I’m excited to begin diving deep into learning by looking at a great artist, pulling apart his/her book and creating my own curriculum from it.
It’s starting out slow, like everything, but I can see this becoming huge for my learning and increasing my skills. Already today with just starting the first lesson I created I’m learning a ton and challenging myself.
The drawback is that I’m starting back at the beginning and working hard on the fundamentals to get those mastered and I feel like I should be beyond them. But, as soon as I started drawing a box rotating in space I knew this was the right course for me now.
I’m also excited to begin sharing this with everyone soon.
Let’s start with the “performance” part of my day, which is basically the time that I spend on creating a finished piece.
The focus on storm today was to instill a bit more structure and stone into her portrait and really get the form to advance and recede into space. I feel I’ve done that well with today’s session. There are a few things that I want to correct but for the most part her face is done.
Next is going to be the fun stuff. The only thing that is from a photo in this drawing is her face. The rest I will be working on from separate references and my imagination.
These are the bread and butter of the Nicolaides course. I love doing them. They are always challenging and I learn so much about myself when I work on them regularly.
The focus for the gestures today was to try and get some clean lines while at the same time introducing simple forms and also quickly.
This is the actual beginning of my day. Well, after I was typing up the curriculum. Then I began diving deep into learning by doing my warm-up and drawing cubes rotating in space.
I always thought this would be easy. I was so wrong.
It’s not hard to look at a box and just copy the angles of all it’s lines. But when you doing it from your head you have to think about the angle of each line and how it should tilt if the box was in the position.
Then I made it even harder by trying to take that cube and rotating it in space. That’s not so bad if you don’t care about the proportions of the cube. But I care about the proportions, I’m an artist that focuses on the figure I have to care about proportion. Needless to say it was very challenging and I’m going to adjust my curriculum out of Figure Drawing for Artists to include exercises for this.
Next up was the actual first exercise I’ve ever created for myself with this new curriculum. Drawing cylinders in space.
I wanted to start out with practice on ellipses but I figured I could save two birds with one act by just doing transparent cylinders. This took the exercise to a whole new level.
I’ll make a post in the future all about the exercise.
The simple daily sketch is always great feedback on where you are in your art skills.
I drew a cup of water on my desk and my wife demonstrating a workout move in one of her videos. I’m almost ashamed to say it is her because the drawing is super bad. My only excuse, it’s from my memory.
Lots of art time and my first ever exercise created by me!!
My back is killing me and I needed to stand the whole time but I’ve turned that into a positive because I think it’s better that I work standing on all of my drawing.
I learned a ton about drawing cubes and cylinders in space.
