http://www.drawright.com/So this is my bible. I love this book. I must have bought it back in the early 90's when I was doing the pastel portraits but am pretty sure I never had the patience or the discipline to work through much of the book. It's filled with what I'd call a psychological discussion of how our brains typically see versus how an artist must see, two very different things. The book is full of exercises which train you to turn off the rational left hemisphere of your brain & turn on the creative right side. Probably the most famous exercise is the one in which you turn your subject (assuming it's a photo and not a person ) upside-down in order to stop seeing the subject as a whole but rather as various components that fit together.
Having looked through bits and pieces of the book a few weeks ago, I decided to jump to Chapter 7 yesterday, "The Positive Aspects of Negative Space." One of the exercises was to draw the space around a complex object, so I took this photo of Jeff on the bike and did this sketch. I managed to hack off a bit of his leg , but I found the exercise very educational.
Finally, I did this sketch of Jeff yesterday after he crashed, totally wiped out from a day teaching 70 French students. It doesn't totally look like Jeff's but it's a huge improvement over the sketch I did a few days ago & it took 20 minutes instead of 3 hours. Today, I get some perspective. We can only hope.
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