Lots of drawing today. I worked from Nicolaides’s book for the first hour and the next Fandom Fitness drawing for the next hour.
For the gestures today I realized that I have the most trouble with the standing figures. This is also true for long term drawings I do. I need to focus more on the standing or elongated figure more.
I also did a half hour of the cross-contour drawings. This is basically a page of lines that isn’t intelligible as anything but just that, a bunch of lines. The process though is really helpful in getting a “feeling” for the figure.
Today I also flipped through The Natural Way to Draw to get an idea of what was coming next. After seeing all the exercise schedules, 15 hours each, I realized that it may take me a couple more months to get through them all at my current rate. I could just do noting but the exercises in this book but I would rather work on other things that I motivate me. Such as Ann’s painting and the Fandom Fitness schedules.
I know now that I vastly undervalued this book years ago when I rated it based on it’s illustrations. Which I’ve now realized were compiled along with the book after Nicolaides’s death. Even with the first four exercises I’m beginning to understand drawing in a different way than before. Drawing that is more expressive of what I feel of the figure and a closer visual connection to what I’m seeing. It’s helping me build more complete mental representations of the figure than I’ve ever had.
Lastly, my drawing of Samwise Gamgee today was done in a style that I learned from research of Studio Incamminati. Check out this awesome YouTube video of a 5 hour portrait session with some amazing artists.
This is just the first session of the drawing. I take a photo of it into Photoshop and compare it against the original and fix any huge mistakes. Then hopefully finish it up in one more session. Probably more.
Lots of drawing done plus reading and art planning.
Lots of distractions that I have to use willpower to avoid. Working on it though.
Nicholaides exercises are going to take a while and are very helpful. I’m going to start Ann’s painting over.
