Hello, over the last couple of months I have been blogging
about several landscape pencil drawings I have finished and a high-level
overview of how I completed them. I do a lot of landscape because I just love
to draw them. Another reason that I like to draw landscapes is that they are
actually very easy to do and make a great starting point for practicing and gaining
confidence.
This week I want to go a little different direction with my
blog and talk about accuracy in drawing. I bring this up because there is
another area of drawing that I would love to be able to do well and that is
portrait drawing. However, to be good at portraits you must be able to draw
accurately. Actually, it is more than that, you have to be able to accurately
see, interpret what you see, and then correctly render that on paper. I have
heard many artists say that portrait drawing is the hardest subject to master,
and I would have to agree with them. Nevertheless, I also believe it to be one
of the most rewarding forms of art.
The reason I bring this up, is that I am going to start to
include portrait drawings in my blog as well as the landscape drawings. My goal
will be to increase my accuracy. Back in July I blogged about the two drawings I
did of my dogs Lucy and Anna. As I described the process I used for creating
the drawings, I said that I transferred the rough outline using home made graph
paper. That is one way to ensure the drawing starts off with the correct proportions.
Many professions today use tools to help them achieve very accurate
drawings, this is not cheating. If you want to test that theory, try drawing a
portrait by first tracing an outline. From there try and finish it, making it
as life like as possible. My guess is that you will learn that even with a very
accurate starting point, drawing a life like portrait is still very challenging.
However, that is where the real artist comes out. It is not the starting point
or method, but the finished work that is important. The finished impression is
the true art, not the methods to achieve the work.
Now, with that said, as an artist I would still like to be
able to achieve a certain level of accuracy in my drawing without the use of
aids. I am sure there are artist out there that can do this instinctively, but
I am not one of them. This really jumped out at me with the drawing I am
including in this blog post. The drawing is one I did while out camping in July
of a dwarf leaning on a carved harp. Taking the drawing by itself, it is not awful
as a quick sketch. When placed against the reference there are many areas that
the drawing is completely off. Now, I am not going to post the original drawing
for a side-by-side comparison because I do not own the rights to do so. Anyway,
the drawing is off and that is what I want to correct in my skill level. To do so, I need to learn the skill the old
fashion way, through practice and hard work. As I finish up the summer and move
into the fall, I am going to research different ways to practice accuracy without
using special tools and post my results. I will let you know what works for me
and what does not. Now, this will be my personal opinion and others may find
different methods that work for them that I found did not work for me. Everyone
is different in how they will approach drawing. I just hope sharing what I learn
may help others. I will also be providing
links and credit to the individuals that I get the techniques from. In other
words, I am not out to reinvent the wheel but to learn from artists that have come before.
I hope everyone has a good week. Please leave any comments below, especially if you have ideas or techniques that you have used to gain accuracy in your own draws.
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