Different artists’ marks
This is another exercise from New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain Workbook
The book has you copy marks (or lines, or line-making techniques, just to give you a clearer sense of what I’m talking about) from four major artists. This works WAY better than just looking at the marks – once your hand makes the lines differently, you “get it” instead of just zipping through to the next page.
After doing the four different kinds of marks, you do a drawing with your own marks. For some reason this was really hard for me at first, then I just gave up and drew whatever. Those weird long things are two shoes…
There are also two sleeping cats. I seem to draw a lot of sleeping cats… but there’s usually one close by, so no wonder.
This seemed like an okay exercise when I did it, but as I kept drawing over the next few days, it really sunk in and started getting interesting. See the blog post about the garden plants I drew to get an idea of how I am starting to apply this technique of using different kinds of marks. Its really cool. Basically you are learning how to use textures better, but there is more to it than that. This is definitely an exercise worth doing. It will improve your drawing quite a lot.
