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Day 10
Not much to say other than that eggs and spheres seem to be just the right amount of difficulty right now. Getting their edges smooth and soft is challenging and I still can experiment with different approaches.
@Deborah & Erik
Yesterday I haven’t noticed that my answer to your comments got pushed back to the first site. So just in case thanks again to both of you 🙏
Day 11
More mileage. Not that I would see any improvement but as long as it pays off in the long run.
Christopher, I think the fact that you are emphasizing process is most important. We often tend to let ego take over when we’re too focused on results.
In another discipline ( golf for me) I had a mentor who always said Mastery = focused on process Ego= focused on results, and we can’t control outcome! So we get Mastery in a discipline when we just do the work, do the process and have patience, and from time to time, we get results!😂
Thank you Debra & Raven 🙏
And yes I’m pretty grind resistant, that’s the easy part for me and to a certain degree I’m proud of that since it can be useful to get the needed mileage.
The more difficult part for me is to find the right point between being frustrated about not being able to execute a technique but still attempting to apply it instead of practising it isolated until it’s “mastered”.
So in the end everyone has his/her weak points 😅👋
Day 12 & 13
Over the weekend I wanted to create some distance but without missing a day, so I only did some shading excercises there I focused specifically on trying to not overlap the contours of the shapes with my strokes which I still struggle with.
I wanted to do much more but surprisingly these pages take longer than I thought.
I also tried to apply the things I tried doing these exercises on a cube. I again focused on not overlapping the contour but also on the order I filled in the tones. I find it easier to fill in the background first, that way I can clean up the subject with an eraser before attempting to shade it.
Lastly I find it quite interesting that the graphite looks much smoother on the no name din a3 paper I use for those excercises compared to how grainy it looks on my hahnemühle paper.
I could see wanting to practice shading without overlapping the contour using a pen or brush, but for graphite or charcoal, you can overshoot the contour and use an eraser to create hard or soft edges. It makes you think more like a painter. Remember, drawing is painting, and painting is drawing. The more your can meld the two, the more you will learn from doing each one.
If you have your pencils sharpened correctly, you can hold them so they are almost parallel to the paper and create a wide tone using the side of the pencil as well as back and forth hatching on the tip.
On the cube, do a gradation on the dark plane and medium plane (darker on top) to show reflected light. To get the gradation, you can either lift out from the bottom using a needed eraser, or add more tone to the top. It will give your drawing more sophistication and depth, then you can apply this to all box forms.
I admire how you are spending all of this time working on geometric solids. That will serve you very well in the future.
Thank you Erik for your suggestions and your encouraging words 🙏
Day 14 & 15
I wanted to try to draw something else than simple geometric forms. First I thought of Sunflowers but then I thought that’s to difficult and choose to draw something, at least I thought so, easier. So I chose to draw cramped paper and what can I say, it ended up being much more difficult then I expected it to be.
Choosing subjects with the right amount of difficulty seems to be a challenge on itself 😅
Thank you Debra, even if I have to admit that I only simplified it that much because of my inability to capture all those little details. This was just to much for me right now 😅👋
Day 16
I don’t know if it’s just not my day or if I have a talent to choose subjects that are a bit to complex for me right now. My intention was to approach this one with the technique of the Russian Academic course but establishing a block in while I chose such a subtle perspective (almost front view but not fully) in combination with the rounded corners ended up being to difficult.
I don’t know if I’ll finish this one or come back to it later …
Day 17 & 18
It’s kind of embarrassing only having such ugly stuff to show and there might be some of you saying I’m grinding to much again.
I do agree about the importance of not just practicing certain skills isolated from each other but in my opinion if it’s about these fundamental things grinding can’t be a bad thing. I mean how can I expect to “successfully” draw certain object like an apple, a radio or a cup if I’m not even able to execute and shade those basic geometric shapes.
It’s just frustrating not being able to figure out why I’m having such a hard time with the sphere or rounded shapes in general. I understand the principles as you can see on the spheres there I used scribble lines but anything else, no matter what techniques I’m trying or if working from the shoulder or not, ends up in a mess 😅
I don’t want perfection but at least achieving spheres somewhat similar to the other geo forms I did would be enough for me to try more difficult stuff.
So grinding or not I’ll keep working on those spheres to hopefully get a clue of what I’m missing.
it is very good to see your evolution in rendering exercises. I liked the crumpled paper. I always find it confusing simplifying irregular shapes, and your work is clarifying that. 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
Thank you Mirian🙏
I for myself can’t see any noticeable improvement yet but as long as I can look back after the 100 days and actually notice some improvement, I’ll be happy 😅
Day 19 & 20
So after reflecting upon the last weeks and thinking about what Deborah said in her thread about building muscle memory I decided to simplify the focus.
I have to admit that it’s hard to judge my work even for myself since I almost force the bad drawings always pushing towards areas I feel uncomfortable with. Because of that and because I always jump around alot if it’s about different techniques I think one of the problems could be a lack of muscle memory.
I mean I’m drawing for almost two years now but still struggle and think about how to apply the medium and how to hold the pencil or how to orientate my hand.
To a certain degree that might be normal but I think I never gave my hand/arm a chance to get used to any of these different techniques.
The sphere is the perfect example since I exactly know what I want to do but I just can’t execute it physically. Also I’m pretty confident that a lack of understanding is not the problem.
Long story short: In order to build some muscle memory I will focus on mileage and do pages like the above. These are all from memory which is just faster than working carefully from reference or live. These are really good in my opinion because they offer plenty of different angles and problems to solve and to get used to. Therefore my focus is also just how to apply my strokes and to get used to it until I don’t have to think about it. I don’t care how accurate or clean these are executed anymore, that can be a goal for later or improve passively.
Hey Christopher, these forms look really great, very nice hatching, tone, and line work on those cylinders! I really like the interesting shapes you invented, making a curved surface convincing is not easy! I know you are probably very familiar with drawing through boxes, but I do believe finding the inside corner is quite valuable. Basically what Drawabox is all about. Most of the boxes I think are very accurate. For the spheres, I also struggle to make em right. Whenever I try to wrap lines all around it like a globe, it always turns lopsided or just a mess! The exercises I think have helped for me is tightly fitting ellipses and circles inside squares, planes, and tables, checking the minor axis. I’m sure your familiar with similar exercises, sorry I haven’t looked through haha.
I think this is looking great, I wouldn’t be too down on your work. Hope something was helpful!Thank you Mattias and yes most of what I have done until this point was centered in some way towards linear construction. So everything that has to do with rendering, shading or applying tone is something I struggle with.
Day 21 & 22
The curved planes and the simple forms done with an hb pencil are from yesterday and the sphere was done today following a Stephen Bauman tutorial. I know it’s not perfect and it ended up not really being a sphere but I think it’s definitely better compared to my latest spheres.
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