February is Drawing to a close…

But I’ve still got nearly a week to draw my heart out! 😉

Earlier in the week, I was continuing with observational sketches using the plastic picture plane. I showed you a photograph last time of the picture plane with my hand holding a flash drive. Here’s the final sketch result. My fingers didn’t come out perfect, but I think I’m showing some progress:

Next, I did a still life of an apple with the picture plane, and I went back to toning my drawing paper with the charcoal stick:

February drawing – week 3 update

Are you sick and tired of seeing my pictures and hearing me ramble on about the right side of the brain yet? I hope not, ’cause here comes some more. 😀

Well, since Saturday, I’ve done quite a bit with some very complicated Contour Drawing exercises. The overall recipe goes something like this:

• Draw a horizontal and vertical axis onto the paper to match the plastic picture plane.
• Take the graphite stick that I bought at Curry’s art store and rub it over the paper to ‘tone’ it to a shade of dark silver or light gray. Use a paper towel to rub away any extra graphite.
• Use the plastic picture plane to get an outline of the subject I want to draw, in temporary marker, keeping only one eye open to avoid stereoscopic confusion.
• Put the plastic picture plane against a white paper background to see the lines clearly, and copy the marks onto the paper in pencil as well as I can.
• Then return to the original subject, from as close to the original perspective as possible, and refine or add detail to the pencil drawing as much as possible. Use the one-eye technique again.

It’s been very interesting. For the first go-round, I did another marker outline of my hand:

 

And from that, I made the toned drawing like this:

 

Mid-February Drawing Update

Okay, the drawing stuff is still going well, and I hope you’ll enjoy the artistic masterpieces that I can share with you. 😉

When I left off last time, I was in the middle of working through the “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” chapter on the development of drawing skill in young children. The section on the landscape drawing stage talks a lot about a typical scene that many children return to draw again and again, and Betty encouraged the reader to remember that picture and draw it again. I’m still not sure if I remember a scene that I actually drew as a child, but after thinking about my childhood and the sort of things that were typically in childhood landscapes, I drew this:

 

Later in the chapter, Betty talked about the difficulties of moving on to ‘realistic’ drawing and the paradoxes of perspective, with examples about how it’s impossible to draw a recognizable cube with square shapes, because the squares get distorted into other shapes via perspective. (Unless you’re just looking at one face of the cube head on, in which case it’s a square, but you can’t tell that there’s any more to the shape than one square.)

So I wanted to try sketching a cubic die, and several other platonic dice. Luckily I still had a few, though I’ve thrown out most of my collection of RPG dice:

 

After that, I moved on to a new chapter, full of really interesting and weird drawing assignments. The first one involved tracing the lines on your palm, moving the pencil as you moved your eyes – but you were supposed to keep your head turned away from the paper that you were drawing on, so the results weren’t supposed to be a realistic picture of your palm, just a window into the process. So here’s the ‘drawing’ I made of my palm: