More Drawing….
Saturday, June 6th, 2009One of the next exercises in The New Drawing on the Right Hand Side of the Brain is to draw your own hand using the “window.” (more on this in a sec) PS–pictures in this post are (well…should be…) clickable for a slightly larger view.
The drawing above is one I worked on about six weeks ago (and haven’t had time to do much drawing since!). I didn’t look at my old workbook prior to doing this exercise, which wanted you to hold something in your hand. What a hoot… here’s the first attempt from 2003 (eeks it was THAT long ago?):
The Window is a piece of plastic with cross-hairs on it. You make a cardboard frame to make it rigid, then look through it to divide the object being drawn into quadrants. Doing this helps train the eye to see the foreshortened object, in this case hands.
Here is a picture of a foreshortened hand done using the window this year. I left the wash-off pen markings on the clear plastic window, on the left side, for you to see how placing your hand underneath allows you to just trace the outlines–presto, one of the hardest thing to do (foreshortening) made easy!:
And here is the same exercise from 2004 ish–I used a different background technique in 2009 than this one just to see how it would look. I like the dark background better I think…..
Basically, I think I just need to draw more….Here is one last exercise (I’m doing more of them this time as I KNOW I need the practice):
I like the cross-hatched (with eraser) background on this. My hand is in the “figa” …with thumb tucked between the fingers. I did this naturally as a toddler; we lived in Spain at the time and it is considered good fortune if one naturally makes the figa. I hope so!