Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Shape Up or Ship Out

On my second day at the Hein Academy I started a series of assignments to practice seeing and copying simple shapes. When I thought my first drawing looked good enough, I asked Jeff to take a look. He told me some minor changes to make on a couple of the shapes. I was a little surprised at how picky he was being, but he explained that the foundation to a good drawing is getting every shape as perfectly accurate as you can. If you're doing a portrait of someone, those small discrepancies will determine whether it looks like the person or not.

After that first critique I realized "good enough" was not good enough. The standard to which I had previously held my work was no longer satisfactory. If I wanted to progress in the curriculum and really improve as an artist, I had to raise my standard to Jeff's...which is basically perfection. No biggie.

I practiced seeing the basic shapes on the model or object I was drawing, which meant simplifying the form and value to only black and white. Here are two drawings I did using that technique.

A year and a half later I'm constantly reminded that the foundation to every drawing or painting is the underlying shapes. It doesn't matter how beautifully the marks are made or the colors blended. If the drawing is off, it won't look or feel right. Sometimes I will notice a drawing error after I've spent weeks on an assignment. I often can't believe I was able to stare at the drawing for hours on end and not notice the nose was too long (or whatever the problem is)! I have to constantly remind myself to check the drawing, over and over again, especially because an adjustment in one place will necessitate an adjustment in another place, which affects something else, and so on.

At the Hein Academy each student progresses in the curriculum at their own pace. After about four months and 241 hours of studio time (not ALL of which was spent drawing, but most of it was), I moved on to drawing in "full value," which basically meant I could draw all the variations of gray in between black and white. Yippee! This was one of my first full value assignments, costing me 25.75 well spent hours of my life.