So, it’s been a while with no content, and there’s not really much to take pictures of these days in Springfield… it’s all rainy all the time and I don’t get a chance to get out much. So I thought I’d take up something I haven’t done much of in the past 4 years: drawing. Back in the day I purchased an excellent book by Betty Edwards called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I went through some of the exercises, but got busy with school and promptly forgot about working from the book.

Ironically, one of the things that I got busy with was college art classes. And by the way, most art classes are absolutely worthless… they assume that you know how to see in the way you need to see to be able to draw. Anybody who doesn’t shows slight improvement, but will eventually get frustrated and give up. I remember one teacher in particular who would rip students’ drawings to shreds on a regular basis, but it never occurred to him that others might find it more difficult to “Just look at the still life, and draw what you see!” than he did.

Anyways, I’ve done some pretty good drawings before, so I know they’re in there. However, I suck at life drawing. Figures, still-lifes, trees, whatever… I always get tunnel vision, and start drawing little details with no perception of how those details are supposed to fit into the whole, and so I’ll keep drawing little details until suddenly one of the little details won’t fit where it’s supposed to go.

With the goal of being able to eliminate that phenomenon, I’ve started going through the exercises in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, and I’ll be posting my progress on here as soon as I get my scanner working. If any of you would like to do the exercises as well, feel free to email me scans of your work and I’ll post them alongside my own.

The first three exercises are to measure your pre-instruction ability. They are as follows:

#1: Draw a self-portrait. Use a mirror, not a photo to draw yourself.

#2: Draw a person from memory. Head only, bust, waist-up, or full-figure.

#3: Draw your hand. If you’re right-handed, draw your left hand, and vice-versa.

Sign and date each drawing and if you want you can write notes about what you like/don’t like about the drawing and what was difficult/easy for you while drawing it.

Here’s my pre-instruction drawings. They suck. This is proof that if you get out of the habit of drawing daily you will suck at it when you finally do go back to drawing.

This first one is the self portrait, of course. During the drawing I constantly fought to try to get the correct proportions, and although many other things ended up being off (it feels like if I live to be a million I’ll never be able to get lips right) the proportions ended up generally good. I also look really fat in this drawing, fatter than I actually am. I like the right eye a lot, but I put it too close to the nose (or else the left eye is too far out, not sure which).

This next one is a person from memory, based on my favorite photo of Amber that I’ve ever taken. This was during our honeymoon in Acapulco. I made the head too small on this one, and she doesn’t seem to have a chin to speak of in this picture. Also, getting glasses to look symmetrical seems to be a problem for me… I really like the right side (her right) of her glasses, but the left doesn’t match. I think I did good on the hair, though. It captures the feel of the moment like I’d hoped it would. The original picture follows.

And finally, my hand. It looks cartoony, but at least I got the proportions way closer than I would have hoped for before I began. I’ll be doing more hand studies once I get better at seeing the shapes that are actually there.