Author: rufus0705

This is a line art drawing of my office window that I drew today:

I like the way it came out. I took me about twenty minutes to do, which is good to remember when you are procrastinating your drawing for the day – it really is not a huge time commitment.

Doing this reminded me a lot of a drawing exercise I did a few days ago where you practice different types of marks – as in Matisse-like marks (which are curly) or Ben Shaun marks (which are almost like pointillism they are so uncertain and shaky. I am not sure where my marks fall on the spectrum, but this does seem to be in line with my drawing “style” these days.

I’m really happy with what I learned about leaves from this. When you look closely at them, how leaves really look, NONE of them are leaf shaped, at least in terms of the eye-shaped leaf that we all think of, and usually draw. Real leaves are at angles, so they look like everything from a thin line to a weird dented square.

Usually I would have tried to draw the leaves as big masses, but because this is a line drawing, and because I had the tree and the hills behind the leaves, I decided to skip that.

The folds of fabric on the couch, and the folded up blanket that’s on the windowsill where also hard. I am intimidated by drawing fabric and folds, but I am learning to just draw what I see and hope for the best, and, actually, it typically comes out ok. Sometimes when I am looking at just one isolated line that I am matching to how it looks (not how I want it to look), the line looks awful, but when I pull back my view and see the line in context of all the other lines, all of a sudden it works pretty well. This drawing what you see and not what you know can be a real mind-bender sometimes.

I got the perspective of my printer off. It was difficult, because my printer is not exactly square – it slopes in at the front a lot, which makes it look a bit futuristic, which is nice sometimes, but can be hard when I’m drawing it at an angle.

The block thing to the right of the blanket on the windowsill is a really big crystal. I got that down okay, but I doubt anyone would be able to guess what it is.

The thing to the right of the blanket is a radiometer, which is one of the coolest toys ever. Its a light bulb, but instead of a fuse in the bulb, there’s a little pinwheel that has panels that are black on one side and white on the other side. If you put it in sunlight, the photons of light bounce off the white side, but get sucked in on the black side. The difference in force is enough to actually MOVE the panels. It sunlight, the little panels spin around like crazy. It reminds me to have faith in things that are invisible, and seem inconsequential.

This did not come out very well, but I am included because that’s part of the terms of this – I show you the bad stuff as well as the good stuff.

I started out drawing the mermaid that lies in a plant saucer. That’s the funny thing in the foreground. She’s a cast iron mermaid, about 15 inches long, and she hangs out in this large blue plant saucer that I had no better use for. She stays there all winter… she just becomes an arctic mermaid.

The purpose of the mermaid and her saucer is actually to give the birds some water. I stopped feeding the birds when I cut back all expenses, but I can still afford a gallon of water every day to give them something to drink. We get more interesting birds (something other than house finches – wow!) after I started putting out water instead of seed. Its so dry here that the birds don’t have a lot of choices for drinking.

The round things in the saucer are river stones. I put them in because a few months ago we had honeybees drinking out of the mermaid saucer, and they kept falling in and drowning. About 2-3 a day were dying, so I put the stones in. A few still drowned every week, but it was way less.

The mermaid drawing came out pretty bad. I was about to quit when I just looked up a little higher and saw the row of plants in the bed along the far wall. The textures were interesting, so I started “drawing” the plants. I kind of figured it out as I went along. Really, what I should have done is started all over, taken a dose of patience (drawing requires a lot of patience, I’m learning) and re-done this after I did this study. It might have come out nicely.

The dark shaggy thing in the middle is an evergreen bush. Just to the right of that is a big tarragon plant (the herb used in French cooking). Tarragon plants do great in my garden… not sure why. To the right of the tarragon plant is an even larger sprawling mess of Russian sage, which, along with its brothers, may take over the garden entirely one day. Being that its purple, needs no extra water, smells nice, and attracts hummingbirds, I figure there are worse things that could happen.

To the left of the shaggy mess are a bunch of irises. They are not in bloom, but the leaves looked really interesting. The better way to draw them was with one stroke from the side of the pencil (ie, holding the pencil at an angle so the long side of the graphite touches the paper).

I would not have been able to do these plants as well if I had not done the different marks exercise the day before. Trying to draw these plants line by line with the same kinds of lines would have been awful, but once you figure out what kind of line to make to depict different plants, you actually can get a lot of definition between different plants just using a plain old pencil. Texture can REALLY make a difference.

Another thing I learned drawing this is that sometimes I don’t like drawing with a soft pencil. Especially when I am not drawing well. I tend to press down on the pencil and paper when I am not drawing well, and that just dulls the pencil tip faster, which gives me an even more blunt instrument to work with. I sharpened the pencil I was using about three times doing this drawing, but it still make a mark that felt muddy somehow.

When I have a hard, sharp pencil to work with, I tend to slow down and make more precise, lighter marks on the page. It results in a better drawing – most of the time. This may change when I move over to drawing more people (a lot of people look better with softened images), but we’ll see. Its just something I noticed drawing this – that soft pencils don’t work well for me – that will help me draw a little better in the future.

I did a self portrait back in March when I was starting the exercises from The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, but I did another one to see if I was getting any better. And because I was low on drawing ideas. And because I was flipping through the book again.

Here’s how it came out:

This one is better. I am getting better!

This is better because it looks more like me. The nose is more accurate, and I didn’t even mean to do it, but I captured the way I tilt my head. Have been doing this tilt since I was a little kid. Not sure why I do it. I got pounded in middle school over it – they loved to make fun of me. I was actually kind of damaged about the tilt because of that for a long time, until I saw Modigiliani’s paintings with so many of the women tilting their head. At one point there was a big exhibit of his work when I was living in NYC, and that tilt was really celebrated and kind of showcased. I accepted the tilt after that. And so of course it promptly went away – I stopped doing it. Its interesting that its come back here. It is probably because the mirror I was drawing from was a little small. Either way, that’s the LONG story about the tilt.

One more thing: I had not noticed before, but tilting my head like this actually makes my face look more symmetrical. If you look closely at the drawing, my eyes are really skewed – if my head was not tilted, the right eye would be MUCH higher than the left one. My ears also are not symmetrical. I don’t look weird in real life (most of us don’t have symmetrical faces), but studies have been done that symmetry in faces really improves how attractive people think you are.

This is good thing to remember for portrait drawings: people’s faces are not usually symmetrical. Its exactly the sort of thing our brains would correct for, thus making a drawing that didn’t look quite right. But if you want, you can have the person tilt their head just a wee bit, and thus fudge the imbalance just enough to make them look good, but still look like themselves.

This is the drawing I got done today. It is nothing special, but I did it just to pick up the pencil and keep practicing.

I cheated here. My fingernails aren’t painted, and they aren’t as long as they are in this drawing. For some reason it just felt like all those thin lines needed some dark space, so I shaded in my fingernails to make them look painted. I also made them look longer than they are. The drawing does look better. Its not as true to life, but hey, that’s artistic license for you.

You would think that if I was giving myself an imaginary manicure that I would also have erased all those wrinkles on my hands, and my funny-looking knuckles. Oh well.

Ugh. This is for all you people who either think that I can’t draw to save my life, or think you can’t draw to save your life.

This is a bird bath that’s in our front garden. Its right by a large window in our kitchen, maybe six feet or less from our kitchen table. The birds do use it, some of the time for bathing, but mostly for drinking. Because of the light here, and how little rain we get, I need to refill this most days or it will go dry. Its one of my little every day chores, but it is one of my favorite chores.

The things in the bird bath are 1) a metal sailboat. This is also a sundial, and there are numbers in roman numerals around the edge. I put them in the drawing. 2) River stones. These are for the bees, so they don’t drown, but mostly because there’s an old trick for keeping water from freezing and helping it thaw more quickly if you put stones in. In a shallow dish, the black stones warm up faster, and so they melt the ice around them just a little. This is enough for the bird to be able to drink, even when it is up to five to eight degrees below freezing.