Mirror Image

I never want to look in the mirror again! I spent almost two hours staring at my face and trying to draw my self-portrait...again...in order to show my progress. Admittedly, I skipped the chapter on light and shadow, which apparently is crucial to drawing a nuanced likeness of yourself. But I really wanted to finish my creative skill blog with a self-portrait since that is how I began it.

If I have learned anything through this process, it is that you CANNOT skip steps. Developing a skill is a process. All components of the process rely on the other. Sure I was able to produce a slightly better likeness of myself, but I do not think it is representative of the progress that I have made as a person who draws.

To be honest, I thought that it was turning out great. The eyes were awesome and really captured the sadness in my eyes -- not that I am a sad person, I just have sad eyes. The nose was not too bad, but the mouth kind of threw things off. I had my head tilted at an angle in the mirror, and I do not think that I was returning to the right angle because my lips are off. Then the hair. I hate drawing hair. I have not made the leap from actual to representation with hair. I can right brain everything except hair. BOOOOOO.....

I think I might try this again soon. I just get so impatient. Plus, this has been hard to endeavor on my own. I really miss the instruction part of learning. I enjoy being taught and having a teacher to give feedback, so the learning on my own part, I think, exacerbated my impatience.

Portrait of Proportion redux

So the second part of the lesson on proportion was to draw a portrait in profile using a live subject. I was a bit skeptical of my ability to pull this off. I know that I have gone out on own my own to test my progress, but that was different because I was deliberately off task, so failure was not only ok, it was expected. So far, I feel like I have been relatively successful at all of the assignments set forth by the book. This one was the first one that I thought I might not be ready for.

I selected my boyfriend as a subject. I figured that it would not be so hard to get him to sit still in profile on TV night. The result was not that bad. He feels like it is a true likeness; I do not. If I had never seen him and then saw the drawing, I might think that the drawing was really good. However, I don't think that it is a true likeness, so from that perspective, I am not truly happy with it. But the fact that it looks like a real human in proportion is a success that is not lost on me.

Without further ado...Dan in profile:

Porttrait of Proportion

So now that I have "mastered" perspective, it is time to move on to proportion. My book uses portraiture for this lesson for two reasons: 1) they are perceived as more difficult, so doing one successfully builds confidence and 2) they effectively demonstrate how proportion can be easily misconstrued by a brain that sometimes overcompensates.

The second factor is actually a really interesting phenomenon. Apparently, because the top of the head is less interesting than the eyes, we see the eyes in a more prominent spot on the face. When beginning drawers draw a face, they mistakenly place the eyes 1/3 of the way down from the top of the head, even though the eyes are actually located half way. The result is what the author calls "cut off skull." One way to see proof of this overcompensation of how the brain "sees" proportion is to look in the mirror. Your head LOOKS the size that it is in actual space. However, if you take a marker and outline the image on the mirror and then measure it, the image of your head ON the mirror will be way smaller than the head you see IN the mirror.

To introductory lesson in portraiture is to copy (not trace) a portrait done by the master artist John Singer Sargent. The author believes that beginners can learn a lot by trying to draw like a master. She was right. On first glance, the portrait seems simple. I thought that it would be super easy to copy. However, the complexities are so subtle that you do not realize their genius until you get into it. Some of the lines are softer and broken while others are hard and solid. The lines are also very fluid, and the curvature so slight that it is easy to either make the curve too round or too straight, which really distorts the image. The author allows you to choose whether you copy the image right side up or upside down. I chose right side up because I thought it looked easy. Wrong.

I started and balled up my paper three times -- even though I was using my pane and grid as a guide. This is where I learned all of the great lessons about lines and subtle complexity, but it was nearly impossible to successfully recreate this portrait even remotely close to the original artist's work. So I started over one last time, but this time I recreated the image upside down. It did not turn out so great compared to the other image. However, if I had never seen the other image, and only seen mine, I would not have thought that mine was half bad.

Here is the original:


My girl's forehead is a little weird, but I kinda like it:

Perspective Pain

After abandoning the book and drawing that awful rendering of my dog, I came back to the book for the next lesson, which was on perspective. I set myself up to complete the perspective assignment -- I chose my hallway -- and began. The exercise required me to first map out the hallway with my "perspective pane" -- or as I have begun to call it, my perspective pain.

The first couple of times that used the pane, it amazed me. When I used it to aid me in drawing my hand, the pane was resting on my hand and was, therefore, stable and did not shift around. Using the pane to draw something that requires you to hold the pane up with one hand and draw on it with the other is nearly impossible. And in order for the final drawing to be accurate, the image on the pane has to be accurate as well. With no way to actually stabilize the pane enough to draw my hallway on it with any degree of accuracy, I decided to scrap it. I am not suggesting that I am too good for the pane. But I do feel like it was getting in the way. Because I feel like I fully understood the lesson that the pane taught, I did not feel like it would hinder my progress too much to try and do the lesson without it.

I have no idea what I might have produced with the pane, but I am pleased with what I drew without it. Perspective is not difficult. It is mainly a trick of the eye. Closing one eye flattens the image enough that the line and angles sort of pop into place. As long as you get out of the left brain and focus on drawing the lines as they intersect instead of trying to draw an open door in terms of how language understands an open door, it is pretty easy. I even experienced the "flow" that the author spoke about -- losing track of time and becoming so immersed that you "lose yourself."

Here is the drawing of my hallway:

Hmmm....

Well...I never said it was going to be good.

So I took a break to the book, and while it was fun and made me feel like a real artist using a graphite stick instead of a pencil, the product was less than awesome. Let's just say that my two tries at drawing without the guidance of Betty Edwards are...um...er...minimalist?

A break from the Book

I love the Drawing from the right side of the brain book, and I feel like I have learned a lot from it, but true to my nature, I have grown bored with the lessons...and impatient. I am tired of drawing hands and chairs. So, this week I felt like branching out on my own. I have been working on a drawing of my dog. I have wanted for a while to have a pencil drawing of him that I could frame and hang. I just never thought that I would be the one drawing it!

So far, it is not too bad. I am doing it from a photo, so I don't need the window pane. So see... I am still employing the concepts of the book; however, my creativity dictated that I do something for myself at this point in journey. I am still working on it, but I will post a photo of the drawing of the photo as soon as I feel like it is presentable. Stay tuned!!

Negative Progress

It was bound to happen. I have hit a wall.

The most recent lesson was on negative space -- which I was really excited about because I love the idea of negative space. In art and in life, I believe that perception is reality. Negative space is a perfect example of this. I also love the idea that the spaces in between things are as important as the things themselves...very zen. And it reminds me of quantum physics.

However, the lesson on negative spaces has frustrated me. We are supposed to draw a chair only using the negative spaces of it -- using our perspective panes. I am beginning to hate this perspective pane. It is nearly impossible to hold up the pane and draw on it without the pane moving around and distorting the perspective. Conceptually, it makes perfect sense. But in production it makes what started out as an exciting task an arduous one.

So I decided to put down the pane and try to draw the negative spaces free hand. But I have not cultivated the skills fully or mastered proportion. So everything is really off and distorted.

See, this is the old impatience creeping in. I want to be able to draw now, and I do not want to put in the work. I feel like the karate kid when he was waxing on and waxing off -- working on the fundamentals when all you want to do is kick some ass.

I will go back to the perspective pane. But I won't like it, and I will need to wallow in my set back for a day or two.

Freehand Hand

Finally!!! I drew something freehand!

The latest exercise was another drawing of our hand, but this time we used perspective and a method called Pure Contour Drawing.

To help us with perspective we used the glass pane again, but this time it was only as a reference. I did another glass pane of my hand and sectioned it into four parts. Then I created equal sections on a piece of paper. Using a ruler and measurements, I made tic points for each major point of my hand on the glass pane. Doing this left brain activity really helped free my right brain. By freeing myself from needing the exact proportion, I was able to let go of the language that crops up from the left brain when you try to draw the fingernail or knuckle. Having the proportion done, your right brain can just hone in on exactly what you "see." For example, your fingernail stops being a fingernail and becomes a series of lines and shapes. When you draw the lines and shapes exactly how you see them and as you see them (Pure Contour drawing), something whole emerges, and the intricacies of a positioned hand are drawn without even trying.

As it turns out, this is exactly how Van Gogh taught himself how to draw. He walked around with a picture pane that he made out of glass and iron. He called a "perspective device," and he used it as a reference until he mastered perspective without it. According to my book, that is exactly what we will be doing: drawing with our glass panes, or perspective devices, until we no longer need them in order to "see like an artist."

I am glad that I am tackling drawing. Never in a million years did i think that i would ever be able to draw. This project so far has taught me two things: 1) most abilities, with time and patience, and practice can be learned 2) creativity and art and such a purely a matter of perspective; sometimes we need tools to see things differently, but the more we work at it, the easier it is to see things from different perspectives. I think that this is true of life as well.

Handy Perpective

The latest exercise was a neat trick that did nothing to further my journey to being able to draw -- but it was super fun.

Undoubtedly, one of the hardest things to achieve when drawing is perspective. As I am learning through this book, perspective is all about seeing things the way that an artist sees things. We live in 3-D world, and paper is a flat surface, so it might seem impossible to create dimensions on paper -- at least to me it does. As we can all see from various drawings from the past and present, it is possible...but HOW?

Apparently, one of the hardest figures to draw in perspective is a hand that is reaching toward you. To demonstrate how to achieve perspective, or how to "see" things as an artist does," I was instructed to use a very handy technique. I balanced a glass on my hand, which was in an interesting position, and I traced it using a felt tip marker. When you lay the glass on a blank sheet of paper, you can see what it would have looked like had you drawn the exact same image on paper. It was really neat. The book instructs you to wipe the glass clean and try several more hand positions. I think did about 17.

I was so excited and feeling like I had the hang of it, so I tried drawing my hand on a piece of paper without the aid of the glass. Ummm...didn't work. Turns out, this method is really just a trick. I definitely understand what it means to see as the artist sees -- but that is what we call theory. Practice is what I need to work on. Hopefully, my next exercise will go a little further to help me draw better on my own. Perhaps I should change the name of my blog to No Tracing Allowed.

One interesting thing that came of this, is that I have spent the last couple of days looking at negative space and the lines where things meet, you know, seeing things how an artist sees them.

Here are a couple of examples of me tracing my hand on glass:

Which Brain is Right?

The first actual drawing exercise is designed to help the novice drawer experience the feeling of operating with the right brain instead of the left. According to the book, the left brain -- which is not the part of the brain responsible for creativity -- has a tendency to take over everyday tasks. The left brain is fast and efficient and bullies the creative free thinking right brain into silence. sounds like high school :0 The trick of tapping into the right brain creativity is to give the brain tasks that the left brain will reject, or simply cannot do.

From what I have read so far, drawing is about seeing things differently. Re-creating an image -- either from the world or from your mind -- is as much about what you see as what you do not see: negative space, for example. The left brain is the language part and spends the bulk of its time naming things and using language to understand what it is processing. People who operate -- or draw -- using the right brain are free from the need to understand that they are drawing a hand or a nose. The drawing transcends hand and nose and is about what is actually being perceived by the eye or the mind's eye. When we draw using the left brain, we can resort to symbols of what we think a hand or a nose looks like -- think of the drawings of a child. We can take these symbols into our adult drawings. This book is about giving the right brain a chance to grow.

In order to give the right brain a shot at creativity, the drawing exercise for this week had me re-create Picasso's portrait of Stravinsky...upside down! I was instructed to draw exactly what I saw, and when I found myself thinking that I was drawing a hand or leg, I was to try and shut the idea of hand or leg out and focus on just the lines that I was re-creating. Here is the result



Remember, before this book, I rarely attempted anything beyond stick figures.

Needless to say, I was quite pleased with myself :)

I will do a couple more line drawings upside down to continue my pursuit of understanding the right brain and am really excited to tackle the next phase of this creative journey.

By the Book

Visual art is pretty broad terrain, and drawing is a excellent gateway. So I decided to zero in on drawing as my creative project.

After my initial attempt at drawing was a frustrating failure, I thought that I should start simpler. And since I am in my comfort zone learning from a book, I thought it would go a long way to purchase a book on how to draw. I selected Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. After perusing the bookshelves of B & N, I decided on this one because it is specifically designed for people who consider themselves completely unable to draw -- like me. The book is also based on a five day class that Betty Edwards teaches. She maintains that she can teach anyone to draw by helping them to see things with the right side of the brain instead of the left.
The book contains samples of before and after drawings of students who took the five day class, and their progress is remarkable and, according to Edwards, common. Rare is the student who does not progress.

Edwards cautions against doing the lessons out of sequence, and since I already learned my lesson about not starting at the beginning, I willingly completed the first assignment: three "before" drawings, which are meant to be no pressure drawing to use as tangible evidence of my progress. The three drawings are 1) self portrait 2) portrait from memory 3) my own hand in any position.

Another assignment that Edwards suggests is to write about what it felt like to draw these three pictures. Since we are supposed to blog about our experiences, I will do that here.

Self Portrait:
This was done while looking in a mirror. The hardest part was by far the nose. The easiest was the lips. The one thing that I thought would be easiest was the hair, however, after completing the portrait, I have to say that I found the hair to be surprisingly difficult. The finished product was way better than I thought it would be. Perhaps I have exceedingly low expectations of my drawing skills, but seriously, I have rarely attempted more than stick figures.



Portrait from memory:
I chose to do one of my boyfriend. We live together so I see him more than anyone, yet drawing him from memory was a big fat joke. Even though I could see him in my mind's eye, I could not see details. I gave up pretty quickly on trying to make it as detailed as my self-portrait, so it is not good. Oh...and even though you cannot tell it from this portrait, I am not dating Barry Gibb.



My hand:
This was awesome. When I look at it, I cannot believe that I drew it. It has perspective and everything! One thing that really helped me with perspective was blurring my eyes a bit. I know that seems counter intuitive, but it kind of freed my brain from seeing my hand as a hand and made it more a series of lines that intersected at specific places.



I have spent so much time devaluing my innate ability, that it never occurred to me to even try to draw more than stick figures or to seek out a means to learn. Now I am so excited about the possibility of learning how to draw. I have a feeling that it is going to open up new creative potential. But, I am not a genius...yet. I still have to have my first official lesson, at least now I can move forward with confidence -- not frustration.

Winners Never Quit

Clearly I am not a winner. Because I have already quit.

OK. So I haven't quit altogether, but I did quit my first project. I think that I was too ambitious. At least that is what I am telling myself so that I do not feel like such a loser. Ironically, I thought that I was easing myself into drawing.

When I was in high school, my friend Angie was in art class. Once she had this art project where she sectioned off a picture in a grid. Then she created the same grid to exact proportion on a blank sheet. Next, she replicated the picture square for square instead of trying to copy the picture free hand as a whole.

I thought this would be a great exercise to begin my journey as a visual artist. Every time that I have ever attempted to draw something, the one thing that always eluded me was proportion. The grid exercise seemed like the perfect way to tackle this. I thought it would free my mind from the overwhelming idea of the whole, and allow me to focus on drawing bit by bit. I still think that it will.

The problem: I chose a drawing of Obama from the cover of this week's New Yorker. Big Mistake! I underestimated its complexity -- from the subtle use of non-colors to the fact that it is a portrait.

Because I thought I would start with the hardest part as a way of testing my potential, I began the grid project with the square that had one of his eyes. Turns out that the eyes were not really all that hard. It was the dark shading of his ruffle shirt that did me in.

Originally, I wanted to start my foray into drawing as simply as possible so that I would avoid being overwhelmed. Instead I did just the opposite -- which I now realize I do in many other areas of my life. I have a tendency toward overestimating my own potential. I mean, there is nothing wrong with aiming high. But, in my efforts to aim high, I have a pattern of putting the first step of the ladder to far out of my reach, thereby failing before I can even begin.

For most of my life, I have accused myself of not having follow through. Right now -- because of this project -- because I made a creative effort -- I am learning that maybe my problem is not the follow through. Maybe the problem is that, to often, I try to start at the end instead of the beginning. This could be a result of my impatience. Or, perhaps I do not have a realistic view of my own capabilities. I don't know. What I do know is that when starting a project, the most important thing is how you start.

Aim big, start small = following through.

What does this mean for my grid project? As a means to work on my follow through as well as to experience a small victory that may motivate me to continue creating, I will find a simpler picture to use as a start/practice/whatever. Then I am going to find a book on teaching yourself how to draw and start with Chapter 1.


The easy part: The offending part:



Original;

I am going to need a Visual...

I am a huge fan of the stencil, and I am an awesome tracer. However, I do not think that I have ever freely drawn or created an image on paper.

Will it be fun? Relaxing? Or will I leave broken pencils and balls of paper in my wake? I look forward to finding out.

Decisions are the Worst

Ever since the end of class, I have been obsessing over this creative adventure. I have always considered myself a creative person, so I am having a hard time pinning down an activity. Normally when coming up with a topic for an assignment, I can spend hours trying to come up with an initial idea. For this assignment, however, I have come up with too many possibilities.

1. Guitar -- I have no musical ability whatsoever. In fact, I am completely tone deaf. So this creative exercise would definitely push me into new creative territory. Also, my boyfriend is a musician and we have several guitars in the house, so I have the resources for minimal to not cost.

2. Visual art -- I can't draw to save my life. But, I cannot necessarily afford classes and materials. There is a Friday night pottery class at Good Dirt, which is not too costly and I have always wanted to do it. If I do pottery, then I will have a product to bring in.

If I do guitar, will I have to play a tune in front of the class? Yikes...No way.

3. There is a writing project that I have wanted to start for quite some time. It is not exactly outside of my creative comfort zone, but forcing myself to write creatively for a period of time each week would be new. I love to start writing projects, but I have zero follow through. This could be a great opportunity....But I have to write so much for school and work that sometimes the very last thing I want to do is to write, even if it is for pleasure.

4. I have been meaning to put down some design ideas for my house...
5. I haven't sewed in a very long time, and I just inherited a new machine that I have not taken out of the box in six months...
6. I would LOVE to create several simple, large canvas pieces for the bare walls in my house...even though I have never painted ever and have not progressed beyond stick figures...

Hmmmm......this is a tough one. I think I will leave it up to the fates and draw from a hat.

Back in a few with the results...