Absence makes the eye grow fonder

It's one of those things you tell yourself over and over, other people tell you over and over, but it's hard to remember. Sometimes when you feel like everything is coming out wrong, you have to step back for a bit and get a fresh look.

I've been struggling with the latest techniques from my drawing class. It's just not coming together for me. I know it's largely a matter of practice, but it's been frustrating in comparison to everything else I've learned, which seemed to sink in pretty well. In last week's class, we were drawing animals from photos using some specific techniques. It was not going well. I hated everything I was doing.

But last night I pulled my sketch pad out to flip through and came across this giraffe here. It was one of the last things I drew in the class, and when I was done, I was sure it was crap. I was completely dissatisfied, and didn't even think it looked anything like a giraffe.

Amazing what a week will do. I was surprised to see it and recognize it as a giraffe. A pretty severely deformed giraffe, but definitely a giraffe. And, more to the point, with some depth to the face, which I thought for sure I had botched entirely. I guess it was just a matter of being fatigued from 2 hours of frustration and just being too close and too focused on what was wrong to see the whole picture.

All that said, I haven't hated everything I've done with what I'm learning. I was pretty pleased with this kangaroo and especially with this elephant. These are two drawings that I could never have made 6 weeks ago.

[sorry about the dark images. These are on cheap newsprint and are too big to get on a scanner, so I had to take a photo]

Emergency Lemon

There's a story behind this one that I'm sure is only amusing to me and the person on the other end of an IM conversation. It involved Trader Joe's, lamb kabob, and a very dry serving of tabbouleh (or tabouli, or tabouleh, or however you want to spell it). Thus, the Emergency Lemon was born.

Personally, I drew the box with the lemon and smiled. I added the reamer and laughed out loud.

Ironically, we had just gone over perspective in my drawing class when I drew this. I even had a debate with the instructor over one-point perspective and the fact that, unless you are looking dead straight on at the subject, there's technically no such thing as one-point perspective and that it's just a convenient shortcut because the actual perspective is hardly discernible in that case. So yes, I'm well aware that the front plane of this box is utterly wrong. And yes, it does bug me.

Mod round 2

More of the same. Just experimenting with shape and color, using one of my favorite doodles as a starting point. This was also my first shot at playing with pastels, a brand new material for me that I clearly need to learn more about.

Rediscovered

You know, I hated this when I made it. I hated it and I forgot about it. But I stumbled across it this morning, and I don't think I hate it anymore. I still don't like it, but I don't hate it.

This started as a pencil drawing. I'm unnaturally obsessed with the ever popular mid-century mod look, and this was my first real crack at putting my spin on it. I scanned the drawing and wanted to get nice clean bold color in it. But I need to figure out how to compensate for the jagged edges inherent to a scanned pencil drawing when filling color.

In which Dude learns to draw

I'm jeopardizing my integrity, risking turning myself into a liar. Dude may soon be able to draw.

I've completed 3 sessions of an 8 part intro drawing class. I don't expect to come out of it as Rembrandt, but I do hope that it'll give me the foundation to actually develop drawing as a skill. Perhaps I'll actually then be able to set out to draw something and successfully draw it, rather than randomly doodle until something kinda looks good.

Week 2 was all about "blind contours". Drawing while looking only at the subject, not at the paper, and never lifting the pencil. The result is, understandably, a mess. But it's not about the result, it's about training the eye and mind to outline shapes and connect that to hand movement. The one shown here was my best effort of the day. These were my initial attempts. I got lost in the details and ended up just going over the same spot on the paper. It'd be nice to be able to say that I started there and progressed until I was doing ones like the main image here, but no. It was pretty up and down for the whole class. Just gotta remind myself that it's not about the product (no matter how much "better" the instructor's example was).

These three were a good effort, I thought (even if the one in the middle looks like something from the old Disney cartoon Gargoyles).