Friday, July 13, 2012

Kimon Nicolaïdes built a mountain

The mountain is called The Natural Way to Draw, and I'm at its base. The book has daily workloads of about three hours, including small breaks.

As you can see day 1 has a lot of blind contour drawing. The first time I tried this, in "Drawing on the right side of the brain" I found it very hard, not very useful, and definitely annoying. This time I'm doing it slightly differently. I start by drawing as much of the contour as I can in one go, look at the drawing, move the pencil to the next starting point, look away, and draw some more. This way I can judge smaller sections of work, and it looks less terrible than the first time. What more or less sold me on the idea this time was a section that you can read about here. Seeing that you can make such a statue without actually looking impressed me a lot. This time I was focusing a lot more, trying to "feel" the subject as I went along the contour.


(also did some basic line and circle practice)


Yesterday I linked a discussion thread of a guy who went on the same journey as me. He was following the book very closely, and got a lot of "are you sure this is wise?"-questions along the way. Often they would encourage him to diversify a bit and try other approaches as well. This is basically what I will be doing. What I like about TNWTD is having a schedule to follow, as well as the large amount of work along the way. The thing is though, there are other ways of drawing figures too, such as following Figure Drawing by Andrew Loomis - probably the most recommended book on the subject at conceptart.org. Additionally there's the matter of anatomy and detail in general. I don't intend on going a year without working on those areas too, so as of now the idea is to follow my drawing workout as provided by the book, and supplement that with other fun stuff.

(made it to cartoon character #21 of 101)


TNWTD statistics so far:
Total time from start to finish: 375 hours / 15 days and 15 hours
Time drawn: 3 hours

Contour drawings: 18
Gesture drawings: 0

Percentage: 0.8%
Times considered quitting: 0

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