Learning to draw by hand from scratch

Made my way through chapters 5 and 6 – I’m catching up! Chapter 5 was mostly some theory stuff on how drawing develops over an average person’s lifespan, starting from young childhood (~2-3 years old) through middle adolescence, where drawing is either abandoned as being “too hard” or pursued if someone feels good at it. The author believes that this stark dropoff in drawing habits is partially due to the fact that people want to learn how to depict things realistically but get hung up on how to properly see something in real life, ending up with disappointing drawings that lead them to thinking drawing is unattainable for them. There was a short exercise on recreating a childhood picture you drew but I ended up skipping it as I don’t really remember drawing as a kid and I don’t really want to try to go down that rabbithole right now!

Chapter 6 starts with an exercise the author calls “Pure Contour Drawing”, where you take some time looking at an object and draw the contours and edges as you see them without looking at your drawing at all, as precisely as possible. In this case, the exercise was to set a timer for 5 minutes and draw every wrinkle in your hand as precisely as you can while turned away from the drawing entirely. The idea is to get you used to drawing what you see exactly as you see it, even though the picture obviously has no form. I did this exercise a couple times!

Then, it was on to creating a picture plane! I made mine out of an old glass picture frame and the cardboard backing. The picture plane is used throughout the next few chapters to help frame something in the real world to help isolate it and give some guiding lines to use as reference when drawing what’s framed. Closing one eye and keeping my head and the plane still on top of my hand, I did an exercise tracing the outlines of my hand in a few different positions.

Then, it was time for the big exercise of the chapter – drawing a hand in a pose with some foreshortening, fingers coming at the viewer! The book kinda glosses over it, but this is the first time I was taught to tone a piece of paper. I’m still waiting for a graphite stick in the mail but I was able to make do by gently rubbing the side of a pencil across the paper for long enough, smoothing it out with a paper towel. Using the trace I made in the previous exercise, I copied over the main points of the hand and then started filling out the details.

The author made a big deal out of spending most of your time (90%!) drawing looking at the hand rather than at the drawing, which seemed completely impossible to me at first. But I was surprised that it was actually possible. I guess it kinda works like playing music does, where at first you have to look at where you’re putting your hands but eventually you can just sorta feel it out. Of course, lots of little mistakes happened but nothing that wasn’t easily erasable.

I’m really happy with how it turned out! I was able to do lots of little shading things with the pencil-on-its-side thing, which I’m really glad I was able to figure out. I didn’t realize how much I would have to look at my hand with only one eye open, but it makes sense that you would want 2d vision to make a 2d image (even if that 2d image ends up looking 3d). I’m really excited to keep drawing after this exercise, which was a really nice change of pace after my last update!

Two more exercises (actually from Chapter 4, turns out I had completed chapter 3 not chapter 4)!

These exercises were both to reproduce an image by looking at the picture upside down. The idea is that when you can’t see the picture right-side up, you stop trying to “make sense” of what the picture is and are more clearly able to see the lines and shapes that make up the picture! This makes it much easier to draw what something looks like rather than what I think something looks like. Here is the first image I was copying:

My portrait of Igor:

Picasso’s portrait of Igor (right-side up):

I’m pretty happy with the products but I was really frustrated while working on both of these. These took a combined total of about 4 and a half hours, and I was super frustrated while working on both of them. I think it was partially because I was trying to both reproduce the image and scale it up in my drawing at the same time. Since I wasn’t using a ruler or anything, this made it really hard to judge appropriate scaling and I had to erase large parts of each picture multiple times because something just doesn’t make sense. For both of them I started from the bottom and worked my way up to the head, so you can probably see when I stopped caring as much and just wanted to finish the damn drawing lmao

My picture of german horse and rider:

Picture of german horse and rider (artist unknown):

This one I liked doing a bit more than the Picasso one but man look at that chonky chonky horse head

Overall, the project was useful even though it was so frustrating. I learned some more about how curves interact with each other and how I needed to trust my eyes more than my brain’s interpretation of what a line looks like

Here’s an update from last night’s drawings! I’ve finished chapter four which focused a lot on the differences between left-brain (verbal, logical, symbolic) and right-brain (nonverbal. intuitive, spatial) thinking. It included an exercise on drawing the vase illusion made out of two profiles; basically the exercise tells you to draw the first profile and to identify out loud the different parts you’re drawing while drawing (forehead, nose, lips, chin, etc.). Then you try drawing the right side – the trick is that you’ll kind of have a mental block when trying to draw the complimentary side because drawing is a visual task, not a verbal one and all the words you primed yourself with are useless for actually drawing the profile. The point of the exercise is to get you to experience that kinda brain-break moment where you literally stop being able to do anything for a second because you’re trying to do two contradictory things at the same time. You want the right brain to take over the task, as it has the proper skills for actually completing the task.

I definitely had a moment where I paused but I figured out the trick a little too quickly so it wasn’t as much of a “gotcha” moment. I ended up not really making the vase truly symmetrical and just moved on with reading.

Also included are just some doodles, a mini-exercise on signatures, and another attempt at the vase!

Had a pretty long gap between drawings, but here’s the final of the first 3 exercises, a drawing of my hand. Honestly, one of the hardest parts of this was keeping my left hand still in one position for ~an hour. I must have erased the thumb at least 15 times…

I like how it turned out though! I’m particularly proud of the shading between the thumb and the index finger, and the creases on the fingers. The thumb still doesn’t look quite right but I probably could have spent an entire hour drawing thumbs and I started to get tired.

This exercise helped a lot with understanding how to curved surfaces work in drawing. I felt like I had a little brain breakthrough in my… 8th redrawing? of the thumb where I finally understood that straight lines often have to be curves on 3d objects to show depth and a curved line might have to be drawn as straight on 3d objects. Super unintuitive but makes a ton of sense now that I’ve messed around with it!

Oh man this one really turned out some kinda way huh

This was the second exercise, drawing a portrait of someone straight from memory. I have a really hard time remembering faces, even when I’m looking at them. I figured I would do Matt Mercer, voice actor and DM of Critical Role as his iconic eyebrow arch and scrunched face are pretty burned into my memory.

I’m uh not as happy with this one lmao but drawing things from memory is super hard and these are my baby steps so I’m not gonna beat myself up about it. The purpose of this exercise was to see what kind of “symbols” I might automatically use to draw. For example, kids often draw noses as triangles, so the goal was to see what kind of things I draw when I don’t understand how to draw something properly yet. Speaking of noses, I definitely drew the exact same nose in both of the portraits. I knew he had an angular face but I also haven’t figured out how to draw that realistically.

I think I’m understanding hair a little better and also better depth on the brow though! And I’m excited to learn how depth works in-depth (hahA). And that’s that on that!

Today I read through the preface, introduction and about halfway through Chapter 2 where the first three exercises are given – a self-portrait, drawing a portrait of a person from memory, and drawing my hand. I spent about an hour working on my self-portrait and am planning on doing the other two exercises tomorrow.

The author believes that that drawing is a “global skill”, like driving a car or riding a bicycle. This basically means that it’s comprised of a few parts that are all required in order to use the skill at all, but once you learn all the composite skills, everything should sorta click into place. The author lists these five composite skills as:

1. the perception of edges
2. the perception of spaces
3. the perception of relationships
4. the perception of lights and shadows
5. the perception of the whole (gestalt)

It also places a lot of emphasis on the differences between the right hemisphere and left hemispheres of the brain, which I’m not sure how accurate that is now. My copy of the book is the 20th anniversary edition of the original book published in 1979, which was right around the time that cognitive neuroscience was becoming it’s own recognized academic discipline. The author provides a lot of caveats and acknowledges that the research stuff won’t be up-to-date or technically accurate, instead saying that they are using the scientific basis as a framework for how to teach a skill that, historically, is very hard to teach with consistent results.

Overall, I’m impressed with how much thought is put in to help the reader understand everything about the book. The author makes sure that the reader understands the framework through which they are going to view and teach drawing and the limitations and criticism to their teaching method. Skimming through a little, I also saw how there are explanations given for the point of each exercise both before and after, so that the reader is able to understand where the author is going, especially with some of the more seemingly-obtuse exercises.

Wow that was a lot of words! Here’s the self-portrait and a reference picture. Outside of the nose (lmao) I’m actually reasonably proud of it! It felt like hair was the hardest thing to draw and I didn’t know really how to differentiate it from shading. Need to give it VOLUME. I got a ton of graphite on my hand that I ended up actually using to try to smudge in some shading in places.