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!

Self Portrait Number 17

Well, it has been months since I have produced a self-portrait.  Over the summer I had a greater interest in drinking a beer while reading from my Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars Battleworld Box Set after work, but as the end-of-day sunshine became impossible to capture and the  weather worsened I have taken refuge in my drawing table once more.

This picture is from a video I made back in October. I had been looking for another project to work with my water color pencils and this screen capture had the rays of sunlight at my head making it fun to try and capture.

After Self Portrait 16, I was anxious to work with color again but every attempt I made was unsatisfying.  I began to get frustrated with nearly everything I was trying to produce and eventually just took to doing the occasional practice drawing.

After the long summer break, I had enough time between drawings that I went back to using the drawing upside down technique for this project.  Much of the anxiety that presented itself after Self Portrait 16 had receded and I just started drawing as if I had never taken a break.

I think Self Portrait 17  took at least two months from start to finish which points out to me the need to record the start date just so I know my own progress.

I did get some wonderful new tools for my drawing for Christmas, a brand new drawing table.  A nice LED light that stretches across the table, some flesh tone pencils, a male form drawing manikin and a male hand manikin. So since Christmas I have been practicing action shots with the manikin.

Now that I am at the end of the year and have produced 17 self-portraits and a variety of practice sketches, I am very glad I started on this last year.  I still need a lot of practice but I have drawings that I have drawn.  The idea that I cannot draw has been vanquished, it is only to figure out how to sketch certain things or control the ratios and perspective of what I am attempting to draw.  I look at the world differently now.  When I look at a person or an object, my mind starts breaking the basic shapes down and I am constantly asking myself, 'How can I draw this? How can I bring out the color in this?" so that this has been one of the most successful New Years Resolution-type things I've ever attempted.

Self Portrait 14: Back on Schedule

As I reported in the Self Portrait 13 update, that my drawing has been much more of a flow since I have been listening to Gary Numan from his Replicas and other Metal Period albums. This week, the idea came to me that the reason for this is because when I was 15 and 16, however old I was when I first listened to Gary Numan, I was at the height of my potential.  Or something like it.  And instead of using Gary Numan to relive my so-called glory days, I am using Gary Numan to tap into the limitless potential I had when I was that age.

I do not wish to be that age again. I like the age I am now.  It feels like the perfect age for me.  But I do want that potential I had back then. I want the thrill of discovery like I had when I first discovered Philip K. Dick and Gary Numan with my friends. But I do not just want that thrill of newness and discovery just for the sake the thrill of the newness and discovery, I want to channel it.

The other thought that struck me is how pure an act of true magic it is to exercise my will and recreate a photograph into something coherent on the paper.  To work my will and create something that did not previously exist in the world and that it is something that only I could bring forth.  And when I put all my effort into a drawing and I feel that tiredness that feels good.  That feels like I have done some real work today. That is sheer joy.

And I then the third dominant thought I have this week is how my friends in podcasting, Phil Leirness and Dean Haglund of the Chillpak Hollywood Hour and how I would not be doing any of this now if I had not listened to their show in January that inspired me to do my best. To draw and put it out there no matter how bad or good I might think it is, because it is the act of drawing and struggling to improve that is the important part, not the fear that I may not be good enough or that I may never draw for anybody but a very small audience. But that is enough.  Thank you Dean and Phil for getting me started allowing me a visit every week. It has been a blast so far.

And thank you to all my friends who see my drawings and encourage me.

This week, I really wanted to experiment with color once again.  About two weeks ago, I bought some water soluble colored pencils so I had to find something colorful to draw and I settled upon this picture of me playing my flute from March 9, 2014 at sunrise on the Sanibel Island beach:

I am very happy with how my first use of these colored pencils turned out.  First I I worked on the drawing and blending the colors. And I really liked just the pencil but it was rather streaky and the beach had very little beach-like feeling to it so I continued by making the beach darker.  I even tried to draw in that sea slinky that is just to the left of me in the picture but that definitely didn't look good.  I tackled the beach first using my broadest brush and working the light as best I could.

Next I worked on the sky starting with the cloud, then the sun, then the rosy dawn and then I worked on the central figure and decided to just make him grey against all the color except for a little brown for my flute's pouch.

I also purposefully decided not to draw feet since they are cut off in the photo in order to make it feel like the figure, who is me,  is some sort of spirit coming out of the sand.

Thank you for reading.

Self Portrait Number 12

Another week with very little time to draw. When I was about to sit down on Friday night, suddenly there was a plumbing problem to attend to. Saturday we celebrated my 50th birthday and other than getting some art supplies and arraigning my pencils, there was no time to draw.

Sunday, I finally sat down and I chose a still image from a movie a friend took with my phone while I was at my birthday cake. But Sunday I couldn't make a go of it. I started five or six times and abandoned each time.

Yesterday, Monday, March 30th I had some success:

I am very satisfied in how this one turned out even though I have more of a bubble head and the shadow looks more like some sort of ancient helmet.  What I like about it is the glasses.

Ultimately, this was a very challenging portrait. It is the first time I tried to draw a profile and at the same time there was so much shadow and shading to contend with. One part I really struggled with was getting the glasses right and in the end I think I got the nose and the glasses pretty well.

I do wish I had started the portrait more to the right side of the page but after so many false starts I decided to concentrate on the face and so I ran out of room for the corner of the birthday cake and the candles.  Oh well. It is only number 12.

Bonus features: For the party, I decided to hang all of the drawings I felt were complete. It is nice to see so many considering I only started on January 7 when there may have been a sacred geometry drawing or two but nothing more:

Self Portrait Number Eleven

This week I had no time at all to draw until Friday night and I wasn't particularly enthused with my choices.

I had this picture in the middle of winter as a fun way to acknowledge Chillpack Hollywood Hour's 400th episode which ended with a rare technical glitch: The theme song ended before allotted time and one of the guys could be heard saying, "We ran out of theme song."

But when I considered this one in the past as possible subject for a self-portrait I rejected it because my face is so covered.

On Friday, I just decided to draw for the sake of drawing, I wasn't intending to make this anything but an exercise in noticing shapes, which is why everything is so rough but when I looked at it the next morning, it reminded me of The Scream by Edvard Munch so I decided to add colors, not aping the original scream but evoking it.

Unfortunately, I did not have paints, only some felt-tip markers that were marketed as "brushes" but respond nothing like brushes and many were already dried out even though I only bought them three weeks ago.

Oh well, I only bought them on a whim and so I added waters to the dry markers and proceed.

Even though this drawing looks no better than something I might have been forced to draw in grade school, I find I like it very much. Somehow the way I chose to add color makes it pop and look very 3D.

I could not fit everything into the placard I was holding in the original picture so I chose to abbreviate it as "Ego is Skel."

I think this is the most artistic thing I have drawn so far and that it evoked The Scream to me simply fit in with my mood this weekend.

On Thursday and into most of the day Friday, I was on a very high good feeling place after having some people over to my house on Thursday night. But I feel I have been falling since then and even though I had no conscious intention of expressing this in my drawing, it is there nonetheless.

I will have to get some paints soon, maybe I will recreate this on on a canvas and it will be my first canvas? I don't know.

Here are the images:

Bonus! Bonus! Bonus! Man Screams At Yellow Paint!

Self-Portrait Number 6 and 7- In Color and Black and White

After last week's disaster in trying to use color, I decided to draw the same photo in black and white.

I took a lot of time with the above photo and I just stopped today after taking a side by side photo comparison.

At this point, I took one more look at the uncolored drawing, erased a few jagged lines but decided to stop at this point because I felt I made some progress in giving some 3D and I got the slight unevenness of my face pretty well and I didn't want to ruin what I already had by making changes.

One thing I felt while working on the second drawing is a great love for myself for the face, working to get it right. So, if someone has a problem with self-love, this could be a good therapy. Especially in a case where I am working on a picture from 20 years ago.

But also I noticed when I am drawing another person, even if it doesn't work out as well as I like, I am loving the person while I am drawing. Which I don't know if it is like that for everyone who is trying to draw a face but it seems right to me. But maybe that is how you become an artist, it  isn't the skill of being able to draw but to love what you are drawing?

Interlude: Between Self-portraits

Teaching myself to draw is one of the most rewarding things I have done in a very long time.

After my last self-portrait, which is available as the previous post on this blog. I felt I wanted to draw something else. Really, I wanted to draw a flower but I didn't feel comfortable with my level of skill in making a flower "pop" from graphite and paper, so I found this photograph from Olbrich Gardens with some flowers in it:

Even though I am not happy with how this eventually turned out, it was fun to attempt and more importantly, I learned a very important lesson.  If you see the subject's shoulder is exagerated. This is because at first the face was too wide so I made it a little narrower but I didn't alter the body which was was already drawn.  Again, like in my last self-portrait, number 5, I drew this and the remaining images upside down and I didn't really noticed this distortion until I turned the picture right-side up.  But the idea that I could erase a part of the face I had already drawn so much around was a revelation to me

Here is the photo:

Here is a second drawing I did. I found this one very interesting because of the light play. Also, I did not quite know what to do with the arms since they are cut off, that has been an issue in other drawings too where only a portion of something being drawn appears in the photo. The difficulty is I am not focused on creativity at this point but working on getting a likeness and yet sometimes.

Also the shading was interesting. I think I went a little overboard with the darkness for the shading but at the same time, I discovered I had a tool that lets me blend the graphite. It is like a little white pencil and I am sure it has a name but I do not know what is and, I obviously haven't mastered its use at this point. I find the likeness I achieved in both these instances interesting and yet still wanting.

And yet, I am starting to imagine being creative though no definite vision has yet presented itself.a

Finally, and perhaps because of my thoughts of eventual creativity, I was inspired to recreated somebody else's creativity. I recently bought this book, AMERICAN GROTESQUE The Life and Art of William Mortensen as a present for a friend and while I haven't given the book over yet, I used  the cover as an inspiration to draw a more complex drawing.

I used the actual book itself and it was a little dark where I was working so it was very hard for me to determine some of the detail but overall, I am quite pleased with how my reproduction turned out.  It is really the first time I have attempted a full body drawing and here there are two full bodies and they are even intertwined to an extent.

You can get American Grotesque here at Feral House and other places where fine art books are sold, I am sure

Self Portrait a Week: Week 3

This week I was a bit ambitious and tried to sketch an picture where I am with another person. This is from a vacation Patti and I took last year, this is at Hot Springs Arkansas on February 28, 2014:

In this case I think I did better at shading. Getting Patti close to recognizable was a task because she isn't fully in the frame and getting anything close to her nose was a huge task. I think I'm a long way off of creating recognizable portraits for the most part. Here is the source I used to sketch:

I can see a lot of room for improvement in getting proportions right too.

When I haven't been attempting self-portrait I have been practicing shading. I tried just trying to make a circle look like a sphere, I tried an apple and I think I learned the most working on sketching this stone skull:

The thing I learned most from working with the skull was how to dissect the skull into two different shapes and then bring the depth out by shading and adding additional lines. But I still have a long way to go.

Li'l Tiger Portrait

I've been bitten by the drawing bug! I think about drawing all day and when I see people's faces or reflections or just about anything I think about how I might go about trying to sketch it.

Tomorrow is the third anniversary of my cat, Li'l Tiger's, death so I thought I would try to draw her.

And here is the picture I based the drawing on which I posted her last year too:

Self Portrait Number 2

Here are the rules I am drawing by:

1) the end goal is 52 self-portraits by 1/31/2015
2) If I do three in a week, Great!
3) If  I don't do any in a week, maybe I was busy.
4) This is not a challenge
5) Nothing is perfect, if I don't like an attempt, too bad for me, it still counts toward the 52.

I think that's it.  Here's the self-portrait for the second week of January, 2015:

This one is take from a picture when Patti and I were on vacation last March. The photo is from March 12, 2014 and we are staying in a condo at Sanibel Island in Florida.

I am not as happy with this one as I am with the first one but, hey, it's only the second one. Maybe I try too hard. I have trouble capturing the mouth and the ear and the nose.

I started today by practicing shading, just trying to make a sphere out of s circle and even though I wasn't too happy with my shading, I was eager to jump in and try again.

Then I remember it is only the second week and prior to three days ago I never tried to draw a self portrait ever, so I am good with it.

The One Self Portrait Per Week Show

I have always been a frustrated artist, as I am sure are many of us. And like many of us, I want to be good a drawing but I know that I am not so I never practice!

What!?

No wonder I am a frustrated artist! It is like writing: If you are not writing you are not practicing!

So, yesterday, which in the the nominal time was known as January 6, 2015, I was listening to a new favorite podcast of mine, Your Chillpak Hollywood Hour hosted by TV's One-Third of the Lone Gunmen (among other things), Dean Haglund and filmmaker and actor Phil Leirness.

On this occasion, they were doing a show on their New Years Intentions/Resolutions (Ego is Skeleton), which is a show they do every year but this is my first year of listening and Dean mentions an artist who is doing a self-portrait per day and that one of his goals for the year was to do something along those lines, maybe not quite as frequently.

This resonates with me in a way that I cannot explain. It suddenly hits me that I can draw a self-portrait, at least one-per-week and then I will be able to measure any improvement in my drawing by the end of the year!

So here is my first attempt which I just drew tonight:

Which is based on this photograph I took yesterday morning (see above for nominal time date) which I took only because I love how the towel did my hair!

I had the most trouble with the nose but for a first attempt; I am off to the races!

Thank you Dean Haglund and Phil Leirness for your Ego is Skeleton and for your inspiring show!