Week 3

Continuing with last week, I carried on going through the exercises in the 'How to Draw' book by Scott Robertson.

The next exercise was on how to create curved lines. I places points down and attempted to trace a smooth curve through them.

In some I felt a little pressured not to take the pen of the page in order to avoid chicken scratches. I do believe though that while the book recommends not taking the pen consistently off the page it is good to rotate the page in order to better follow the line of the curve with the bend of the wrist, this would imply taking the pen off the page at least somewhat, just not to the extent of chicken scratches (forming unconfident lines though many strokes).

I was often missing the points and making mistakes. This will have to be an exercise I return to often as it seems I have a weakness in this area. Being able to do this practice better could lead to better inking for pieces in general going forward with the confidence and foresight of the strokes put to paper with less reliance on a rubber or undo button.

The next practice was ellipses. Sometimes they weren't much of a problem, sometimes they were very off. It's then recommended to draw the Minor Axis determining the mid point of the ellipses. I did a little bit of annotating on the common problem found in drawing ellipses and identifying them in my own work.

I tied drawing the Minor Axis first and this proved even harder. It's recommended to draw 3 lines and ellipsis's between the lines using the middle line as the minor axis, this proved even harder. I tried ghosting the stocks a lot, mimicking the action to get my hand used to it and figuring out where the sides of the curves need to meet the lines, even doing this I was unsuccessful in creating accurate ellipses that confined to the boundaries of the lines.

I kept up practice, a little unsure of how well I was improving.

I stepped a way for a bit and went back to one of the first exercises that I found hard at the time, 1 point perspective boxes. Without a ruler, I attempted drawing boxes in 1 point perspective. starting out with a rectangle and a horizon line I found the point of the rectangle and created straight lines leading back to a point on the horizon.

I tried with different points and positions above and below the line. I do think a few of the 'straight' lines curved a bit but overall it was certainly better then the first attempt I made. I even tried a little 2 point perspective starting with a horizontal line.

During lesson, I was finding reading tough so my tutor recommended doing more exercises using the time. Using references of other artists I attempted to find the horizon and converging lines in their pieces and sketched out the buildings they drew for myself. My tutor got back to me telling me it would be better to look at refences from life as artists may have made their own mistakes. I think this exercise was nice but I do see her point. In my next studies I'll look at photography and apply a similar practice to those pictures.

Going back to the practice of ellipsis, my tutor recommended building up the muscle memory by tracing over a guide. I found a picture of different ellipsis types and started tracing them using my laptop as a light box. This felt like a more effective practice when it comes to getting them accurate so I recon I'll try this a few more times before attempting the 3 line method again to see if it has helped.