Okay, so here's the result of a couple weeks of drawing practice. I've been focused on getting good at drawing faces, because human faces are probably the most important thing to know how to draw. People like to look at pictures of faces almost more than anything else. As human animals, we are physically wired to look at and interpret faces.
I learned the basics of drawing the human face way back in high school. So, I've been able to draw a face straight on for quite a while now. But drawing faces at angles, and making my faces look different from one another weren't something I ever took the time to improve at. Plus, it's always taken me a lot of time and concentration to draw a face really well. But, with practice, I've become pretty good at quickly knocking out a small face that has some amount of realism to it, not to mention a bit of personality and emotion. Though, my ability to get the exact emotions and personality I want aren't quite great at this point.
I've also become better at drawing female faces. That's a thing that I've wanted to improve at for a while. It's probably weird to say, but I love women's faces. Occasionally I see a picture of a woman whose face is so pretty that I can't help but look at it for a while, trying to figure out exactly what it is that makes her face especially attractive. It's been satisfying, too, reverse engineering the building blocks of femininity and female facial beauty. In that process I'm also getting an understanding of the power of lines, how they are shaped, their curves, lengths, thicknesses etc.
There's still a way to go on that front, though. I haven't drawn any large female faces. Best I have right now are these.
First is something of a child-like face. Done in orange pencil and colored in with watercolor paint. The picture is roughly 6"x5" and is on Strathmore brand 300 gsm cold-pressed watercolor paper. I'm probably not going to buy any more of this paper when I run out. It's too hard for me to draw on very well.
Second picture is a male face, drawn in graphite and colored with watercolor paint, on the same paper. You can see some of the blue lines where I put down some lines at the beginning. That's another problem with this paper. Colored pencil doesn't come off it so easy. Some colors are harder than others. This is true with all the paper I've tried, but this paper has a texture that gets destroyed in an unsightly way if you erase too harshly.
This picture is approximately 7"x5".
Here's a couple of paintings that I did over inkjet photocopies on basic white 8"x11" photocopy paper. These aren't archival, unfortunately. But I think I can glue these to bristol board or something sturdier and they'll be a little bit less ephemeral. This will also give me a chance to smooth out the wrinkles that developed when I put down the watercolor layers.
I used everything I had on hand for these. Watercolor, colored pencil and graphite pencils. Take note of the hot-pink torn scrap element in the lower-left corner of one of these. That's the kind of stuff I was doing before I switched gears and started practicing drawing. It was all abstract and most likely of limited appeal to the rest of the world.
I like doing abstract work, but it can get psychologically weird. It can be so subjective and uncertain. The really hard part of it is deciding what to frame and present as a finished piece. What looks good at 3 am can look completely stupid the next day. And there's this aspect to it of trying to hit these super fragile sweet spots where the object unquestionably has something going for it. And even then, you're still operating in an extremely arcane signaling zone that most people can't relate to. Which meanst that making all this abstract stuff ends up being kind of futile, because I end up being the only person who really knows how to look at it. Maybe there are other people who could see what I see in those abstract pieces, but they wouldn't actually get to the point of seeing the things in that way, because I have no credentials, or even credibility, as an artist. The importance of reputation in the abstract expressionism game is probably underappreciated by a magnitude or two.
Still, you've got to play the ball as it lays. If you find yourself way out in the rough, there's no use complaining. Just get your ball back on the fairway. This is why I backed up and decided to work on my drawing skills. I want to make pictures that are actually interesting to people.
By the way, the picture with the hot-pink scrap is supposed to be Hermann Rorschach. Not a great rendition, admittedly. Rorschach was the Swiss psychiatrist who developed the famous ink-blot psychological test that is named after him. I thought it would be funny to draw a picture of him because doing abstract pictures was making me think a lot about subjectivity and psychological projection. I got to the point actually where I was beginning to consider all of reality as something like these ink blot tests. We all look out at the undifferentiated chaos of the world and project patterns on to it.
We see in the world what we expect to see. We add details where we lack information, for instance. And these details are drawn from the store of our personal experiences. Someone new comes into our life. In two weeks, maybe twenty hours or so of actually interacting with that person, we think we know them. People drive through traffic every day assuming that all of the other drivers on the road are going to obey the rules, stop at stop signs, look over their shoulder before they merge into traffic or brake appropriately in order not to collide into the back of your car.
Similar things happen when people look at abstract art. They bring all of their perceptions and projections, experiences and expectations to the image and see the image through these filters. I don't know about other people who do abstract images, but I want people to chuck all those filters when they look at the things I make. I want them to look at the way the materials interact with each other, the interesting effects, the tiny little details and all of that. It's not a song, it's ambient music.
Most people can't do that, though. Most people expect pictures to be "of" things. And even when they look at abstract work, they largely expect that there's nothing to see if they haven't read the five-paragraph explanation that goes along with so much of abstract expressionism. Maybe one day, with luck, my pictures will be spread around enough that a few people know enough to just look at the things. There's nothing to say or think or expect. Just look at it. Don't even try to decide if you like it or don't like it. Just look at it. That's all you have to do. Give it a five- or six-second look. And if there's nothing there that makes you want to keep looking, then I've done a bad job.
Maybe one day. In the meantime, I've got to get better at demanding so much out of people. Give people what they think they want and maybe in time I'll have the opportunity to give them something I think they might need.
This next picture is something that emerged while I was messing around with colored pencils and pastel chalks on bristol board. It's nothing great, but it's interesting to me because usually when I'm just messing around I end up making a big mess of shapes and colors that is basically a static nothingness when looked at as a whole. I hardly ever get anything that could be considered an actual drawing. So, this was a happy accident. I might add some watercolor to it.
These last eight pictures aren't finished. I'm going to add watercolor to them all pretty soon, and who knows what else. They're all 3.5"x2.5" on that 300 gsm watercolor paper. I made these because I recently discovered that there is a market for these small little pictures. They're called ACEOs or ATCs-"Art Cards, Editions and Originals" and "Artist Trading Cards." They go on eBay for a wide-range of prices. Some of them even fetch a thousand dollars or more. I'm going to do a bunch of these and see where it goes. I doubt I'll get a bunch of money out of it, but I will definitely get information about what kinds of things people respond well to, and what I should do more of.
So that's that. More than fifteen hundred words here. I really don't expect anyone to read all of this. It'll be on the Steem blockchain forever, though. I'll probably come back and read it myself at some point in the future.
Whether you read all this or not, let me know at least what you think of the pictures. All non-bot replies get an upvote.