I bought a book titled Mastering Sketches by Judy Martin. I thought, “This is the book I’ve been waiting for!”  There are 40 lessons. I am trying to decide if I want to do one lesson a day or one a week. Although they are not so much lessons as ideas or maybe commentary (at least so far.) Still they are good ideas, the unmade bed being on of them.

No matter what I decide I am looking forward to having a guided path to improve my sketching.

I also realized a few things about my sketching habits.

1. I am too much of a perfectionist with my sketches. I hate them all if they are not as good as I want them to be, I erase way too much, and I don’t enjoy the study of my object because I am too busy hating what is on the page.

Solution: After today, no erasers when I sketch. This will make me more mindful of each line I put down and will, hopefully, help me move passed the fear of error. I would just use a pen, but I don’t know how to shade very well with a pen.

2. It may take me an hour to make a decent sketch, but that’s still a sketch when you consider the hours I put into a painting.

Solution: Time. I will get faster over time.

3. If I stop worrying about how boring the subject matter is and focus on what makes it interesting (i.e. focal point) I can have an interesting sketch with out worrying about all the details.

Solution: Stop worrying about all the detail. Everyone tells me to lay the whole thing out first, then slowly build in the details. I must say while I thought I understood what they were saying, it finally started to click today. Even if I rough in most of the scene all I really need to spend time on is my focal point.  I finally get that the sketch isn’t about the whole subject, it’s just about the feeling of the subject.  I have done that before, especially in gesture drawing,  but have never (until now) been able to grasp the concept when it came to sketching.

I don’t know why that was so hard for me to grasp. I can’t explain, I can only shake my head and give a bashful little smile.

Week 3:

Gallery

Day By Day

Day 10: I realized that these stick figures are actually really helping me see the angles of the body in a different way. I must concentrate on the figure as a whole and think more about the abstract shapes that it makes as one.  Who knew you could learn from from stick figures?!

Day 11: Actually day 11 only consisted of the two figures on the left and the head oval. I became very frustrated after the bottom figure and decided to call it a day before I went to work.

Day 12: I came up with a happy medium between the stick figures and the more detailed drawings. I was planning on just doing a few more gestures today (Saturday, Day 14) and calling it a week, but last night I had the over-whelming urge to draw some gestures so I did.

Day 13: Technically these were done on day 14, but I am grouping them sort of, by 10s and just calling those days. Again I figured I would just sit down and do 10 for today and that’s it. I would confess my sins of playing Ninja Warrior on Facebook for an entire day. (Well technically I ended up sleeping 12 hours until 2 o’clock in the afternoon and only stayed up until about midnight, so not really an entire day and I blame my little brother. It’s so his fault.)  However…..

Day 14:  I ended up modifying the stick figures so that I would hopefully have something that could be done quickly as well as help me get the proportions a bit more accurate. I believe I did 15 of these as well as flip back to Day 11 and fill in the page for a total of 50 gestures. By a nose on this one…

I will also say that Ninja Warrior was not my only pit fall.

The last two weeks have been a bit crazy. However, from the craziness came good. I was able to spend some fantastic time with my best friends and I think we all needed it no matter it came about by the tragic loss of another friend. Sometimes it takes a tragedy to make you drop everything that “needs” to be done in order to focus on your real priorities, such as loved ones.  Danielle will be missed greatly by her friends and family, luckily, for us she made the world a better place while she was with us and her memory will live on for a very long time.