book lessons

The “500 Challenge” — or maybe just 200?

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I am currently reading Maggie Price’s 2007 book Painting with Pastels: Easy Techniques to Master the Medium. In it, she mentions taking the “500 challenge” — something she learned from attending a demonstration by pastelist Eric Michaels. The idea is, you paint from life, “en plein air” — and do it 500 times. Ideally, you work small (8×10 or smaller) and fast (no more than 1 hour). Finishing a painting is not the goal; rather, the point is to just get out there and paint. Regularly.

Maggie says, “It was the single best piece of advice I ever had about painting”. (p. 117) She also says not to worry about finishing any given piece — she called them “color studies” — and to number and date them so you can go back and see the change in your work. She noticed a change in her own work after just 50 paintings, with improvement in skill markedly showing at 100 and again at 200.

This actually relates to Karen Margulis‘ “daily painting” concept on which she built her blog. The more you paint, the quicker you’ll accrue skill.

To that end, here is #1 of my “plein air” color studies — of the neighbor’s oak tree I can see part of from my backyard. Right now, I’m shooting for 200 plein air “color studies”. We’ll see what happens after I reach #50, #100 and #200.

Practice Sketches from Lee Hammond’s How to Draw Lifelike Portraits

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Portraits and the human figure are what interest me the most in drawing, and I love the way Lee Hammond shades her drawing. The blending is so much smoother and looks like paint, compared to, say, cross-hatching.

So, I am following along in her book and doing a few exercises in between working on my ArtTutor.com class.

These are just a few of the images/exercises I’ve done, focusing primarily on clothing and draped fabric.

Foreshortened Hands: Sketches on a Picture Plane

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These drawings are from an exercise found in Chapter 6 of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (4th ed.) by Betty Edwards. Essentially, you “copy” or “trace” your non-dominant hand (which is holding the plastic picture plane) using a dry-erasable marker. You are to include the major lines in your hand, including wrinkles.

The lines are fairly sloppy because the marker actually didn’t work that well on the plastic, and there’s a grey shadowy line along the drawn line, due to the overhead light being on when I took the photos of the drawings (which are now wiped clean off the plastic picture plane).

After a number of practice drawings, the next step of this exercise is to use the picture plane drawing as a model while you draw the pose on paper.

 

No, it doesn’t look like a hand! Contour, “Modified Contour” and Gesture Drawing

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Above, on the left, are “modified contour” drawings of my left index finger (and all its associated wrinkles) and my right index finger (yes, drawn with my left hand). Betty Edwards discusses this kind of drawing in her book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (4th edition). The drawing on the left I did years ago and is (my attempt at) a “gesture” drawing of cabernet sauvignon based on Kimon Nicolaides’ posthumous book The Natural Way to Draw. The artists in the various books I have all say different things about contour drawing (and gesture drawing, when applicable).

Garcia and Purcell

Garcia, on p. 26 of Drawing for the Absolute and Utter Beginner, Revised (15th anniversary ed.), doesn’t specifically define contour line drawing but says you need to study your subject first, and that you should draw slowly, use long firm lines and “turn all crisp edges into line”.   She does not mention gesture drawing at all. 

Similarly, Purcell in Your Artist’s Brain discusses contour drawing on p. 50-51 of his book, and has a similar viewpoint to Garcia.  He also does not mention gesture drawing.

Dowdalls

In Drawing School: Fundamentals for the Beginner, Dowdalls delineates between the two methods of drawing, saying, “Gesture drawing is a very quick, all-encompassing glimpse of the subject.  Contour line drawing is a slow, methodical, detailed observation of the subject.”  He finds both methods useful.

Nicolaides

In The Natural Way to Draw, Kimon Nicolaides takes a completely different approach. He says on p. 15 of his book that, “In contour drawing you touch the edge of the form.  In gesture drawing you feel the movement of the whole.”  He says in gesture drawing you should draw what the object is doing, and that it may not even look recognizable to someone when you are done.   (And, in fact, they do look like scribbles.)  In fact, he argues first for a focus on gesture drawing, and feeling the energy of the subject well before doing any more realistic drawing, saying, “Gesture is movement in space.  To be able to see the gesture, you must be able to feel it in your own body… IF YOU DO NOT RESPOND IN LIKE MANNER TO WHAT THE MODEL IS DOING, YOU CANNOT UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU SEE.  If you do not feel as the model feels, your drawing is only a map or a plan.” (p. 15-16)

Edwards

Betty Edwards discusses Nicolaides in chapter 6 “Perceiving Edges” of her book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (4th edition).  She indicates that she uses a “variation of Nicolaides’s contour drawing method that is somewhat more drastic.  I’ve called the method ‘Pure Contour Drawing’.”  Her “pure contour” drawing has similarities to Nicolaides’ gesture drawing in that the results (say, in drawing your hand without looking at the paper) end up looking similar to scribbles.

But her “pure contour” is more of a deep meditation on the subject –if drawing your hand, for example, you draw every single line and wrinkle you see – while Nicolaides gesture drawing has more obvious energy, even with a seemingly static subject like a lighthouse.

Edwards believes drawing of this sort is “the best exercise for effectively and efficiently enabling students to later achieve good drawing.”  When she has skipped this exercise because the students hate it, she has found the students don’t do as well later in the course.  She speculates that pure contour drawing “permanently change[s] your ability to perceive” perhaps because the analytical, categorizing, naming mode of your brain “drops out”, leaving the nonverbal, spatial mode to take over.

Having done the exercises in Edwards’ book, I can speak to it being intensely restful, a plus for these covid-19 times. It sure beats coloring, and if it helps me to see and perceive more deeply the objects right in front of me, that is all to the good.