I’ve been trying to come up with ways to get myself drawing new things and be a little more serious about my drawings.  Basically, I’m trying to find a rhythm for sitting down and drawing something in a way that will be productive and help my skills improve.  I say this because I often give things one shot and then move on.  For example, my last post with the sketch inside safeway:  I just sat down and started drawing.  If it ends up being good then so be it, and if that same drawing had ended up being bad, well so what.  Either way I would have closed the book, stood up and wandered off.

So I question, how much do I learn by just drawing something once and then shrugging and moving on?

I’ve noticed that Marc tends to draw things over and over again.  It’s actually pretty amazing to watch.  He will draw a pose that may look good or bad, then continue to draw that same pose 3 more times.  After that, he looks at them all and tries to home in on what he likes and dislikes about them.  Then he just uses those rough sketches as reference for another attempt, then another attempt.  When he’s done, he’s drawn the same thing about 5 times (at least) and he smiles and tears up all but the last drawing.

This persistance to get where he’s going is really admerable.  So I experimented with drawing the same thing over and over today.  Not as allaberate as Marc, but with the intent of drawing something new and walking away feeling like I’d gained something.

So here’s what I did.  I looked for an odd object that was already on my desk and just started drawing.  No waiting to be "inspired" to draw or searching for the "perfect" object to draw.  I just looked at the first thing in site that looked challenging yet doable, cleared some space for it and started drawing.

Warm Up

Rather than do my normal "just make an attempt", I decided to try some warm ups from some drawing classes I took a while back.  I started with a 5 minute blind contour drawing. 

If you’re not familiar with this I really recommend giving it a try.  Basically, you put your sketchbook on your lap, *under* the table and then start drawing without looking at all.  You focus on only the outline of the object.  I’ve heard it described as imagining an ant very slowly crawling around the outline of the object and you’re watching it.  You tried to notice every little detail that ant would encounter on it’s epic journey around the object border.  Basically, you go really slow and you look for tiny details on the object’s outline.

While you’re doing this with your eyes, you have your pencil on the page and you’re very slowly drawing what you’re seeing.  When you’re done, the drawing will look like nothing (if it does look like something, you probably cheated and looked).  But what you’re doing is training your eyes to looks for new details and letting your hand feel what it feels like to be drawing just those details. It goes back to that saying, "you can’t draw what you don’t notice."

It’s great because you can’t mess it up.  When you’re done you have a drawing that looks like nothing, but it’s the experience in your head that’s valueble.

So I did that and I took 5 mintues or so to slowly going around my object, the old beat up headphones, twice –my pen died out a little on the second time around, but who cares?  In all honesty, you could do it with a pen that doesn’t  work and still gain the experience of training your eye and your hand on the details of the object.

Next I made another contour drawing, only this time I put the book on the table so I could see what I was doing.  I ended up also outlining the shadow and blocking it in with some highlighters that happened to be on the table already.

And that was my 15-20 minute warm up.

Focused Attempt

Next I made an attempt to draw the object with as much detail as I could.  And I commited myself to take as much time as I needed to feel like it was done (as in, adding more lines would take away value instead of add value to the drawing).

One thing to note is that I’m still using the pen a lot these days.  I find that starting with the pen really makes me take my time and think about every line before I draw it.  I’m not saying you should use a pen, I’m just saying I like my own state of mind when I use it.

I also decided to make an attempt with those highlighters again (which is a tool I’m still trying to get the hang of). 

After that, I did something I rarely do, I made a pass at cleaning up the drawing a little with the use of a whiteout pen.  Like I said, I normally make an attempt, shrug and move on.  But I’m really trying to get all I can out of this for a change.  I’m really trying to focus.

All this took about 35 minutes.

Put it to the test

Finally, I covered the object so I couldn’t see it and I tried to draw it again from memory.

Again, I commited myself to taking as much time as I’d need to finish it.  I also started with a pencil this time and tried to keep myself thinking about every line before I drew it.  I ended up drawing as you would expect to draw with a pencil, I "constructed" the object by making a lite, rough layout of the shapes and slowly homing in on what the final lines should be.

I inked it and shaded with a pencil this time around.  Then I did some cleanup with and eraser.  I was trying to take my time, but I think I went a little too fast because I was done in about 20 minutes.

After that I compared what I had just drawn to the drawing I had done earlier and then I compared against the actual object that was on the desk.  Right away I noticed I’d shifted the orientation of the head phone on the right (which is just "interesting", not "right" or "wrong" or anything), but for the most part, I drew something with no reference that I wouldn’t have been able to draw at all about an hour ago.

I was pretty exhausted afterwords (mentally), but I do feel like drawing something a few times in this order really helped me walk away with a lot more then a shrug.

Maybe tomorrow, I’ll try to draw it again from memory, just to see what happens.

Give it a shot, I think I’m going to be taking this approach more often (and I’ll be trying more than just one viewpoint of the object),
~Danny

PS: you may have spotted the "fill in the blanks" I wrote on the page in my very first photo.  Basically, I’m at the end of a sketch book and I’m trying to go back and fill in all the blank (or mostly blank) pages I skipped for some reason or another.  I figure it’s paper and I shouldn’t waste it :)

So I’ve been doing a little drawing and I’m nearly finished with one of my sketchbooks.  Since I’m so off and on about sketching in this particular sketchbook, it contains drawings that range from 2002 to today, April 2009.  Reaching the end is always a milestone and it always has you flipping through the whole book, reliving some of the thoughts and moments that involved each sketch.

Any way, if you haven’t already heard, the book Outliers goes on about a study that describes how it take 10,000 hours of practice to get good at anything.  So if you did something for 10hours a day, 5 days a week, that would be about 2,500 hours worth of practice in one year.  In 4 of those years, you’d have your 10,000 hours.  Surprise, surprise, that’s 4 years of college.  What’s interesting is if you don’t go to college for something.  You can still get to your 10,000 hours, it will only take much longer to get there.  For example, if you practiced something for 1 hour a day, that would be 365 hours a year and would take you about 30 years to reach your 10,000 hours.  You’d make it, just not as fast as a college student did.

This 10,000 hours is in relation to anything, but of course I’m thinking about drawing, especially since I just reached the end of a sketchbook.  On a whim, I flipped through the book and tried to estimate how many hours I spend drawing in this book.  I came up with 53 hours (about 30mins a page in a 100 page book).  After that I estimated I’d spend maybe 500 hours drawing…. but by the end of the day, I couldn’t help be flip through all my sketchbooks and loose sketches to try to get a real estimate of how many hours I’ve spent drawing so far… after all, I didn’t go to college for art, so I’m pretty curious where I might stand.

After going through every sketch and sketchbook I could find (I’m talking 12 years worth of stuff) the number I came to was 2,172 hours of drawing.  Which is almost equivolent to 1 year in college.  Surprisingly enough, the time I spend on "You had me at croissant" and my other comics accounted for a large part of that number.  So, long story short, I think I should draw some more comicbooks :)

 ~Danny
21.72% Artist :)

 PS: that sketch above was basically me killing time while waiting for the mechanic to look at my car’s power stearing.  When you’ve got plenting of time to kill, you end up with a lot of detail.