Drawing Fundamentals - The Adventure Continues

I spent a lot of time at the Minnesota State Fair this week, plus it's just been a busy week overall. The best part of the week was the llama dress up contest at the state fair. I took a number of close up pictures of the contestants and their llamas or alpacas when they were lined up for judging. While this didn't capture the full impact of the costumes, it was more fun to capture the faces of the contestants and their animals. This one's my favorite.

Super Girl and Wonder Woman, both looking strong. I think our world needs more strong female energy in it.

In spite of having limited time, I have been drawing every day. Earlier in the week, it started out okay and I was doing things like this.

There is so much coverage about the fair in the daily paper, so I used some of those pictures to experiment. 

Somewhere, it started to go wrong and I could start to see that flat geometric shapes might not be the one-size fits all, introductory, step towards better drawing that I thought it might be. However, I wasn't sure about the next step.

I've only been doing this a handful of days, so some of it is still figuring out what the shapes are that I am seeing, how much detail is enough or too much and so on, but there seemed to be a bigger problem. Using flat geometric shapes seems to work best for items in silhouette with objects which are relatively flat to begin with. 

Last night, I had a little time and I sat down to think about this and try to look for resources. I found my way back to an Alphonso Dunn video on YouTube. Instead of ovals, he's using cylinders.  Here's a clip from this video. Plus, in this clip, he is midway through showing an example of linking a gesture line to filling in the rough details of the person. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Alphonso!

I may have linked to this same video before, but now it makes sense to me in a different way. Plus, I can see that thinking about simple shapes in this way helps address the 3d-ness or volume of things.  

I was part way through this page, but played around a bit with cylinders. I also have one of those mannequins which can be easily positioned, so I am going to use that to explore the world of using simple shapes to help my drawing in a way which better suggests shape, volume and 3d-ness.

This has been and continues to be an interesting journey. I lack a predisposition towards processing and making sense of shapes. As an adult learner trying to figure it out, it's fun when there's a next step. It's frustrating when I get stuck and don't know enough to identify the problem or a problem when I get stuck. In those times, I know that I'm not making progress, but I don't know how to get past that. 

Sometimes I wish I could snap my fingers and find the magical tailor-made path, which would lead me through this learning process. I'd do the work.  I promise.  Just, lay out the steps for me, which would help me develop skills and also help me to better evaluate my work. At other times, I'm glad that I'm in charge of my own process and I have to find the resources and people who can help me and I decide if what they offer is what I need or want. It sure seems like a middle ground should exists out there, but I haven't figured it out.