The Glade 4.0

I used to be fairly...okay at sketching as a child, but was never exactly what you'd call artistic. I never could (and doubt I can) draw from imagination or memory whatsoever. I never could draw people or faces and have it come out recognizable.

Inspired partly by one man's journey to become an artist or die trying, I decided to try my hand at drawing. It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately. I do a lot of analytic, left-brained things but outside of the occasional photoshoop I haven't really strained my artistic side. So I've decided to start a self improvement project. I don't know whether I have the dedication to draw something every single day and become a truly accomplished artist, but I'd like to be able to say one day in the not-to-distant future, "hey, I can actually draw!" Or do 3D modeling. Something anyway.

I sat down and picked up a pencil and drew today for the first time (of any real seriousness) in probably 10 years, if not more. I'm following along with an old copy of "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain", so I started with a self-portrait based on this photo:



And this was the result:


I'm not sure exactly how this happened, but it turned out 100x better than I had expected. There's still something sort of "off" about it, but I can actually recognize myself.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

That's actually a very good drawing. I can't manage more than stick figures.

_________________
Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

Very surprised at the result. I'd say the main thing "off" is your shading, followed a bit by proportion. Maybe dedicate a few days to some light/dark exercises.

"Value" drawing is definitely a weak point for me. Drawing without lines is, I know, going to be a big hurdle for me. That said, at least part of the issue with shading is that things got blown out a fair bit by the scanner. I tried to tweak the curves a bit in GIMP to bring it closer to how it actually looks on paper, but wasn't entirely successful. It's probably too light and low-contrast in the original, though. I was kind of purposefully trying to force myself not to over-shade. It wouldn't surprise me if I over-corrected. In any case, I need to go buy some real drawing pencils (#4B?). Shading with a #2 pencil is a *****.

Actually, just trying not to over-do things in general. I used a much more gradual, iterative revision process than I've used in the past. I think it mostly helped. If nothing else, I've learned that where faces are involved especially, the tiniest little alterations can make a huge difference in recognition.

Perspective issues:

My parents just took me out for dinner at a Thai-Vietnamese fusion place and a movie to celebrate the first semester's outcome. After letting it set a few hours, I can already see a few things that are obviously off. The right-hand ear (the viewer's right, that is*) is not quite scaled correctly. Note the distance between where the lobe meets my face and where my neck meets my jaw. It is noticeably larger in the drawing than in the photo. The top of the ear also needs to be just a nudge higher.

The right eye (again, viewer's right) is also just a bit too low and -- to a larger degree -- a bit too far inward. Focus of the eyes is pretty close to correct, I think, but notice how much white space is visible to the right of the iris compared to the photo. I think the issue here is the shape of the outside corner of that eye, not the positioning of the pupil. Unless my eyes deceive me (get it? eyes!) the lower lid has been drawn a little too long and low.

All things considered, though, I'm more than pleased with the result. It ain't great, but it ain't terrible. I feel cautiously optimistic that if I keep pushing myself I might actually be able to get halfway decent at it. I'll have to see if I can find any old sketches to compare it to. I think I drew a couple still lives (why does that pluralization seem so weird?) when I was about 19 just for the heck of it, but I don't think I have them. Prior to that, I think the last serious drawing I made was probably circa 9th grade.


* to make matters even more confusing, the photo was taken through a mirror, so it is also actually the subject's right, too!

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

I manage to dig up some old drawings I did in high school for reference. I guess I'll journal them here just because.

This is the oldest, done on Oct. 6 1997 at age 17.


This was a more detailed drawing of my sister's cat, once again sleeping. This was done a bit later, on Mar. 14, 1998 -- a week before my 18th birthday. It's gotten somewhat smudged in storage all these years, but it's mostly still intact. And before you ask, yes: that's a ceramic statue of bunnies making out on the table . Lots of crazy stuff going on with the perspective on this one.


Following that is a series of three copies I made of watercolors by Alan Lee from the "Centenary" edition of The Lord of the Rings. These were all done in a single spate from March 14 to 16, 1998 (the first was done on the same day as the drawing above). As I recall, I needed to do these for CAS hours (creativity, action, service) for my IB diploma.

Tinuviel:

Original by Alan Lee

Mirror of Galadriel:

Original by Alan Lee

The Chase (unfinished):
Also quite a bit of smudging on this one.

Original by Alan Lee

On the whole, I suppose they aren't too bad other than the faces. Oh God, the faces. Frodo looks like he accidentally wandered onto Jackson's set from an adjacent filming of Planet of the Apes.

Also, for some reason I can distinctly remember that all of these (except perhaps the first cat sketch) were done entirely with an engineer's mechanical pencil for some reason. Probably because that's the only damn pencils we ever had around the house.


On that note, I just bought a set of drawing pencils (HB, 2B, 4B, 6B, 8B), a set of graphite sticks (HB, 2B, 4B, 6B) and a 9x12 pad of drawing paper. My next "assignment" is to try to draw someone's face from memory. This is almost certainly going to be a complete trainwreck, but I'll post it anyway when I get done.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

ALOL.

Both of the cats are pretty darn good. I've often lamented that I have neither an inborn talent for drawing, nor the patience and willingness to fail to live up to perfectionist standards to develop the ability via practice and experience.

_________________
"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Quoting myself for truth.

Oh wow, is this every bit as horrible as I thought it would be.


Yikes. Not only does this not look anything like my mother, I'm not even too sure it looks human.
Everything about this drawing is so very, very wrong.

For reference, this is what my mother actually looks like:


...Yeah.

At least we both got a good laugh out of this.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Well, on a positive note, if your Mom was in a lineup, I probably would have picked her over the rest as the subject of the drawing.

It's not that bad, if you discount the conehead thing going on and flesh out the hair. The eyes and nose are pretty good, the shape of the cheeks works, and the chin is well-shaped but just a little narrow.

The lips are pretty much out of nowhere, though.

_________________
"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Okay, last one for today. I felt the need to do something else to cleanse the palette of that mess.

Hand study:


Yep. That's a hand.

The pinky is a little disjointed and there's something not quite right about the taper of the thumb tip. I think it's pretty decent otherwise. Shading is hard. Even with a graphite stick, I'm having a hard time getting smooth shading with no stroke marks. I don't understand how other people seem to be able to do that.

Edit: Heh, I just noticed how thin that middle finger is. Whoops.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

This afternoon's exercise was turning Picasso's portrait of Igor Stravinsky upside-down and copying it (also upside-down :p). This helps force people to draw literally instead of symbolically by breaking your brain's ability to recognize objects and meaning. The image becomes just a collection of lines, shapes, and spaces with their geometric relationships. This tricks your left hemisphere into shutting the hell up for just once in its miserable life so your right hemisphere can draw what you see instead of what you think you should see.

The left hemisphere gets kind of squicked out by the realization that you actually have no idea what even simple objects look like. It's true, though. You think you know what something looks like? Try drawing it. Pretty soon you'll just be amazed that you manage to make it through the day without walking into any walls. It's really bizarre how good we are at navigating through space considering how bad we apparently are at accurately seeing it.

Anyway...

The original:


My copy:


I'm pleased with the result. I'm not going to be forging Picassos any time soon, but it's pretty darn close to the original with a few minor deviations. A few of my curves got a bit exaggerated: for instance, the outer edge of his right lapel and the edge of his jacket along his torso under his right arm. Also the big looping wrinkle near his right knee. I have this tendency, particularly with double curves.

Weirdly enough, there are some subtle, but noticeable differences between the image in the book and the "yellowed" version you'll find if you do a google image search. It's almost identical to the version in the Stravinsky wiki article, but there are some miniscule differences that might just be attributable to scanning/post processing issues. I'm not sure if Picasso drew more than one nearly identical version of this, or if the image in the book is itself a copy. Weird.

Anyway, I went through an entire CD of Tchaikovsky and another of Mozart while working on this, and did the last 20 minutes or so in silence. I'd guess it took about two and a half hours, then. I was getting kind of tired by the end, so I didn't copy his hair quite so literally.

Pro tip: want to forge handwriting? This is how it's done.

Edit:

Now that I think on it, this exercise once again illuminated something rather strange for me. I actually did this exact exercise from the book a long time ago when I was maybe 13-ish, I think. Unfortunately, I have no idea what happened to the work I did then, but I remember it well enough to know that it turned out somewhere in the ballpark of this. I am again mystified at the apparent increase in ability between then and now in the absence of particularly much practice.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Overall it looks pretty good. It appears to me when you are drawing, you focus on the part being drawn at that specific time and don't constantly check your reference points for relationship, or as you saw in the upside down drawing, you draw what you think, or expect to see, but not what is there.

Look at your hand and note the spacing of the knuckles on each finger as it relates to the length of the adjacent fingers, the base width of each knuckle, etc.

For smooth shading, smudge the graphite with the end of your finger.

Ok maybe I used an app and cheated

This evening's drawing was time-consuming, but fun.

To begin, I posed my hand under a piece of glass and drew it (with one eye closed) on the glass with a wet-erase marker. This is a scan of one I did earlier in the day, but not the one I used for the rest of the exercise. I'll probably scan that tomorrow (no time -- got to get up early to go answer jury summons...):


Because you're literally just tracing what you see, this can be done really fast. I think the picture above took perhaps 2 minutes.

The next part of the exercise involves "toning" a piece of drawing paper. Basically this means giving it a light coating of graphite and buffing it in to give the paper a uniform medium gray tone. After that, I was supposed to draw crosshairs in the center of the paper to match the ones on the glass and copy a few key geometry points onto the paper from the drawing on the glass. After this, I was to set the glass drawing aside, re-pose my hand in the same position, and draw it from life, using the glass drawing as a sort of supplementary references and to help check proportions.

I guess I'm bad at following directions. I wanted to press myself with a little more challenge, so I didn't transfer any points in advance, and didn't bother to even look at the glass drawing again. I just drew directly from my hand and tried to check the proportions the old-fashioned way.

Several hours later -- I completely lost track of time. Perhaps three? -- I had drawn this:

I really like the result, and I really enjoyed doing this in spite of being unbelievably tired when I started. Especially considering that I was interrupted twice during the process and had to completely re-pose my hand (yeah, have fun matching that exact pose even once), I think it turned out remarkably consistent. Looking at it now at a distance, the proportions seem pretty accurate to me. The only thing I spot is that the angle of the left line of my wrist is pointed just a bit too far inward. It ought to intersect my palm in line with the outer edge of my index finger. I'll probably correct that tomorrow.

Really once I had the countours (outlines, more or less) drawn and had sketch approximate boundaries of hard shadows, I didn't even bother posing my hand anymore. Most of the shading I just did by combination of memory and invention, with the occasional examination of my palm to see where the creases were, and what the fine texture looked like. I mostly just just kind of thought like, "okay, so there's this crease that runs over this way. What would that look like if my hand were held like that? Which part would be bright or in shadow if it were lit up from over there?" I didn't really think of it in words like that, but that was more or less the process.

I think I learned a lot about using the medium from this drawing. I liked starting from a toned base like that. It reminds me of the "digital light painting" technique I used when I was trying to recreate the "Dragan" effect in Photoshop (turning this into this): painting with light and shadow to reveal shape and even exaggerate the sense of depth. If you compare this drawing to my first hand study, this one feels a lot more three-dimensional because of the higher dynamic range.

Oh, and I have no idea what that thingy in the corner is. Or even why I drew it. I had no intention of doing so. But when I finished the drawing I just felt suddenly compelled to draw it. Go figure.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

You best so far, by far.

But will it blend?

_________________
Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I keep asking myself that while shading. Sometimes the answer is intentionally "no", interestingly enough.

I fixed up that wrist issue in the previous drawing and added a few more fine details:


And today I did a copy of Rubens' "Studies of arms and legs". The original:


My copy:


I didn't totally stick to Rubens' style for the shading, as I wanted to play around a bit more with toned bases. I also added a few embellishments along the way. I'm pretty pleased with this one too. I'm minorly frustrated with some of the murkiness in the background/mid-tones. This is apparently a side-effect of having to erase and rework the same area several times (**** feet! How do they work?!). I don't know how to prevent this short of not toning the paper in the first place.

On the whole, I think the proportions came out pretty well, though I got a little sloppy as worked my way over to the figures on the left. They don't really seem "wrong" in and of themselves, but they don't quite match the original. Frankly, the quality of the reference image leaves a lot to be desired. I was having trouble seeing in the organic sense with this one. That probably didn't help.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Stathol, I had told Corolinth that I was secretly hoping that your next picture would be of your hand operating a blender, just to stick it to him.

_________________
"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

I was going to do a negative space drawing yesterday but I got tired. Here's another hand study, done this morning while I waited on my (rescheduled) jury duty:



I think it turned out well. This was largely an exercise in proportions for me, and also in using a lighter base tone. It's not as visually interesting as the previous hand study, but I don't really fault the drawing for that. The waiting room had the most bland, flat, fluorescent lighting you can imagine.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

I like the lighter base tone.

_________________
"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Yeah. In retrospect, though, it might have been better to just not tone it at all and do all the shading manually. It's certainly the least forgiving way to draw, though. It's not really the point of toning, but any erased linework will be clearly visible if you don't do it. There are always some adjustments and erasures before I get to the point that I'm ready to commit the final linework. I really do try to mark as lightly as possible with an HB pencil until I've got everything placed and double-checked before I start shading and ... well, I guess you would call it "inking" if I were actually using ink. Even so, erased linework is still often faintly visible on blank white paper no matter how hard you try.

It doesn't seem to matter whether I use a vinyl, gum, or kneaded eraser, either. I'm wondering if getting a hard pencil for undersketching would be a good idea. I have no idea what would be appropriate, though. 4H? 6H? I'm such a pencil n00b.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

I always found some blue sketching pencils very useful when I was first learning to draw. Cool note about blue pencils, a lot of scanners don't pick them up. I still use them, but unfortunately I don't draw often anymore. And, when I actually do, it's usually on my Wacom tablet. I'm depressed now because I just looked up the new Intuos5 and it makes my '4' seem like a caveman tool

I've heard that a lot of professional artists seem to prefer the 4s, but I don't know if this is just hipster mentality or if there's something to it.

We have an annual family reunion, and I had intended to a lot of drawing while I was there. Instead I got kind of lazy and only did one complete drawing and started on another. This is a sketch of the living room of the ginormous house we rented:


Not exactly exciting material, but I don't really have any major complaints about how it turned out. This was mostly just an exercise in perspective, but I'm trying to work on shading, too.

I also have this work-in-progress drawing of my niece at the reunion:

I'm really trying to work on my value/shading/blending skills with this one. This one is really driving home my feeling that I need to at least get a 2H and maybe a 4H pencil as well for doing really light shading. The shading on her face is really not turning out the way I want it to because I can't lay down really light shading even with an HB stick. Too much is getting pushed into mid-tones, contributing to a muddy appearance. I think I might benefit from having a paper push stick to work with. I have large hands, so using my finger tip isn't very precise. Tissues, paper towels, and q-tips tend to blur the shading too much.

Today I decided to work on gesture drawing. I've always found these sorts of drawings fascinating and compelling. At the same time, trying to capture the essence of an image with just some crude shapes, curves, and lines seems intimidating to me for some reason. I feel like I would really benefit from doing this, though. I need more practice seeing form in its simplest terms and decomposing complex shapes into simple primitives.

So I grabbed a magazine and just started churning out gesture drawings of every interesting pose I could find. I didn't use an actual timer, but I tried to keep each drawing brief -- generally 2 to 5 minutes each. I also tried to make a point of not erasing anything, but just layering darker lines over lighter as I refined the shapes. These are listed in the order I drew them:

I like the results so far. Even over the course of just 11 of these, I can see improvement.

My favorites:

• #3 (the man with folded arms) really loosened me up. I chose this pose because of the foreshortened perspective. I had a lot of trepidation about how that was going to turn out. Once I stepped back and looked at what I had drawn, I was encouraged by what I saw.
• #6 (ballet dancer) is another that I think turned out really well. It's such an odd pose that I was pretty skeptical about what I would wind up with. But in the end, I feel like I captured the pose quite well.
• #8 (model grasping the column): this is and the ballet dancer made me feel like I was turning a corner with female figures.
• #9 (woman with shawl? jacket?) - another bizarre posing angle that turned out well. The left side of her bodice could use some slight tweaking, I think, but otherwise I really like the motion of this one. I'm especially pleased with how the head turned out, in particular the jaw line
• #11 (woman bending backwards in breeze): this might be favorite of the entire bunch because FABRIC. God, I hate fabric. So many complicated planes! I don't know if it's "less is more" or what, but somehow this crudely drawn and minimally shaded dress feels more real to me than any fabric I've tried to draw before.

Overall, what surprised the most about all of these -- even the ones that I'm not overly fond of -- are the proportions. Drawing that quickly and without deliberate effort, I thought everything would wind up way out of proportion. I'm surprised at how correct they came out, generally speaking. The first one is kind of a mess, but once I got warmed up, the proportion errors that jump out at me are generally fairly minor. This especially surprises me because I deliberately nudged my initial motion lines a bit, exaggerating them slightly, in some of the drawings that I think turned out the best in that regard.

Critiques? I need all the help I can get, heh.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

My favorite part of my life drawing classes were probably the 30-second poses that you had to draw quickly. Those were some of the best exercises, and they help you quickly identify some problem areas with proportion if you have any.

I think #11 is your best of the set, also. One thing you'll learn about fabric is that 99.9% of its definition is going to come from good shading. You've got the idea on her upper body pretty well, but then you go back to having some hard lines below the belt.

I'm postponing the drawing of my niece for the moment. I want to exercise values first. A lot. So my current project is drawing Gustave Courbet's The Desparate Man purely by values.

This is my initial sketch so far. I've drawn this with a 6H pencil so the scanner had a lot of trouble with it. I had to do all kinds of terrible things to the levels in GIMP to make it visible. So it's not really what it looks like on paper, but it's close enough to get the idea.



I'm not quite done with the this phase yet, and I already see a few things that need fixing -- chiefly his right eye (our left). Compare the position of the shadows beneath it to the left eye. Oops. That was one of the first things I drew within my initial face blank, so I didn't have a lot to sight off of.

It's funny to me how persistent the brain is about interpreting what isn't there. This is just a jumble of crazy outline shapes with no values yet. In spite of that, it already conveys more realism to me than the self-portrait I drew a few weeks ago.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Four hours of shading later...



It's going better than expected, I think. Although I just now noticed that the nose is definitely too thin compared to the original. That's going to be a real ***** to fix at this juncture, but I'll do it tomorrow. I can't tell if the face is slightly too thin as well, or if it's just an optical illusion due to the nose issue and a lack of complete framing. I think it's the former :/

Need to work on the eyes some more, too. The lid angles (esp. upper) aren't quite right. And his left eye (viewer's right) needs to be nudged outward a bit, too. The soul patch needs some revision too. I've reworked that area a bunch and it lost most of it's original shape. Wharrgarbl! I demand perfection!

Does it always take this long to draw with this much detail, or am I just slow?

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.