A Year Of... interesting things

Week 7 - Progress, but Spotty Availability

I liked the progress I made this week; I definitely notice both the increased awareness in examining subjects, sometimes catching mistakes before I even made them (are they still mistakes in that case?)

Historic House in Houston

However, throughout the week my availability has been spotty.
Then during the weekend I completely dropped the ball.

I don’t think it was wasted, because I did work on some interesting projects, but nevertheless it’s something I need to acknowledge.

This seems to be occurring with some frequency, but I am not ready to make a decision about how to handle it.

Week 8 - Shading; Reintroducing Exercises

Last week I have watched an interesting video in the Draw with Jazza series on how to practice.

It breaks down drawing practice into several different areas and I intend to incorporate them into my routine as following:

  • Tuesday - tutorial marathon: this will consist on going through as many of the DAUB chapters as I can in half an hour, both reading and practice, and this will set the theme for the week, in other words I’ll keep repeating during whatever windows of time I can find whatever I have managed to cover in that half an hour;
  • Wednesday - deconstruction of photos: take photos from the internet or scenes from video games (building unto my hobby from last year) and attempt to break them down into simple geometric forms and/or outlines;
  • Thursday - life drawing: draw objects from my surroundings trying to transform their 3D nature into 2D, incorporating lessons from the past such as perspectice and shading;
  • Friday - reduce time repetition: I will select a photo or an object and attempt to draw it in a certain amount of time, for example in 20 minutes; I will then reset and attempt to draw it in 15, 10, 5, then finally 2 minutes. This will teach me about discovering what is essential in a subject;
  • Saturday - focus on what’s hard, focus on what I seem to have troubles with or what I seem to be avoiding, most likely it will be some human feature, and luckily Draw with Jazza has some great tutorials on it, or perhaps it’ll finally be the day I address the box-sphere exercise of DrawABox;
  • and finally Sunday I will attempt to product a complete drawing incorporating all the lessons of the week.