Drawing Practice

Frustrated with my inabilities to realistically do perspective and depth, which I attribute to my lack of depth perception, I’ve decided to re-edu-um-cate myself!  I signed up for an online gouache class by Lena Rivo, which has been great, as well as bought an eBook version of Bert Dodson’s Keys to Drawing.  I have decided to dedicate part of each day to doing at least one of his exercises if possible.  The hope is to improve my drawing skills, which are the problems behind some of my painting issues.

First exercise is contour drawing.  The purpose of this is to get used to the idea of checking what you see against what you draw, and get the idea into your head that what you see is not what you think.  This means looking at angles and curves as well as relationships of parts to each other.  Here are my exercise examples, diving in feet first!

Next was fun – look at your hand face on – that is, fingers in your face!  Close an eye.  Draw!

And then, imagine a pepper.  Draw it.  Then get a real pepper and take a good, strong look at it, and draw.  My imaginary pepper is at the top, and the real pepper, in three positions and three variations of drawing style, are below.

Very glad I chose to do this!  More to come.