#138 - Drawings You Want To Make Versus Drawings Others Will Like
Can what you want to make and what others like be the same?Drawing Demo
This demonstrates my memorization exercise, where I used an image from plate I-3 from the Charles Bargue plates. The profile is of the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri. Notice the vertical plumb line and the points where the profile outline touches the plumb line. You can see me building up the drawing here, going from touch point to touch point. Memorizing the single-line segments independently is easier. And then I can put the whole thing together. In the end, it is satisfying for me to be able to draw the entire profile from memory, seemingly from imagination. Try it out!
You will run into this sometime. For example, you’ve drawn in a “realist” style, and now you feel it isn’t as challenging, but people compliment you on it, so you keep drawing in that style, even though secretly, you’d rather draw something else.
My form studies do well on Pinterest at the moment. People pin them onto boards for future reference, to study, or to draw. The problem is that I don’t feel like doing form studies now, and I firmly believe drawing should remain fun.
On YouTube, I can do well by getting you curious about something and then talking about my views a bit—while you are drawing as you are listening, hopefully—but I don’t feel like making videos. I want to do my memorization exercises.
Who knows what works on Instagram anymore? I still post there. It’s liberating not to have to worry about views and likes. There will be almost none on my account now, which is fine! As a result, the platform has become much less addictive for me. Read: I get to draw more.
I want to do the memory drawing exercises from my workbook. They are fun, and I like how the sketchbook pages come out.
I came up with the idea of doing demos of the memorization exercises from my workbook, which I try to do often because they are fun and help me become better at drawing. I pick some references for the demo and show you the landmarks I use to memorize things so that you can memorize them the same way. See the demonstration image at the top of this article. I’ll share it in other places, too.
I can see myself doing loads of those.
You could maybe find time during the week to do this memory drawing warm-up. Would it be helpful if I did more of these? Was it fun to follow this demonstration?