More Contour…

The Natural Way to Draw by Nicolaides had me do 3 hours/day of drawing. I just finished the first set of exercise which focus on nothing by contour…

This experience taught me:

• I get sleepy. I need to sleep better.
• I tend to speed up when drawing “Long boring” lines, like the jawline. (LOL)

• I draw fast, sometimes rushing to finish. I tend to finish a sketch in 15 minutes. The 30 minute exercises had me very bored and impatient.
• I can do more 30 minute exercises to learn to focus on details and take it slow for more “accuracy” when doing the contours.

I can definitely practice more to get better at this.

Learning on the go: Change Lab Podcast (Art Center) on process-driven master pieces, proCreate, Read on Gesture and Contour drawings…

I had to drive out of town today and did not want to lose my learning momentum. So, I looked into the podcast world and got myself some podcasts episodes from the Art Center! I listened to Paula Scher’s dialogue with Lorne Buchman (Art Center President). She has designed the logos for Citi bank, Tiffany and Co, and the Museum of Modern Art, etc. The dual talked about the process of work and creation, controls of the meanings that her logo communicate across different platforms – making the “same logo” work without being boring…

I have to admit. Many of the ideas they shared were hard to follow. I just don’t feel like I know enough concepts to understand their emphasis and logics… they sometimes sound contradicting. Example… I don’t understand the differences between “getting inspiration from so-and-so” from plagiarizing. I guess it is hard to learn this concept without any visual too. Regardless, I still learned something from this! Here are the few things that I was very happy to learn:

“Many arts were created by their process, not as final visions that happened in the artists’ minds.”

“If you know how everything is going to be, how is it creative?”

“When designing an logo to give an identity, plagiarism does not work because by copying… you lose that identity. This is not yours.”

I would not even be able to get these if it was not that Fundamentals of Graphic Design class that I just audited on Coursera yesterday. (Here is the class note.)

I really did not have much time today. But, I managed to squeeze in some proCreate contour drawings of Chris Board… (Sorry, Chris! But, your face is just interesting to draw and you are my favorite YouTuber!) I also did a shopping bag contour here:

I also read a section on gesture and contour drawing from the Natural Way to Draw… I should have more detailed notes later on that section, but so far, these are the key points that I got and want to type down before I forget:

• If the contour drawings were too perfect and those being your first attempts, you might be missing out on the experience by having looked at the paper too often. It is expected to have hilarious outcomes with disproportioned parts in the drawing of your model.
• When doing the gesture drawing, spend 5 seconds to sketch down the whole idea of the pose. Do not fix on starting the drawing from the model’s head. Focus on the “whole” and allow your gut to decide where to start to get the most information out from the moment. Then, draw for the motion. If the drawing comes out with not a “focused motion”, hard to see what “motion” is taken place, this could mean the focus when observing the model was too spread out with not one motion recorded.

More quick contour drawings…

Kimon Nicolaides was not an advocate for quick sketches as the majority learning practice. He likes them slow and “painstaking”. I did not get to draw a lot today. I had to settle on just quickies. I should try finding longer periods of drawing time. But, I am not gonna beat myself over if I could only do quickies every here and there. It is what it is.

(Definitely need more practice. I started contour drawing just yesterday from reading The Natural Way to Draw by Nicolaides. Here are the “nailed it” contour drawings and my book note.)