Sketching and drawing projects

Hello everyone!

I decided, a couple of weeks back, to give myself a small treat - I bought a book called Drawing Projects: an exploration of the language of drawing. It has some positively glowing reviews on Amazon, and I'm keen to (a) improve and (b) have more fun with my sketching and drawing.

I have to say that I found some of the language a bit 'art schoolish', a bit affected and pompous, but maybe that's just me. However, the projects do look like they'll be FUN :-). So I'll share what I'm up to with these, along with what the aims of each exercise are, as and when I do them...

First off I'll point out that this isn't a book that tells you how to draw things. There are no instructions on how to draw a sphere, or a tree, or a face. You pretty much pick your own subject matter to draw from life. The drawing projects are designed to help you develop your own drawing practice, and to shake off the notion that the only successful drawing is one that looks like a photograph...

Anyway, here are my first few drawings. The first project is about control, breaking the habit of always holding the pencil as if you are writing with it - these are my 'extended arm' drawings. The first one was done with the pencil attached to a stick, about 60cm long, with me at the far end of it:-)

Nice and wobbly! Bit faint that one, hope you can make it out!

Next, I had a pencil attached to a shorter stick (actually a paintbrush!), about 30cm long.

 Drawing number three was done by holding the pencil at the very end.

And the next one was drawn while holding the pencil as you'd hold a knife and fork...

And finally, a fifth drawing - this was done using all of the above techniques, one drawing being done on top of the previous one, loosest to most controlled, so that the end product is a combination of drawings of varying degrees of control.

I was interested to find that I didn't make lots of revisions with each successive drawing in this last one - I actually quite liked the looseness and liveliness of the early drawings, and refined this a bit when I had more control of the pencil.

All pencil on A3 cartridge paper. And all good fun to do, and very interesting to reflect upon.

Until next time - happy drawing:-)