My facial expression may not reflect how intent I am about taking her book seriously, but I really am. If I can improve half as much as her student examples than I will be a happy man. The next two exercises I will post by tomorrow. The exercises are to draw my hand and draw someone from memory. Drawing my hand will be fun because I have always loved drawing hands. Drawing a person from memory sounds like it will be difficult. I know in the past whenever I try to describe someone to somebody and they don't know who I mean, I can usually sketch the person and they know who I am talking about, but the way I draw is with basic symbols and caricature. I'm not sure how I will handle drawing someone from memory but I imagine it will be embarrassing to post.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain
My quest for drawing improvement hit a road bump this week because Art Center no longer has figure workshops till next term. For the past 2 months I have spent almost every weekday drawing at Art Center. The only drawing workshops I have now are the Art Directors Guild workshop on Tuesdays from 7-10pm and Bill Stouts workshop on Sundays from 10am-1pm. I hear Nucleus has a workshop on Wednesdays, but if it is more than $10 count me out. To fill in my practice gap, I started reading "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" by Betty Edwards. Friends of mine told me to check out this book, but I would ignore their advice because I was already paying a large amount of money to attend art college and didn't want to admit a $17.95 book could help me. After I finished reading the second volume of "Drawn to Life" by Walt Stanchfield (BTW the best drawing book I have ever read) his word became gospel and he mentioned Betty Edwards often. I started reading her book last night and I am going to do all the drawing exercises she teaches and post my progress here on my blog. Here is my first drawing for her self portrait practice:
My facial expression may not reflect how intent I am about taking her book seriously, but I really am. If I can improve half as much as her student examples than I will be a happy man. The next two exercises I will post by tomorrow. The exercises are to draw my hand and draw someone from memory. Drawing my hand will be fun because I have always loved drawing hands. Drawing a person from memory sounds like it will be difficult. I know in the past whenever I try to describe someone to somebody and they don't know who I mean, I can usually sketch the person and they know who I am talking about, but the way I draw is with basic symbols and caricature. I'm not sure how I will handle drawing someone from memory but I imagine it will be embarrassing to post.
My facial expression may not reflect how intent I am about taking her book seriously, but I really am. If I can improve half as much as her student examples than I will be a happy man. The next two exercises I will post by tomorrow. The exercises are to draw my hand and draw someone from memory. Drawing my hand will be fun because I have always loved drawing hands. Drawing a person from memory sounds like it will be difficult. I know in the past whenever I try to describe someone to somebody and they don't know who I mean, I can usually sketch the person and they know who I am talking about, but the way I draw is with basic symbols and caricature. I'm not sure how I will handle drawing someone from memory but I imagine it will be embarrassing to post.
