BEGINNING DRAWING 101
LESSON ONE:
LEARNING HOW TO SEE
Madeleine Jacobs, course instructor
Quick Links:
INTRODUCTION - HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT
1 - HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT 2 -
HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT 3
In this lesson, Madeleine suggested in our first class that we take a fresh approach to viewing things, partially by seeing things with a fresh perspective. So that's what I did in our first go-around.
Heyo All! Welcome to my first weeks' assignment for our beginning drawing course at Eclectic Academy. Some of you probably don't know me-- and those that do probably won't admit to it-- so for introduction's sake, my name is Mark Hughey, I'm in the over-thirty crowd, I'm a bona fide smart ass, and I'm learning to draw. It sounds kind of odd to say it that way; I've actually been drawing for about twenty years, all told, mostly emulating what I see in comic books and how to draw guides... so I'm pretty much self-taught. I tend to work in a fantasy vein: mythology, magic, superheroic, and science-fiction type pieces that have heavy anime and cartoon influence. Lately I've been doing a lot of the same style of work in 3D programs like Poser, Cinema 4D and Vue D'Esprit. I don't make money, I mostly do it for my own enjoyment and means of self-expression.
Anyone who might like to see examples of my work can find it at my artist page at SheezyArt. I honestly forget if you have to have to join to view it though... so if that's the case, I apologize beforehand.
So why on Earth did I sign up for a beginning drawing class? Well, to be honest, I've noticed a lot of stagnancy in my work. I tend to draw characters in very similar poses, and skimp on backgrounds, so I need to learn a fresh perspective to get a more 'real' approach to my work. I want to learn the better points of shading, texturing and lightcasting, and how to translate that into pencils and inks. Put simply, I want to be able to advance beyond what I can already do into areas I hadn't thought about before. Taking a formalized art course is a first step for me.
So let's get started, hey?
First off, we were asked to write something backwards, to view each letter as an individual entity instead of as words. Let me tell ya, that wasn't the easiest thing to do for me! I'm a sometimes writer, so I had to really focus on NOT thinking of each word as I wrote it. I chose a couple lines from a couple favorite poems.
First was one stanza from Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love", whose title I likely butchered. Here's the original stanza in my handwriting:
And here's my attempt at writing it backwards. No poets were injured in the making of this piece, but *I* would have been injured (or injured something!) if I'd tried to do the whole poem this way, the way I'd originally planned:
It's scary when you have better handwriting on some words going backwards. o_O Here's something kinda weird. When I was doing this, I kept having to think of HOW I wrote the letters in order to reverse the strokes. Kinda like when someone tells you to recite the alphabet backwards. You're going great through U and T and S, and then you hit this point where you have to sing the song to yourself to remember what precedes what. That's what it felt like.
The other is a single line from John Greenleaf Whittier, a quote I'm sure we've all heard before; I had such a time with my cursive that I decided to play around with this a little and do some stylistic printing, just to see what I'd come up with. *I* think it looks cooler, anyway. ^_^ See if you can figure it out! (If you want to cheat, and don't want to load it into a graphic program and flip-horizontal on it, the answer's at the bottom of the page)
We were then asked to draw a couple items upside down, to get a better feel for the shapes that make up what we draw rather than looking at the item and drawing what our eyes see verbatim (eyebatim?). For my first sketch, I chose a candle I keep in my room in a big glass ashtray. You'll have to take my word for it that I sketched it upside-down and didn't sketch it right side up and then just scan it in upside down. ^_^
Kinda looks like some kind of sicko mushroom, doesn't it? Oh, I also have to admit that I embellished a little. My candle didn't have that much wax dripping down its side. Now, what I SHOULD have done was give it a lot more depth, especially along the side of the candle, to give it a sense of curvature. It just looks a little on the flat side to me. These are the things I really should be working on. *Sigh.*
I opted for a little more shading on my second piece, but I still can't believe I did something so gauche as to sketch my TV (An RCA 21", for sticklers.). There wasn't anything really on tonight when I sketched it, so I roughed a picture on it. It still looks sort of 'sketchy', for lack of a better term, and I was NOT fond of the shading job I did on the backside of the TV. Maybe it's because I'm so used to using inks to layer over pencils, maybe it's because I didn't use multiple pencils, maybe just because it sucks. ^_^
Finally, for our third piece of homework, we were supposed to look at a piece of art, picture or the like, reversed, and see what it reminds us of. For my own homework, I chose the middle cat on Madeleine's Lesson 1 page. The one that's upside down, facing to the left, which I've shamelessly swiped, below:
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Mirrored Cat from
Madeleine's Lesson Page. |
The first time I looked at it, when I just sorta scanned it, I got the impression of a color rough of an owl right-side up. The more I looked at it, and sort of let my mind wander, the more I backed up that first impression. The white space in between the ears is the brighter stomach plumage, flanked by his wings at rest. The nose is a sort of decorative crest on its forehead, with the area leading up to it being a beak. The whiskers and scruff of the neck are the owl's head-feathers, and I almost get the hint that he was asleep and is now a little torqued at being awoken. Yeah, a lot of that comes if I sort of narrow my eyes and let my mind wander, like you would if you were looking for those magic pictures that used to be in the Sunday paper. (Which, by the way, I could be on codeine and not able to even speak coherently, and my eyes still wouldn't be relaxed enough to ever see anything.)
Well, that's my homework for the week. Hope it was worth the wait! Can't wait till the next lesson! Enjoy your week!
TOKEN BACKWARD WRITING ANSWER:
"Of all the sad words of tongue or pen
the saddest are these-- it might have been..."
--John Greenleaf Whittier
