Figure It Out! A Great Drawing Book for the Fledgling Artist

Well, it's been several months since I have updated.  It has been a very hard few months as I had a protracted cold and work has been very hard in throwing up those petty little annoyances that make getting any meaningful work done.  I only did one or two drawings in the meantime, usually based on videos from a very good YouTube site called My Drawing Tutorial which has a variety of tutorials.

I also received a human figure manikin and a hand manikin for Christmas and I spent quite a few pages just drawing the figures in different poses just to let my mind build new neural pathways.  But I was not finding satisfaction in my progress.

It finally occurred to me to see what kind of drawing books our local Hobby Lobby has (I don't know why it takes so long to think of these things) and I found a great variety of books including one called Figure It Out! The Beginner's Guide to Drawing People  which is the opening photo for this essay.

One of the reasons I decided to get this book and another one called Draw 50 Famous Cartoons: The Step-by-Step Way to Draw Your Favorite Classic Cartoon Characters is so that when I felt like drawing but didn't have a major project of my own to satisfy my urge, I could have some ready suggestions at hand.

So, starting Sunday, which was March 6, 2016, I drew my first drawing from Figure It Out! which was a male human face:

And I thought it turned out pretty well.  Yesterday, Monday, I had a full day off of work and no other chores to do so  I was able to devote several hours to drawing and drew these:

One of the main lessons I am learning from this experience of teaching myself to draw is the expectation of perfectionism.  Now intellectually, I know I shouldn't be able to draw perfectly right out of the bat, to kill a metaphor, but emotionally it is much harder because as an American who went through the public school system, we are psychologically damaged so that we are constantly measuring ourselves against our classmates and this causes us to devalue both ourselves and the work we can produce.  I think this kills our imagination and puts us into a low-self-esteem mode that makes us more manageable to government bureaucracies that enjoy managing our lives.  And we've been taught through experience that we aren't very valuable anyway, so why not let some controlling sociopath control our lives for us?

The other thing I've learned is that drawing can be very hard on the beginner, even though I spent probably 5 hours at the drawing table yesterday, most of the time is spent on the initial step of getting the oval shape of the head right.  But I have decided this is okay as you see, I drew the same image twice, once where I couldn't get the shape of the head right, or at least, to my satisfaction, but I decided I would draw it once to completion and then draw it again and I was very pleased with how the second attempt turned out.

This morning I was having the same problem trying to draw a head facing to the left and in that case I left my misshapen oval and decided to do a blog post.

So there's the update!