The Daily Sketch

[jun]

[Ai]

@DB32: Really like that last gorilla -- very expressive! I've looked at Nicolaides before but felt he was kind of guru-ish in that I wasn't satisfied that I knew roughly why a particular exercise was on the plan. Looks like his exercises are working for you though.

I've been mostly working on text recently.




(testing a method for quickly laying out text, where you draw ideally just one stroke of the letter that captures its extents. The "title" is a reference to how I use the heck out of Bilateral Smoothing )

[jun]

p p d
w z l

[0xDB]

@AI: Spoiler

The key is... Spoiler

to draw.

  Spoiler

Today's batch: The third image is "flash pose" exercise which is like gesture but instead of looking at the pose while doing the gesture, one just looks for 1 or 2 seconds and then captures the gesture from imagination based on that short "flash" impression.

[Ai]

@0xDB: Well, that's true. A half hour contour drawing is merely ridiculously long, not impossible. Although I'm not so sure about getting an uninterrupted 180 minutes -- that seems more a matter of extreme good luck.

[0xDB]

@AI: Uninterrupted 3h blocks are not strictly necessary but yes, you need to make a lot of time to work with Nicolaides' book. He says somewhere in the beginning that he assumes readers will take at least a year or so to do the exercises. Whether my steam will reach that far remains to be seen.

[Ai]

@0xDB: I see he says there are a few ways you can divide up time. I understand how you can apply the 14 x 1-hour option, but it seems that the 7 x 2-hour option would make responding to 'Draw according to schedule X' prompts a little odd, since some of A would become part of B, some of C would become part of D, etc.

Anyway, I've started (1 hour done of schedule 1C today, after tons of frustration about materials), but it's out of order. Spoiler: unclear layout + prompt for 1B appears to entirely.. not appear

The first "draw from schedule XYZ" I encountered was schedule 1C -- which surprised me, but after quickly reading back, I didn't find any other ones, and concluded it was a strategy to surprise the student. So I did 1C.

Now reviewing more carefully, I see the prompt to do 1A is attached to a diagram of some apples. Definitely not clear.

A prompt to do 1B seems entirely AWOL, not occurring between pages 13 [the prompt for 1A] and 20 [the prompt for 1C]. Have I missed it?

For the mean time, I'll just use my judgement based on the idea that he does in fact intend the order to be A B C D E.

Sorry no pics, it's nearly midnight.

[wolfenoctis]

[0xDB]

@AI: Yeah, the prompt for 1B appears to be missing. I did not do it because I thought it might appear later, but I think the important thing is to just draw a lot. Most exercise blocks inside a single schedule are very similar if not entirely equal, so the gist of it is: draw/drill. I do not always manage to keep my focus all the way to the end of the three hours, so I take longer breaks here and there or just split the time however it fits. I have even cut the 1h blind contour exercise short by as much as 30m on one day. It does not seem to matter as long as the practice is somewhat regular and plentiful.

Wanted to rest my drawing hand today but felt a strong urge to draw, so still did a few untimed but lose and fast gestural observations of hands outside of the Nicolaides schedule (also to practice with the tablet again which is very different from pencil and paper because of the disconnect between drawing surface and screen... though I feel like especially the blind contour exercise helps with adapting to that as a neat side effect):

[wolfenoctis]