A few August sketches

Well, one thing I managed to do during August was pull out my “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” stuff and do a few profile portrait exercises, including a live sketch of my mom. First, though, was another copying exercise. Here’s the profile picture that I was copying out of the workbook, “Madame X” by John Singer Sargent:

This is the freehand copy that I made of the Sargent portrait:

Sharing some more sketches (and a fanvid!)

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about drawing here on the blog; in fact, it’s been a while since I’ve done much drawing. I gave myself some goals in December and reached them, but I also realized that it was a little depressing to work on drawing in the winter without much natural light. But I do have some sketches that I wanted to share with you before I forgot about them entirely.

 

A September exercise out of the ‘Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain’ workbook; my own knees and feet in perspective. 😉

 

 

 

I think this was my first try at the ‘books on a table’ still life perspective exercise. I probably have another whack at it around somewhere, because I wasn’t that impressed, but I couldn’t find it when I was taking stuff in to get it scanned.

I’m still drawing on perspective

Over the weekend I finally got back to some ‘Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain’ stuff. The next assignment in the chapter on perspective, (after copying somebody else’s,) was to draw an open door by sighting it. I picked the open doorway out of my kitchen, and I think I like how it came out:

For comparison, here’s a (slightly tilted, sorry) photo of the same doorway I took on the iPhone!

In which I try to copy Van Gogh’s perspective…

Hey. It’s been a while since I’ve done anything with drawing, specifically ‘Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain’, but I wanted to at least give it another try now that I’m back from Odyssey, so I pulled out the books last week and tried a drawing exercise Sunday morning. In February I’d gotten up to the chapter on perspective, and there was an example in the workbook where you try to sigh-copy a Van Gogh sketch with perspective in it. So, here’s the original of the Van Gogh:

 

And here’s my version…

 

Whatcha think? It kinda looks okay, especially from a distance.

Nano season is kicking off…

In my time zone it’s less than 27 hours until NaNoWriMo begins, and the excitement is definitely building. I had a great time at the Hamilton Kick-off party Sunday afternoon, and everybody seems to think I did well with my first official function as a Nano ML. The Hamilton Nano chat room has been registered, and I have three write-ins to go to in the next few days – Thursday evening, Friday late afternoon, and Sunday early afternoon. 🙂

My novel idea is coming together a bit more – it’s not the most planning I’ve ever done, but then, I think I do better and have more fun with Nano when I edge towards the pantsing side instead of plotting. I think I know where I’m going to start on Thursday morning, and that’s the important thing.

And my to-do list for October is nearly finished. It looks like one thing will end up partially unfinished; the novel critique I signed up for with critters.org  I finished reading the book, but I’ve still got over a hundred notes I took on my Kindle that I want to review and add as notes in MS word, and that just takes more free time than I think I’ve got. I want to give the author a chapter-by-chapter critique, though, and let her know that I’ll work on the line notes when I can, Nano permitting. I still need to work on that this evening.

And I’ve got a lot done in October, from ML preparation to a new short story, with plenty of ‘Goal, Motivation, Conflict’ and Holly Lisle revision in there too. I even tried a little sketching – more about that possibly much later. See you in NaNoLand!