I’ve completed (or nearly completed) two portraits after my Drawing on the Right Side of The Brain class concluded.  Its been hard finding the time given course curriculum development for my new gig as an Adjunct Instructor in the School of Continuing Studies at the University of Richmond.  But when I have sat down and started to draw, it just flowed. It feels really good to be able to drawn something that vaguely resembles what I’m attempting.  Now I need to learn some more technique. Practice makes perfect.

These are some of the things I have learned:

• Occasionally take a break for 10 minutes and get away from the Drawing. Come back and shift to right brain and look again at the subject or the photograph and see what I wasn’t seeing before.
• Concentrate on the darkest darks.
• Tape the drawing on the wall and look at it from a distance.
• Look again at the angle of the eyes, mouth, nose and lips.
• Hair, I’m starting to get how to draw the hair. Can’t yet put that into words.
• I get jazzed with energy when drawing and then I’m tired. Dog tired. I think that is from the left-right brain shifting that is going on. I find that at work also sometimes when I have to think critically then create a solution.
• Careful with cross hatching on a girls face. If it is too distinct it looks like facial hair. So now I can do beards better.
• I’m getting better with cross hatching and shading. These little devices help a lot -Blending Stumps.
• I like mixing pencil and charcoal sticks for the darkest darks. But there is no turning back once the charcoal goes down. See the next item.
• The eraser is my friend.

Its feeling like with practice I can get really good really quick.  So I’m going to try to get at least 2 hours in a week till my course development is complete, then hopefully 4 hours or more a week.  Also our wonderful intructor is going to teach an advanced class this summer with advanced drawing techniques, cross hatching wonders and color theory.

You can see all my posts on drawing here.

This is a continuation of a series of posts. The last two posts were about Shadows and Highlights and Drawing Negative Space.

In the previous two classes we worked on our self-portrait. Last night we had a little celebration and got the chance to spend a little about two hours on something we wanted to draw.  I spend 30 minutes putting some final touches on my self-portrait and then began drawing my youngest daughter’s portrait as a draft image. I wanted to experiment a little drawing her portrait before I jump in with better paper and maybe a change in tactics.  First about the self-portrait:

I’ll let you be the judge of the quality of my portrait. I did learn several important things to take care of in drawing this portrait.

I need to lighten the highlights a lot and darken the shadows. Basically add dynamic range.

I need to put an early image taped to the wall and step back to get perspective.  For example my beard is just not that full. Used to be when I was younger but I keep it short now.

Must keep my hands clean. I would erase an area to give it highlights, only to gray it up again as I moved my hands across the image.

Now for the draft portrait of my daughter. You notice cross hair erasure marks. This was intentional. I wanted to get this one very accurate in terms of proportion and perspective. But being a draft I’m not going to do any more with this image.

I’m going to draw this again 4 times at least.

1) With the typical prepared ground (dark) background like this one but on better and whitter paper.

2) Without any grounding. I will add the shadows and background effect after I get the general features placed on the page.

3 and 4) Using painter X on a Mac laptop with a grounded background and starting plain as well.

I’ll post them on this blog when done.

Summary

This class has been one of the best experiences I have had in exploring my own creative abilities. My drawings before this class were typical stick figured and embarrassing. As I stated in an earlier post, I had always felt that I had artist within me and yet, was yearning to express himself.  I’ve been able to create many things in my life like profitable companies, web sites, high performing teams and and more. But none of these activities felt artistic to me. Now I both know a little about the artist within, I also have a greater appreciation for my other talents that I have been able to exercise through the years.

I will be continuing to practice drawing and may, someday, move to paiting with color or at least electronic painting with Corel Painter and more.

Thanks for all the kind comments (mostly provided privately) that have offered words of encourangment and hope as I made my way through this fantastic journey.  Over the holiday break, I will probably add an epilogue post to this series with final throught. But for now a big thanks to Betty Edwards for her great book - Drwaing on the Right Side of the Brain, and to Nancy our wonderful instructor.

This post is an update to a series of articles on using Betty Edward’s Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain techniques (search for the Book with the same name in Amazon). The previous article was update 10.

Back in October we learned to see the negative space (the space that surrounds an object) as a way to use the right brain.  During those exercises we drew a hard plastic and metal chair over two classes.  My drawing is below. As this one developed I began to see my style and how different my style is from the other class members. I have an engineering background so I wanted to capture the hard lines. One of the class drawings had this chair become much softer. The great part was, all of the negative space chairs turned out wonderful in their own way.

This is when we all knew that we were learning these techniques and had some inherent talent hidden in us for all these years.

Next week I’ll post my self portrait, the final image from the class. Still needs a little work and I’m half pleased with it. My classmates think it is wonderful. I have my doubts. But maybe with a little more work on it I’ll learn to love it.

Update 12 shows my final Self-Portrait and a draft drawing of one of my daughters.

This is a continuation of a series of posts about learning to draw using the Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain concept. The last update was about drawing my first live model profile.

In the last two classes that concluded yesterday, we discussed how the Brain can interpret a small amount of detail and fill in the pieces, giving the viewer the ability to see the image intended by the artist.  Think R-Mode or right brain recognition of the image despite a lack of clear detail.  I’m not sure I said that in a clear way but an example will help.

Gustave Courbet a french realist painter in the 19th century, was known for one of his self-portraits that has informally been called the fisherman.  Note below the use of shadows and highlights and the seemingly small amount of information contained in the drawing. Yet, his self portrait is striking and memorable enough that many people recognize this painting, once they have been exposure to its beauty.

As an exercise in learning to draw with shadows and highlights we created a grounding (a dark shaded rectangle) using graphite and then began to erase and darken as needed. I “copied” Gustave’s famous painting upside down for 20 minutes or so and then flipped it over and added a little more detail. I worked about 10 more minutes and got to the drawing shown below.  When I set out on the exercise, I set a goal to draw as little as I can to see how quickly I could come up with a drawing that resembles the Fisherman. Or at least a drawing that can be recognized as a man in a hat with smoking a pipe.

I’m not sure my drawing look’s anything like Gustave’s but I do think it is a decent drawing given I had 30 minutes total in it, and it is my first highlight and shadow drawing.

At the conclusion of the class we started working on our self portrait. I have included an image of that drawing here for contrast.  This draft was done with about 30 minutes of drawing and a lot of set up time and juggling with the mirror and lighting.  In the next class we will spend 2 to 3 more hours on our self portrait.  So I do expect this to get a lot better. Lets hope so anyway!

I’m really enjoying the class and wish it would never end.  two more classes and then I’m done.  Hope to take the advanced colors class if it is taught in the summer.

The next article in this series is about drawing negative space.

This is a continuation of a series of posts about learning to draw using Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain concept. The last update was the draft version of this profile.

This is the final version of my first live profile. Of all the work I have done in the class so far, this is the drawing I’m most proud of. Within 20 minutes I had a likeness of Bill down on paper and after probably 1 and a half to 2 hours total, I arrived at this drawing.

When I first started drawing Bill my left brain wanted to stop me and kept saying this is too complicated and you don’t know where to begin. But then I was able to quiet the brain down, go to the basic unit of measure concept and mark the position of the back of the eye, the chin and the back of the ear. After that the right brain took over and and Bill started to appear. I’m now a very big supporter of the Drawing On the Right Side of the Brain concept.

All my drawing posts can be viewed here.

On to the Self-Portrait. Yahoo!!!!