On the plus side, I came away with a lot of information. Plus, I worked my way towards figuring out how to apply what I can now and save the rest for later. On the not-as-positive side, yesterday, the sketching part at the fair did not go well for me and I was more of less ignored by the instructor. The instructor said he’d drift by and check in with people from time to time. He didn’t. Instead, I sought him out once and asked for help. In those several minutes, he shared a good foundation skill, but after that I was pretty much left to me own devices. I wasn’t expecting intense hand-holding or one-on-one, detailed, instruction, but was really disappointed that he didn’t do what he said he was going to do, especially since it was a small group. After 2.5 hours of a 4 hour class, I went off and did my own thing.
So for the good stuff. From Thursday night's session, I walked away with a good way to work on value shapes and structures. I purchased a sketchbook with gray toned paper and several Pitt artist pens, the big brush kind, in black, warm grey, cool grey, and white. The Pitt pens are nifty. You can put down one layer of color in one of the greys. After it dries, which is quick, you can put down another layer of color, which is darker. It's a quick way to build value shapes in somewhere between 3 - 5 gradations of values. Plus, the toned paper acts as one of your value ranges. That means you use the white pen to just add those splashes of the lightest light. This also helps me since I have a bad habit of drawing over my lightest lights when I am drawing on white paper. After I work on the following, I think I will practice with simple objects at home where I can influence the lighting and working my way to more difficult ones.
The other idea which clicked and made sense is to try and see objects as a collection of geometric shapes. It’s not a completely new concept to me. I’ve read about it, but it didn’t make as much sense as when I saw a live example of it. There's something about seeing what the artist is seeing and watching what the artist is doing to really help make certain connections. The sketchbook guy, briefly, walked me through seeing a person as a series of geometric objects that are pieced together and how you can build upon that. We were sitting on bleachers and looking at a person from the back. When I looked at people from the back, I could see some of the same shapes in other people, but I couldn't transfer it when people were in a different position. Still, it made sense in that one moment and I could see it. That’s enough for me to slow down and figure it out in my own time and manner.
With the wonder of a Google search, I found this example, which brought additional clarity. Viola! In the reboot of daily drawing, I am going to start looking at objects and drawing their shapes, roughly, using geometric shapes. I started this morning using some of the pictures in the linked example. Here are some of them.
Hopefully, this will me get out of the details and out of the weeds. Right now, I literally cannot see the big picture and cannot filter out the unnecessary. I just can't do it, yet. I keep bumping up against this problem without really recognizing it or knowing what to do about it. Now, I feel like I have some options and, if I practice, I expect to make progress.
I want to work on the drawing things from pictures or life using geometric shapes for awhile. Next up, I could see starting with the geometric shapes in a lighter medium like pencil or a gray pen and adding truer contour lines and a few details in pen and just building off of that. After awhile, I could see using the toned paper and Pitt pens to try and capture the large shapes, but more from a value perspective.
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