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Draw every day. (Everyone's doing it!)
JWashke
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Let me try this again without messing up Flay's thread.
Inspired by everyone else's threads and my renewed drawing zeal I thought I would make a post to sort of post my progress and keep me going. The amount of inspiration I've gotten from browsing this forum has been phenomenal and I hope someday my stuff could have the same effect on some aspiring artist.
My original plan, when I decided to start getting serious about drawing again and try to do something productive with my summer was to the schedules in The Natural Way to Draw by Kimon Nicolaides. While a great book, two days and 6 hours into the first schedule I feel that if I have to do another gesture drawing I'm going to stab myself in the eye.
Perseverance, however is important in art. And I vow to complete the exercises in their still, however I may slow down a bit and mix it up with other exercises such as some Loomis and Real life studies. We'll just see how it goes though.
Unfortunetly for everyone my scanner is either crap or I am just retarded(which is probably the case.) But I've had to jack up the contrast/brightness or even revert to using a digicam for some of my larger drawings. If anyone knows of a good tutorial for scanning pencil drawings, I'd love to see it.
Now on with the art!
First some contour drawings from Sunday, the first exercise in The Natural Way to Draw.
For these I only uploaded 2 pages of the 10 I did since sunday.
Now Gesture drawings!
I honestly don't think I'm even doing these right, if any has tips, suggestions, whatever I'd love to hear them. Likewise I have no idea what to use for reference for these anymore. The book recommends not spending more then a minute on one pose, and using pictures from the internet means I spend more time surfing for pictures than actually drawing, and living in the middle of nowhere without a car limits my options for drawing people. I resorted to watching a movie and drawing from that, which is difficult due to the limits of full body shots and the inevitable distraction from watching a movie. Like the contour I didn't post all of these, In 2 days I did 37 of these 18x12 pages.
Now for some other stuff I did to stave off insanity after doing 3 hours of contour drawings or 3 hours of gestures.
5 min Self Portrait, I'm not sure why I limited myself to 5 minutes, its pretty crappy.
My hand.
Some lady (giraffe neck! olol.)
And a landscape I tried doing from photo reference, took way too long and after looking at it I realized it doesn't really have more then like 2 shades and just looks really messy.
These next images are a couple months old, if anything I think they show how I've gotten worse without any practice.
Inspired by everyone else's threads and my renewed drawing zeal I thought I would make a post to sort of post my progress and keep me going. The amount of inspiration I've gotten from browsing this forum has been phenomenal and I hope someday my stuff could have the same effect on some aspiring artist.
My original plan, when I decided to start getting serious about drawing again and try to do something productive with my summer was to the schedules in The Natural Way to Draw by Kimon Nicolaides. While a great book, two days and 6 hours into the first schedule I feel that if I have to do another gesture drawing I'm going to stab myself in the eye.
Perseverance, however is important in art. And I vow to complete the exercises in their still, however I may slow down a bit and mix it up with other exercises such as some Loomis and Real life studies. We'll just see how it goes though.
Unfortunetly for everyone my scanner is either crap or I am just retarded(which is probably the case.) But I've had to jack up the contrast/brightness or even revert to using a digicam for some of my larger drawings. If anyone knows of a good tutorial for scanning pencil drawings, I'd love to see it.
Now on with the art!
First some contour drawings from Sunday, the first exercise in The Natural Way to Draw.
For these I only uploaded 2 pages of the 10 I did since sunday.
Now Gesture drawings!
I honestly don't think I'm even doing these right, if any has tips, suggestions, whatever I'd love to hear them. Likewise I have no idea what to use for reference for these anymore. The book recommends not spending more then a minute on one pose, and using pictures from the internet means I spend more time surfing for pictures than actually drawing, and living in the middle of nowhere without a car limits my options for drawing people. I resorted to watching a movie and drawing from that, which is difficult due to the limits of full body shots and the inevitable distraction from watching a movie. Like the contour I didn't post all of these, In 2 days I did 37 of these 18x12 pages.
Now for some other stuff I did to stave off insanity after doing 3 hours of contour drawings or 3 hours of gestures.
5 min Self Portrait, I'm not sure why I limited myself to 5 minutes, its pretty crappy.
My hand.
Some lady (giraffe neck! olol.)
And a landscape I tried doing from photo reference, took way too long and after looking at it I realized it doesn't really have more then like 2 shades and just looks really messy.
These next images are a couple months old, if anything I think they show how I've gotten worse without any practice.
JWashke on
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Read that, do the exercises in it. You're at the stage where it can help immensely.
I tried drawing my foot, which didn't turn out so well.
My hand, which the shading is god awful.
And just because I was so discouraged with my shading I tried drawing something relatively easy to shade, so a chair. I had to rush it a bit at the end, as I was drawing it on my deck and the sun was going down. If i turned on a light it would have flipped the light source.
keep going though, persevere!
And that elephant is probably my favorite thing I've ever done, I wish I did it on a separate paper. I'll probably try redoing it eventually.
Another day another drawing. Today I started awesome in my opinion then it went horribly awry from there. I did two Loomis studies late tonight which turned out awful, I really need to stop drawing so late at night. But I did get a bunch of gesture drawings and a skull which I was very happy with.
LOOMIS!
A few pages of the gesture drawings (out of 7 done total.) All of the gesture drawings were done with a 30 second time limit.
And the skull
So... today I tried drawing an apple, and my living room, Unfortunately, the apple turned out pretty crappy and I neglected to draw any perspective lines for the living room piece so I kind of gave up half way through, also I could not get that table right despite redoing it like a thousand times.
Though all was not lost! I needed a new sketchbook and when I went out I figured I would actually listen to some of your guys advice and went and bought Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I did the beginning exercises, which is meant to gauge your current level I guess, which is a self portrait, and a portrait of a person from memory. It says to draw your hand too, but I did two of those in the last few days so eh, (I'm lazy I know.) I also found the book a very fascinating read, particularly the experiment where they showed each eye a different utensil, and they said they saw a utensil one that the dominant verbal eye saw but when asked to pick the object out from ones behind a curtain they picked out the object that the non verbal pictorial eye saw, very interesting stuff.
Anyways I read up to the 4th chapter which starts the exercises so I'll start them tomorrow.
Now! onward with pictures!
Guess which one is the self portrait and which is from memory.
Groovin' all week with you.
Today I did more from Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I did The Faces Vases exercise, which for those who haven't read the book, is where you draw one side of the face/vase half, then go over it several times naming the parts, then you try to draw the other side matching it without naming the parts.
I then did the two upside down drawings, After Picasso and German Horse and Rider, pretty self explanatory.
Next some blind contour drawings on cheap crappy paper, and finishing it off with my hand. I really don't like this drawing of my hand, I just finished it and I'm very tired, so I might end up redoing it tomorrow but we'll see.
I also looked into signing up for a life drawing course for this fall at my local community college. Hopefully it will work out, sounds like fun.
So today I just continued in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I redid the hand exercise because I knew I could do it better. then I did the chair exercise on negative space, and the perspective and proportion exercise.
I did a short exercise of copying a drawing out of RSotB. Then I started the profile drawing but my mom who was modelling for me got tired and wanted to go to sleep so I'll have to finish it tomorrow. I also decided I wanted to draw something for fun too so I tried my hand at the design a creature thing. I posted it in that thread but I'm just going to dump here too. I don't know why but I instinctively toned the paper before starting haha. I discovered that I don't know how to draw clouds, my fisherman is missing a foot, and it really hammered in my need to work on values.
Oh, I also fixed the really wonky fireplace on last nights perspective exercise.
UGH, Yesterday was a bad bad day. So no update. But today was much better, I did a lot more gestures, which I didn't bother to scan. Then finished the portrait of my mom and did a self portrait of myself to finish off Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Unfortunately I did the Self Portrait in my room where the lighting is terrible, which is why it looks awful. I'll probably do another in the next couple days.
Marked improvement though I have to say! I am impressed.
I was too lazy to make the different sized viewfinders too, I used a clear plastic view frame but when I need to make a smaller frame instead of the viewfinder I just made a little rectangular stencil out of folded paper. It worked alright but made it a bit hard trying to write on the flimsy clear plastic while holding it up to frame a picture.
Thanks for the support guys, I'm glad to hear so many people think I'm improving and I'm even inspiring others to boot!
I know I've been lax the last couple days, I've been getting ready for going on vacation for two weeks, I'll try to post a bunch before I leave on Wednesday morning though.
The last couple days I've mostly been working out of The Natural Way to Draw, I've done 8 hours over the last two days of gesture and contour work, I don't really feel like scanning all of it so I'll just so a page of each. I also started a loomis study on proportion tonight.
JWashke, I would suggest working as clean as possible. Erase unwanted strokes. This can be difficult at first if you lack confidence when drawing, but it is crucial to getting better. Also, I don't know where you take classes but 30 seconds is...not enough time to learn shit. I had a teacher once (not at my current school) who would start the timer and not even tell us how long we had. He would go 'start........stop' 'start..... ....... ...... ....... stop!' And I wanted to kill him. This does not teach you how to draw. Drawing quickly is one of the most difficult things to do and if you havent even learned what you are supposed to be looking for yet then it is straight up impossible. Get into some drawing classes where you get to work from longer poses, like 3 hours or so is pretty good. And even in those three hours, dont even get into tone or value or shading or whatever you want to call it. Just lay the figure into the page as accurately as possible. You will learn 100x more doing this one time than doing 100 pages of 30 second gestures.
Very cute, reminds me of this
facebook.com/LauraCatherwoodArt