Mouse is Doodling

Stacked cubes, and a cube machine. Timed cubes. Time, cubed? Watch out, reality.

A friend who is an artist and art teacher very kindly took the time to analyse my suspect cubes and pointed out how I might improve: either be sure my cube lines are parallel, checking my work by extending the diagonal lines and drawing the cubes as transparent (with the backs of the boxes visible), or at least make the cubes’ lines converge away from me, per vanishing points, rather than converging in the wrong direction towards the viewer.

So, I made a mess. It was a mess made in the cause of education, however, and I do not regret making it.

Takeaways: 1. Drawing my reference dots in any kind of visually logical pattern is proving troublesome, even with the gelatinous fate of my poor wee cubes as motivation. 2. I can improve the cubal wobbling somewhat by extending reference lines (then moving my reference dots to a more reasonable placement). 3. Neither extending lines nor drawing boxes as transparencies entirely corrected said wobbling—as shown when I went over the final products with long coloured lines to check my work.

Very importantly, 4. There is something deeply satisfying in scribbling all over a large-ish sheet of paper with rainbow colours.

Open boxes, this time. Still suspicious of wonky angles, but I went ahead with the exercise. Imagining a treasure chest full of wonderful, found books was the best part.

More cubes, and a rectangular prism. Coming up with textures was fun. Also, I discovered that using a very hard pencil, then a very soft one to shade over it, has interesting effects.

Very exciting. Cube practise…I think I didn’t make the top squares foreshortened quite enough; everything looks as though it were on a hill. More squishing in future.

Meaning to move on, I didn’t. I wanted to make deserted sphere homes in a desert. Where did the people go? Will they return again? I don’t know.

A continuation of the spheres lesson. Tiring of plain spheres, I decided to extemporeyes.

Had a second go, and I’m happy; this one’s much less blobby (if more blurry…adjusting to new, softer pencils).

This one was tricky. I discovered I’m not very good at visually comparing sizes, but I hope additional work on using size to indicate distance will help. Visualising the light source was fun, though.

Day two! I look forward to my doodling time in the evenings.

I added about seven layers of pencil so as to blend…maybe I need a softer pencil. (They’re just writing pencils. I have heaps because one either has a bunch of the wee things, or not a one.)

I looked through a bunch of drawing books and chose You Can Draw in 30 Days by Mark Kistler because it seems to cover basic principles, which is where I feel I’m really lacking. This is the ‘before’ picture, meant for comparative purposes at the end of the course.

For months, I told myself I’d draw more often. I love to draw; it’s life-giving and fun and silly or serious, and no one ever pays me to do it so it’s strictly for giggles.

Putting my scribbles here, and perhaps they’ll amuse or entertain. Either way, drawing is happiness (’specially served with a side of tea and Bach).

I bought a book to follow as I work on improving basic technique before I jump into figure drawing, which is largely what prompted me to invest more time into this. But more on that next time. For now, I doodled a little icon to go with the blog.