Category: What I Drew Today

This is the birdhouse I drew today. I am pretty happy with how it came out. Some of the lines could have been erased, like on the top right side and the round base (which I completely mucked up…), but a lot of the lines came out right the first time.

The shading worked out really well with this. Another reason that I like light “H” or “HB” or “H2” pencils – they shade really evenly.

My favorite part of this drawing is on the right side of the roof. The actual bird house has these drop-like things on the roof, and so on this side I tried to shade the drops to make them, not to draw lines to make them like I did on the left side. It is hard to see it in this image, but the real drawing shows those shading-for-shape drops really well. They came out almost exactly how I wanted them to.

I got to pay closer attention to shadows and highlighting in this drawing. The way shadows and highlights appear sometimes is really wacky. It does not make sense, for example why the highlights and shadows on the round part of this bird house (the dowels, I guess, you would call them) go from very faint shadows on the left edge, to bright highlights, then bleed into the darkest shadows of the whole dowel, and then fade back to lighter shadows by the time you get to the far side. Its not supposed to be like that! It supposed to go very light, bright, very light, dark. Not very light, bright, very dark, very light.

I hope people know what I’m talking about. It you don’t, study something round in the nexy hour or day. Really look at how the light and dark parts work. I almost want to go find a science teacher to explain to me why the lightest and darkest parts on the round dowel are next to each other. But they’d probably just look at me funny.

You know you are deep into drawing when things like this really get your attention and stump you. Fortunately, I just drew it the way I saw it, and somehow it looks right. Go figure.

If anybody can tell me why the shadows go from the highlights into the darkest parts so quickly, with the medium tones on either side, I would appreciate it.

This is what I drew today. Its an old rhinestone purse that my mother gave me. I never use it, so I was thinking about selling it, but I wanted to check with her first. At first I was just going to photograph it, but for some reason two tasks got crossed in my head (draw something and photograph purse) and the idea of drawing the purse came up. So I did.

This is the drawing:

This is the photograph:

There were a number of things that came up while drawing this. One of the simplest things to note is that most of this is drawn with colored pencils. I started with an H pencil, but for some reason that really didn’t seem like enough. I wanted to show the gold in the purse, and by some very cool blessing my set of 72 colored pencils had a gold. Yeah! So I used it. I also used a yellow for the highlights, and a dark brown for shading and also for drawing many of the triangle “detail” marks that are along the edge of the purse. Mostly, though, it was the gold that got a workout with this.

The real issue/problem with this, at least initially, was the mind-exploding detail of the rhinestones, and how to convey that on paper. I started out the way most people start out with puzzles: define the edge. Once I got that done, I was tempted to just leave it there. But… the near side of the purse had some perspective issues going on that made it thicker, and also showed the metal lip of the purse going into the side.

So I stared at the purse for awhile, trying not to get overtaken by the urge to go eat something and not deal with what looked like an impossible level of detail. I resisted the urge to go bang my head against a wall. I decided I was going to cheat. By “cheat”, I mean that I decided I was going to come up with a pattern that I could draw that would estimate all the detail that was going on with those rhinestones. The parts of the pattern in the real purse that popped out were the angle that the rhinestones themselves made. The other thing was the round brass or gold-colored metal parts that held the rhinestones in place.

So I made a line of gold dots to show the metal holders. And I tried making some angled lines (like a bent wire) that might look like the angles in the rhinestones. It kinda worked, so I did that around the edge of the purse. I did a few extra rows on the near side, and did only one tapering row on the far side.

I went back again and added some lighter angled lines to kind of blend between the first row I drew and the blank space on the inside of the purse. And I added some lines of gold dots to see how that would blend the edge and the center. I’m still not sure which technique/approach looks best.

You may also notice the chain. At one point I thought using only half circles for the chain would look better, but now looking at this on the screen, doing the full circles seems better.

I really like the way this came out. At first, I thought (as usual) that it was going to be terrible, that it was already terrible, and I was going to just keep doing it because I had to get my daily drawing out of the way, and this was all just a learning exercise and it didn’t matter if it was terrible or not. And then about half an hour later it looked pretty good. I left my office for a break and then walked back in about an hour later (this is what happens during weekends… I get distracted and feel like I show be spending time with people) and the drawing kind of popped off my desk.

You just have to plow through that “this sucks” thinking and keep going. Sometimes, yes, the drawing does end up terrible, but then once in a while – WHOA!

This is a skull that I drew today while I was lying on the couch again, too tired to sit up at the table. I may end up drawing a lot of things from the couch.

My partner thinks this is the best drawing I’ve done to date. Maybe… not sure. It does not really matter whether these are good or not – the whole point is just to keep learning and practicing. For the moment, I just want to keep up with at least one drawing a day. Whether its a good drawing or an awful drawing really does not matter a whole lot to me.

This did come out fairly well. I especially like it because I drew it all from just one line. I never picked my pencil up drawing this. There’s a little handwritten note near the base of the left horn that has an arrow pointing to the place where I started and stopped the line.

At first I thought doing this one line exercise was going to mean I would draw one of those line drawings that looks like a wire sculpture, but then as I kept going with this, I realized I could do shading very well without lifting my pencil up. I was even able to do the softer shading by rolling my pencil over on the side.

The softer shadows on the right side were hard. It was hard to keep my hand steady. Don’t start one of these kinds of drawings if you have not eaten in awhile, unless you like the shaky hand effect.

The softer shadows were also hard because they were a second set of shadows. The light was coming from two directions on the skull, so I had the harder-edged shadows from the brighter light source on the right side of the skull, and those softer, more diffused shadows on the left side coming from the less bright light. I was worried having two sets of shadows would be confusing, and maybe it still is. I tried to just go ahead and draw what I saw as closely as possible, and just hoped that the end result would look okay.

This image is also a little off in terms of the shadows, because the paper I was using is rumpled. I have started going through a lot of drawing paper now that I really am drawing a lot, and so I was using an old sketchbook that had gotten rumpled.

Another thing about this drawing is that I used a different pencil weight. This was done with an “H” weight pencil. It makes a lighter line, but the pencil lead is harder, so you don’t have to sharpen your pencil every two seconds. See my earlier posts about how I don’t like soft pencils.

I think this came out well because I didn’t rush it. Even unrushed, it took less than half an hour. Drawing something as detailed as this is best done if you’re feeling patient. Otherwise you might as well just do a sketch.

I drew this a few minutes ago. I’m trying to build the habit of drawing first thing in the morning. It seems that in the late afternoon and evening, almost anything I try to sketch comes out awful. Not always, but I did five whole pages of bad cat drawings yesterday around four pm until I decided it was time to give up and just do something else.

This is what a corner of the front garden looks like. Sort of – its just a line drawing, and obviously the real thing is much more interesting. For instance, the tree does have leaves. Sure, it is dry here in New Mexico, but in case some of you were concerned… yes we do have trees.

The strands of what looks like beads hanging from the trees are just that. They’re Mardi Gras beads. I collected them in New Orleans about a week after Mardi Gras this year. Was there for a bachelorette party and decided to come a few days early. Had a GREAT time, and these were the second best things I brought back. The best things were pralines. Forget drugs – give me pralines!

I added a handwritten note in the lower left hand corner to show where the roses are going. If they live. They were dug up and put in garbage bags with some dirt and water and have sat like that, in the sun, for two days. I am picking them up this afternoon… not sure if they are going to make it, but I’ll try.

I like the simplicity of line art drawings. The problem is that there is NO room for mistakes. I drew this with a regular writing pen – a Uniball Vision Elite, actually, with the fine point. I have about two dozen of these pens in different colors around the house. They’re what I make lists in and write everything in. They are pretty good for drawing, too. I’ve been wondering about getting a “proper” black drawing pen. Am going to the art supply store for an erasable marker today anyway. Hopefully I won’t get anything that I don’t need… the plain old black pen I did this with is completely acceptable, and I don’t have to worry about losing some expensive pen.

This is a pencil drawing of Max the cat. The very bad cat. He was lying on top of my sketchbook when I came into my office after getting a cup of coffee. I pushed him off (gently), and he just went limp and kind of lolled on the desk a few inches off the sketchbook. He kept putting his tail on the paper while I was drawing this.

This came out okay. I really like how his eye turned out – its so nice when the lines fall in place the first time you put them down. His tail I had to re-do twice, but it looks pretty good now. I got his hips a bit wrong, and they still look a little off. He also has a funny udder-like paunch on his belly. His sister’s is even worse… she looks a little bit like a cow… we sometimes call her “moo-moo kitty”. She does not appreciate the name at all.

I have been doing contour exercises, and actually did the exercise where you move your notebook out of site and draw about one square inch of your palm and the lines in your palm just before I drew this. I think it helped me get the front leg tucked under his chest looking right.

I probably should have taken out the line that’s near his left shoulder… its the one that makes his main body shape into a modified pear shape. The drawing would look a lot better without it. I also should/could have made his far shoulder a bit larger – there was a definite mound shape there that I wanted to show, and the line that’s showing it now was the first one I drew – could/should have gone back and reworked that to look a little more accurate.

All in all, though, its okay. I had one of those usual panics while I was drawing it, thinking “d—, I can’t draw cats at all. How I am supposed to be doing a drawing site if I s— so much? This is awful. And then I just kept with it and reminded myself that this could be a sacrificially bad drawing. Those do happen. I draw a lot more now that I just let myself do awful drawings.

Max, by the way, is wearing the collar so he’ll have less luck killing things. He wanders in and out of the house during the day (not at night… we have great horned owls around here, and they can do unspeakable things to little kitties in the blink of an eye). He’s a hunter. He also likes to bring things into the house. I find a loose lizard somewhere in the house at least once a week that I have to capture and then release.

Yesterday he really took the cake, though. He jumped in through the window in my office, just over my shoulder, with a live bluebird in his mouth. I was working on my computer, and he very nearly landed on my elbow. I see the bluebird, yell his name (the poor bluebird, as if it was not traumatized enough), sit up to grab him, knocking my computer on the floor, get a hold of his shoulders with my left hand, and then brace the bottom of his jaw with my right, and then move the left hand around to secure the bluebird so she won’t fly away, lose in the house (this has happened before with mice). I get the bluebird in hand, Max pinned on the couch, and then put my hand back out the window and let the bluebird go. She dropped about two feet to the ground, but then fluttered up and got into the apple tree. Her mate was right there, and they flew off into the larger willow tree a few feet away. Max was grounded – housebound – for the rest of the day. My computer is fine… at least so far.

Like I said, he’s a bad cat.

This is a really simple line drawing that I did for my daily drawing. I was just sitting on my couch, stumped about what to draw, and so I drew this. It came out better than I expected. Its weird how I struggle with finding things to draw, and then all of a sudden I just focus on something I saw before, but was ignoring, and ta-da: I have found something good to draw.

The tiles in the floor of the hallway worried me at first, but they actually weren’t that hard to do at all. I just copied exactly what I saw, and they worked out fine.

I did cheat on the door itself. I actually have a photgraph on the top part of the door. I got lazy and decided to just skip over it – the photo is of a stream with a lot of large rocks over it. I should have put it in there… was just being impatient.

Another thing that I skipped over was the paint. The two walls of the corner (but not the wall that the calender is on) are both painted blue. The other walls in the drawing are actually white. I could have shaded the two walls with the side of my pencil lead, but I skipped it because I was worried it would not come out even, and that it would make the drawing confusing somehow. However, now that I’m looking at this drawing, it would have been worth the time to do the shading – it often looks really good if you shade one distinctive shape in a drawing – it seems to make the shapes pop in a better way.

The worry about not getting the shading right is a cop-out, too. Being able to shade a space evenly is one of those little drawing skills that you just have to know how to do. It requires no talent, just practice.

But, hey. I got my daily drawing done. Even when I was tired, and didn’t want to draw anything. And that’s WAY better than nothing.

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.