Draw Everything
...storm drains, doors and windows, letter boxes...
Another skull appears…
Today at sketch club (a few of us meet every Friday afternoon for an hour or so of drawing for fun - see last Friday’s post), one of our sketchers placed this skull (plastic) on the table. My plans for whatever I was thinking I might draw flew out the window. This critter was irresistible. (If you can definitively identify this, I’m all ears!) Dog? Coyote?
The ins and outs, overs and unders, shadows and hollows, complex curves in all directions… well, it was a challenge!
I’d like to give this another try (hence the photo for future reference), but man, that was a taxing hour of staring, thinking I’d figured out what I was looking at (that bit of jawbone slides under this bit of whatever that is and rests on this other knob of bone, which I can’t actually see from my angle but know is down there…).
Dad would have been all over this if a skull had been plopped on a table before him. He would have whipped out his sketchbook and started to draw, squinting one eye, whistling to himself. Whether it was finely detailed or loose and rough, the basic proportions and shapes of his drawing would have been more or less right.
When we talked about how he learned to draw, he went back to the same comment, “Learning to draw is learning to see.”
When I asked him what some of his homework was like back in the Sunderland art school days he said, “We were told to look at storm drains, doors and windows, letter boxes - the ordinary things around us - to study them and draw everything.”
Even though this skull wasn’t intended to become a page for the GN project, drawing what was in front of me forced me to look, really look, and even though I’m still not quite connecting what my eye sees to what my hand draws, this is starting to feel like a mind-eye-hand-muscle-strengthening exercise. If I keep plodding along, things will continue to get better.
During a couple of his last visits, Dad and I discovered the joys of mod podge and dove into collage. This one done this evening proved to be difficult to photograph because of the shiny finish, but including it here for a bit of fun and as yet another experiment in mixing and matching text to image.
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"Dad would have been all over this if a skull had been plopped on a table before him. He would have whipped out his sketchbook and started to draw, squinting one eye, whistling to himself. Whether it was finely detailed or loose and rough, the basic proportions and shapes of his drawing would have been more or less right."
I see this imagery of your dad so perfectly, well done! I can see a man intently drawing! Brings me joy and a bit of sadness at the same time.