Drawing Exercise #1

In an effort to keep drawing I have joined a Drawing Blog with others interested in either learning to draw or improving their skills. I have a book that I have had since forever it seems called Nature Drawing a Tool for Learning written by Clare Walker Leslie in 1980 about the same time that Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain came out. This book focuses more on drawing from Nature which I was very interested in doing about then. I did a lot of flower drawings

Not wonderful but not too bad, you would be able to recognize the flower if you saw it for real. Anyway I have never actually used the book for study so I have decided that now would be a good time to do that.

So I have been reading the beginning two chapters and did the first study exercises, well, most of them I did pass on the memory drawing where I was supposed to look at an object for about 3 to 5 minutes then draw it from memory. But I did the other studies, a "blind" drawing where I was allowed to look at the object and draw its outlines but couldn't look at the paper to see how I was doing, the book allows 5 minutes for this, but I know I took much less time, guess I was in too much of a hurry.

Next exercise was to do gesture drawings, these are quick outline drawings to just give you the feel of the object, I did three of these, they are supposed to take less then a minute to do. When we were doing gesture drawings in Drawing II we could get a couple of minutes for the pose, but believe me, 2 minutes to draw a human figure is a very short time frame

The last drawing is a detailed drawing of your object, it is supposed to take 20 minutes to draw but I think I took a bit longer. I am semi pleased with this, I have been so busy drawing the human figure that I seem a bit out of practice with objects so this study will be good for me.

One thing I like about this book is she goes over supplies and what the basic supplies are if you want to do drawing. She also reviews the tools mentioning their characteristics, like a 2H pencil is hard while a 2B pencil is soft. Most of this I already know but for the true beginner this is a lot of help.

So now I need to read Chapter 3 and see what suggestions she has for me to try next. As always comments are welcome.

Comments welcome.