I really enjoyed the reverse gestures exercise from The Natural Way to Draw this morning.
The reverse gestures exercise is to draw the pose in reverse of the way you see it. If the model is facing one way you draw him/her facing the other way. Basically like a mirror image.
Before I started I was thinking this would be very difficult but after a few drawings I found that it wasn’t that hard and as long as I didn’t let my brain get in the way and overthink it, I could draw the figure in reverse quick naturally.
A few points that I observed while drawing excited me even more about the exercise. First, I was forced to focus on what i know about general anatomy and not focus completely on copying what I see. The exercise is teaching me to use what I know. In face, when I really got going I was using the image just for quick references mostly.
Another wonderful part of this exercise is that I discovered how important it is to get the general shape and gesture down first before focusing on any detail at all. I felt I could glance at the figure a couple times to get the general flow of the movement then do the rest from memory.
Next I moved on to my Xena drawing from yesterday. I wanted to continue with my last drawing and see if I could improve the accuracy and the form so that it would look more like Lucy Lawless and have much more depth.
I did a quick comparison on Photoshop to see how off my drawing was. I’m happy to say that the major shape of the face was almost perfect, so was the placement of the brow line and the right eye. But the left eye, nose and mouth was too far off.
I used my comparison to make some edits to the features then I lightly erased most of what I did yesterday and softened the whole drawing with a coat of graphite over the whole. This way I could use my eraser as another lever of lighter color to further bring in more depth.
As I look at the photo I see her mouth is still off and needs work. But I’m not sure of this style of drawing, overly modeled, is what I’m wanting to end up with. Not sure…
Lots of drawing this morning. Loving the reverse gestures.
I interrupted my art time to call my family.
I like the general softening of the whole page with some graphite so I can use white but I need some more linear work in this rather than too much modeling.
