Stacy Weitz Minch

  Okay, one more unfortunate flower attempt ;) One of my biggest hurdles is time. I find 20-30 minutes here and there and though I'd like to be able to whip out a decent little rose study in that amount of time, maybe it's just not that plausible. I'll keep trying, though. 

  Sometimes I really wonder why I bother with all of this--I don't know how many more bad attempted drawings of this woman I can handle :P She's lovely. It's just me. I think my issue tonight was that I didn't have a clear end goal in mind. I think it's really important to have a solid idea of what you want to accomplish when you start out drawing. And it was a rather chatty night at the studio too ;)

Another figure flop :P I don't know. It started out alright. I blocked in the upper body really quickly and felt pretty good about the gesture, but spent the rest of the time trying to get those legs to look like they fit with the torso (and didn't spend much time at all on hands/face/feet, so...). Mostly I struggled with the proportions of the legs. I would measure, mark the midpoints and where they should end, then start drawing, and they kept ending up too long somehow. Part of the problem was that there were people seated with sawhorses in front of me, and I'm just not very tall. So a drawing board on a sawhorse in front of me blocks about a third of the figure from my view. Not that I shouldn't be able to figure out how to compensate for that. But I actually couldn't see the whole figure at once, so I'd be peeking around the drawing boards to see the legs, then going back to my drawing board, basically from memory, to draw them in the correct position ...

  Ack, off night for drawing last night. Which almost invariably happens when I'm low on sleep, and I could feel it from the first session. If I didn't keep this silly little weblog of all my  failed attempts I might not see the correlation, but Stacy on little sleep does not translate into successful attempts at drawing. At least I know.  Anyway, I spent a lot of time chasing (the pose shifted quite a bit from my angle--especially the tilt of the shoulders and and twist of the torso) and when you chase a part of the drawing without changing everything else in relation, you end up with an oddly pieced together conglomeration of parts. And I just don't know sometimes how to be fast enough to change everything together. Oh well. It was about time for me to turn out a real turkey ;)

Ugh, well, another little mess I've made. I started this portrait one night a couple months ago, and since it was far from finished, I really had nothing to lose by drawing over it. I thought it might be interesting to give drawing from memory another try. I just don't like failing. I don't think it ever feels good--not for me or anyone else. Not that I really expected anything different when I started working over this drawing. I knew it would be nothing but a learning experience. But somehow, it still hurts to fall on your face, even if you see the fall coming! So go ahead and quit following my blog. Just go somewhere else where you can see pretty pictures every day. I won't mind ;) But what's the lesson here? Was there any takeaway from this failure? Drawing from memory is probably a helpful skill to have if you want to invent compositions before getting a model. If you want to sketch things out beforehand. And I think in order to do that, it would help t...

"Every failure brings with it the seed of an equivalent success." -Napoleon Hill (I'm currently reading his book called Outwitting the Devil , and it's bizarrely interesting. He claims to have forced the devil himself into a lengthy interview, which seems (to me) to be an interesting angle for presenting the author's personal views on the forces at work in the universe ;). However, I do like the idea that with each failure comes an opportunity to learn, and possibly to find a path to success in the future. So here's my fail. Do me a favor and don't look up the original of this drawing--just don't. Blaaaaaaaah. I'm a little embarrassed to post this, but in the interest of sharing the breadth of the learning experience, I'll go ahead and share my flops (you're welcome :P). The drawing is off. But aside from that, I am learning some things from copying this artist (whose technique is clearly WAY over my head). She adjusts the pres...