drawing

Failing at Gestures

StuartLeave a comment

So, coming back to gesture drawing (practicing) after so long, it is really hard to be pleased with the results.

It always seems like I’m failing.

I’ve been looking at the gesture drawings of some fellow artists in the forum of pixelovely.com. I have read often enough — and I actually believe in it myself — comparing your own drawings to others’ can lead to a dead end very easily, it can make you withdraw inside and strengthen your own doubts about your skills, basically it isn’t much help at all and will only keep you back. Still, I catch myself doing it. So here I am “saying” it out loud and clear: You are you, and you should listen to your own thoughts, emotions, ideas. Make some new rules. Perhaps try out a few things the others are doing, but DO NOT COMPARE YOUR DRAWINGS TO OTHERS! (… you don’t know what background the others have, how long they have been doing this, where they went to school, who their mommies and daddies are, how long they have each day to work on this stuff, what they eat for breakfast, whether they have family or even friends (I’m not saying you can’t have a great family and many great friends, if your a good artist, just sometimes they can be a distraction, but also a good source of input and perhaps one of the days, a source of cheap models for you …))

Here goes, the collected 2 minute gesture drawings of the last 48 hours. Gals w/ or w/o weapons, men w/ or w/o underwear, and a few faces to round it up.

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June 7th, a Sunday drawing

Stuart2 Comments

Spent the morning just drawing what I could see from the couch.

20150607-1Then in the afternoon a few sketches at the Italian restaurant, in my scrap book with a crappy roller-ball-pen. Also used a bit of spit for the rose, just rubbing over with my finger to smudge the ink. Perhaps I should have tried the Aperol Spritz for that.

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In the evening, another 30+ minutes with 1 minute gesture drawings. Nothing to show really, but the daily exercise helps in the long term. 1 minute gestures can begin to get really stressy if I attempt drawing bigger sketches than just thumbnails.

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Plein air drawing

StuartLeave a comment

Well, here’s what comes from sitting on a bench for 1 1/2 hours while joggers pant past me every 10 minutes. One jogger even stopped to sit by me. It turned out he was my figure drawing class instructor asking when he’d be seeing me again at classes.

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When sitting down for this (A4, 100gr, 2B pencil), I just sketched most of the objects first and then began work from left to right (I can’t keep my hand from smudging the sketch otherwise). Always returning to the left to darken parts which looked pale after using much darker tones to the right. I must admit, I thought I had taken on too much here, it took 90 minutes and I’m glad I only sketched the tree branches in the foreground. My main focus was actually the tree line on the border to the background.

Poppies, daisies and corn-flowers to my feet and bumble bees flying around like crazy.

How did it come to this?

I’d picked up the book “Pen and Pencil Drawing Techniques” by Harry Borgman and had spent a day with it, doing some of the early exercises a few weeks back.

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I would normally have just built up monotone tonal values, but Mr. Borgman has already introduced me to tonal values built up with different stroke techniques.

Also, I now have a German urban sketching journal “Ein Jahr Urban Sketching” by Jens Hübner. And he recommended a book called “Watercolour Tips” by Ian King. I’ve been trying a bit of watercolour out the last couple of days and here is my first miniature “Norwich School” painting I did just before leaving the house for the “plein air drawing” sketch above.

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