I got new glasses!
They are bigger and cooler than my old ones, and make me look like
1) A public radio presenter
2) A professor of French studies
3) A minor beat poet
4) Morrissey
Feel
You know what? I’m pretty happy with this one.
It’s another one I copied out of an art book. It’s the Virgin Annunciate by Antonello da Messina. (Here’s the actual painting.)
Hey sure, it’s got some problems. I think the biggest thing is that her hands kind of get lost in the lines of her mantle. I need to find a way to make things stand out from busy areas more.
But it’s got things that went right too! For perhaps the first time in my drawings:
- her face looks human, not undead.
- her mantle looks 3D! It’s got texture and folds.
- her bookstand thing has different texture. It looks hard, while other stuff looks soft.
Overall, it’s just - this drawing has a feel to it. And as a beginner, I’m happy with that as a place to be right now. I can stand up and truthfully declare ‘I produce things with occasional feel’.
Jessica Fletcher
A friend of mine who draws amazing comics declared all this week Jessica Fletcher Week. He published a new comic starring the sleuth herself every day, and asked some other people to do bonus drawings of Jessica for his blog. I was one of them!
Here’s my Fletcher. Criminals, you don’t want to see this face lurking for you in the shadows. A sip from a teacup will be the last sound you hear before justice makes you its bitch.
A German bike
…locked to a German lamppost. In Germany.
It was raining a bit as I was drawing, so there are a couple of places where the ink has run, which I quite like. Instant watercolours!
The stuff you don’t see
A while ago I decided that I wasn’t going to publish all my daily drawings. Partially that was because I knew I was going away, and I didn’t want to publish a month’s worth of, well, very everyday drawings when I got back.
It was also because I wanted to give myself a chance to do stuff knowing that I wouldn’t have to show it to anybody. I could draw more from my imagination that way, and if something turned out really badly, no one would have to know.
It’s been freeing, but that’s had its good and its bad points. On the one hand, my daily drawings from this last month have definitely been more about playing around with whatever’s in my head at the time. Which I like. As it turns out, I draw more naked people if I don’t have to show anyone.
And then there are the weird pages that never would have happened if I’d been drawing only the objects around me. Like this one, featuring my knee, a neuron, and some kind of screaming robot. Um.
On the other hand, publishing every day kept me more honest. There are more days than I’d like from the last little while where it’s all just a bit half-assed. Too often, drawing is the last thing I do just before bed, and you can tell all I want to do is shut off the light as quickly as possible.
So: a bit of bootstrap-pulling necessary now. Taking more time, publishing more, and probably less drawing just before bed.
I went away
For a couple of work things. They involved being away from my scanner, and this blog, for a while. Sorry.
They also involved driving, which I really enjoy and rarely get to do. Going fast, singing along to the radio, having the road to yourself late at night: all fantastic.
The reality of a road trip is sometimes less glamourous, though. Sometimes you find yourself in a service station on the M6, gazing out the window at a heavy sky and doodling the sign for a parking meter.
On the front of a Wimpy bag.
Faces are hard: the first in a probably infinite series
This week I read John Singer Sargent’s quote that “a portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth”. This made me feel better about how the faces I draw very rarely come out looking the way I originally wanted them to. All of my drawings have wonky parts, but it’s only faces that can be completely changed by a couple of stray lines.
One of my drawings this week was of a figurine I found pictured in an art book. It’s of Kuya, a 10th century Japanese priest. His teachings centred around a particular chanted phrase that he believed was the key to salvation, so the figure is of him chanting this phrase. The thing that caught me about it (small version here) was how the expression on Kuya’s face had this mixture of tension and calm. There’s clearly an effort to say the phrase, but also a sense of surrender and peace. After drawing it, I had a new respect for how difficult it must have been to convey such subtlety in the figure, as my version makes him look like an undead mummy soldier.
But the face problem had actually come up earlier in the week, in a much more cartoony drawing. Because of a train cancellation, I had to take a route between Reading and London that involved, instead of no stops, seventeen. I decided that I would draw how my face looked when we got to each station. Again, just a line out of place would change my expression from boredom to anger, confusion, or in the case of the Wokingham face, barfing.
I guess it’s going to take some practice to be able to get a better control over what happens in the faces I draw. Although if Sargent never got to the point where he was doing faces right, I’d also better get used to the idea that there will always be some surprises. Compromise goal: fewer surprise puking expressions!
I liked the pattern in a picture of Pee Wee King’s accordian, so I drew a pattern based on it.
A lot of the things I drew last week were more doodly than normal. I was pretty busy all week (hence the lack of posts) so my drawings tended to be quick, and sometimes rushed. The reason I ended up taking liberties with Pee Wee’s accordian was because I wasn’t paying a lot of attention, and kept making mistakes in the copying. I finally thought I may as well just doodle a pattern if I wasn’t going to take care to copy the original. It was good to have the feeling of making something up as I went along, but I bet even that’s better when you let it take more time.
Feeling things. Things like my face
Today I did something pretty different: I did a few drawings that weren’t supposed to look like anything. A few weeks ago the Guardian published a guide to drawing, and I got my hands on a copy. The first few exercises in the guide are about feeling what you’re drawing. Drawing as a way of recording the act of looking, is I think how they put it.
So there was a picture I drew by closing my eyes and feeling my face with my hand…
…and a shoe drawn with my wrong hand and without looking.
It was interesting to draw stuff where the point wasn’t for it to look like the thing itself. I found it tough to let go of that, a bit – when I first looked at the results I didn’t know what to think. Was it all right? For some reason, especially the face one, I almost expected mystical inner truth to be revealed. Instead there are some squiggles.
One thing that was nice, and this is probably more the point, was enjoying the feeling of seeing, and translating that through movement. My grip was more relaxed, I stopped feeling the time go by, and everything was smoother.
I’ll go back and do more of these, not only because they’re a good exercise but because they’re enjoyable. I’m glad I’ve come to it after doing some drawings with realism as the goal, though. It’s nice to get a bit of the gratification of doing drawings that look like stuff in the beginning. Now I can appreciate a bit of relaxing and feeling the process of seeing something, whereas if I’d started with this I’d probably be all ‘GRR SHOES MUST LOOK LIKE SHOES’.
