My new sketch journal

I think I've finally found a sketch journal to suit me. After sketching last Saturday, I was walking down Park Street in Bristol and popped into one of the millions of office supplies / stationary stores along the way. The search for the perfect sketch journal has become something of an addiction for me. I cannot walk past a shop that sells paper without sticking my head in to see if they've got something that will make me actually want to open it and decorate its pages with my scribbles.

So far, my search had been fruitless...

And then, last Saturday, I found it. And I've done more sketching this week than I've probably done in the last three months. Yay! Here's some of what I've done. You can click on the photos to enlarge them (although I can't promise they'll look any better).

 

The first sketch of the new journal... still struggling with the life drawing though...

But I'm working my way through Bridgman's Life Drawing and starting to get the hang of it.

I was in Suffolk for a few days this week and the gorgeous hotel I stay in has a fabulous open fireplace, which I had a go at sketching.

And finally, this is a table in my hotel room, which for some reason I felt compelled to draw.

Here's hoping the journal continues to work its mojo :)

Drawing negative space

The next exercise in The Book is learning how to draw negative space. That's the space around objects, rather than the object itself. And, to be honest, I'm struggling a bit with this one. Apparently you're supposed to look at the object and then look "through" it to see the negative space surrounding it. If you then draw the negative space, this will help you with things like proportionality and sizing.

This is something I do struggle with in my sketching - how to size objects appropriately to keep the relative proportions and also so that I don't end up running out of space on the page. But having tried out these exercises, I still seem to be unable to get the size of whatever it is I'm drawing right. Hmm...

Here are my efforts:

As you can see, I got totally fed up with the last one and gave up halfway through. The table is a bit better, but still not great. I think I might have drawn it better if I'd been looking at the table, and not the space around the table... But that wasn't the point of the exercise ;)

If anything good came out of this exercise, it's that I'm quite happy with the shading on the chair in the first picture. The exercise was to shade in the background first with graphite and then draw the chair over the top (I don't know why) but because I didn't have any graphite, only charcoal, it didn't quite turn out as planned. But after I'd drawn the chair, I used an eraser to highlight the chair. And I'm pretty happy with the result.

In the meantime, I'll have another go at drawing negative space.

Drawing the left hand from the right side of the brain...?

When I got home from sketching in Brizzle today, I dug out The Book again, and picked up where I left off - using the picture plane to learn how to draw foreshortened objects. In English, that means using a piece of glass that has a basic four-square grid on it to draw 3-D objects on a 2-D plane.

Today's exercise was to draw my left hand. I started by tracing the outline of the hand in marker directly onto the picture plane, and then recreating the outer frame and grid on paper. Then, with the picture plane beside the paper, I had to mark the key points of the outline on the paper. Then, looking at my left hand (the actual hand) which was in the same position, I had to draw the rest of the detail and shading etc.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with how these turned out. It took about an hour or so to draw both of these, and I found that I really started to focus as I got more into the detail. So much so, that I even managed to completely tune out Ireland's defeat to South Africa... which is not necessarily a bad thing ;)

Incidentally, I found out last week that two of my fellow Bristol Sketchers have used this book and they are both incredibly talented, so that's inspired me to continue working through it. I'm going to try to spend a couple of hours on it again tomorrow. I've also vowed to take my sketchbook with me to work every day this week and to try to take just five or ten minutes each day to stop, have a coffee and draw something. So hopefully I'll have some more little sketches to upload here during the week :)

Drawing on the Right side of the brain

In a previous life, I used to do a lot of watercolour landscapes but living in such a vibrant city as Bristol has really inspired me to want to capture urban scenes. And the best way to do that is to (1) learn how to sketch people and (2) learn how to sketch quickly as city life tends to be fairly fast paced.

So, how to draw people? Yesterday, this was the best that I could do:

They're recognisably human (at least to my eye!) but that's not a great drawing. I think you can get the general gist of how these two ladies were sitting, but the proportion is all wrong and there's no detail - just scribbling. The problem was that I was focusing too much on trying to draw "people" or "ladies sitting on park bench" and not focusing on just drawing the shape of them.

So today I spent a couple of hours doing some exercises from Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. The first couple of exercises ask you to copy some line drawings upside down (to stop you from thinking about what you're drawing and instead focus your mind on drawing the lines and the shapes). I admit I was skeptical to begin with, but I think the results speak for themselves.

This first picture is a reproduction of Picasso's portrait of Igor Stravinsky. Click on the images to enlarge them.

That's my sketch on the left, and the original on the right.

What's interesting to me about this picture is that, firstly, it was drawn upside down. But secondly, the book actually said that whilst you're drawing upside down you're using that more creative right-hand side of the brain which doesn't bother with trying to identify or name what it is you're looking at. It just draws it. However, the book said to try to do this drawing uninterrupted; if you do get interrupted - for example, if your husband sticks his head around the door and asks how you're doing - your brain will switch back to left-hand thinking to allow you to verbalise a response and you'll lose your focus. If you look at my drawing above left, you can see that the head is really out of proportion with the rest of the body. As I was working upside down, the head was the last thing that I drew and just before I started on it, my husband popped his head around the door and started talking to me. I didn't consciously notice any difference in my focus, but when I turned the picture the right way round, I could spot immediately when my brain switched back to left-hand thinking.

The second drawing I did (also upside down) is a reproduction of Lichtenstenin's Anxious Girl.

And finally, a reproduction of a soldier on a horse by an unknown German artist.

Now, I've never been able to draw a horse before in my entire life, so I'm absolutely thrilled to bits with that last one :) Maybe there's something in this right-side drawing after all!