Course work: Applied some colored pencil over parts of the marker drawing I did yesterday, adding some highlights and details, and muting some of the more obnoxious colors, which improved it enough to, I hope, meet the objectives of the exercise.
Started the “Drawing Animals” exercise with a very hasty sketch (done through a telescope, in the rain) of a Canada goose on the pond. Black and grey markers were added later. Field marks are adequately captured, but the bird didn’t look this wooden…as I’ve drawn it, it looks like a decoy.
Reading:
Carol Strickland The Annotated Mona Lisa
Andrews and McMeel, Kansas City, Missouri, USA, 1992
Pp 74-109
Personal Sketchbook work: A simple brush drawing of a towel on a hook. Then I rehung the towel and did another. Brush drawing is something I would like to learn, but I find it about as forgiving as the tax collector.
Drawing plants and flowers: check and log:
Negative space is a useful tool for drawing, as it diverts one’s attention from preconceptions about the object drawn and focuses one on the adjacent negative shapes which delineate the object.
In order to get my plant drawings in proportion, I used negative space, measuring with a pencil, comparison with previously-drawn parts of the work, and in some cases modification of actual dimensions to alter the composition.
The plant drawings all had a relatively shallow depth of field, and superimposition and shadowing were the main tools available for suggesting three-dimensional space. Since the subjects themselves varied in size, reducing perceived size to suggest distance was not efficacious. Atmospheric perspective would have been of little use with a total field depth of only about 20 cm. I think that the large colored-pencil drawing was more successful in suggesting depth of field than the marker drawing, even though the former had a much shallower field.
Total time: 2 hours 9 minutes
