Self Portrait, 8th December 2005
8th December 2005
Fourth in the series - a self portrait a day until Christmas.
Another day another self portrait.
This one was done much earlier in the day, in fact I just finished it a couple of hours ago. All The others were done around two in the morning when I guess I was pretty tired. It also means I got to do one by natural light today. I don't know what it is about natural light, it just seems to make everything easier to see.
I used the big grid again for this one, again you can see the grid marks on the paper. I find I'm using it less with each drawing though, which I think is a good thing, and here's why: When you grid up a 2d image for copying, you can pretty much guarantee that neither the grid nor the image are going to move. You can go have a cuppa and it will still be the same when you get back. Not so drawing from life. Particularly with self portraits.
The way I use the grid for these drawings is to tape it to the mirror, so the grid is effectively half way between me and my subject, my reflection. Putting the grid anywhere else means dealing with a reflection of the grid in the mirror - two grids. Add to that the separate images produced by each eye and you have four grids, most confusing. Take it from me, taped to the mirror is best.
However, that means that if I move, so does my subject, so any change in point of view is effectively doubled. Now these drawings are currently taking me anything from one and a half to three hours to complete, so I've no chance of staying motionless right through the drawing. I think the net effect of this is to introduce lots of small distortions into the drawing if the grid is followed too slavishly - or if there is a long period of time between one measurement and the next. It would produce drawings where certain elements were very well observed, but the whole was somehow wrong. I'd say that pretty much sums up the last three drawings.
My solution to this today was only to use the grid in the first fifteen minutes or so, just to block in some anchor points: nostril, ear, chin, top of head, eye-line, mouth. Once I had this I didn't refer to the grid again until later in the picture when I roughed in the shoulders and chest, which I had to change later anyway.
Once I had those points in, I was tending to take measurements and judge distances by eye, both eyes open, relating the element I was drawing (bottom of nose, eyebrow, top of ear) to the next nearest elements.
I do feel that I produced a much more accurate drawing through doing that, with less cartoon distortion. There was something else today though. I was seeing better. I wasn't consciously trying to see flat shapes as a whole across the picture plane. I was drawing my face feature by feature. This goes somewhat against what I've been trying to do lately with the right brain drawing exercises, but it felt more comfortable today.
Once the head shape was roughed in, I went straight for the eyes. It wasn't until I had them pretty much drawn in that I moved to the nose. I was drawing the face element by element, as the left brain would recognise it. But, and its a big but, as I was drawing each element, I was seeing it as a shape, relating it to other shapes - without trying. Drawing the eyebrow, I knew I was drawing the eyebrow, but I was drawing the eyebrow I saw, not my inner idea of an eyebrow.
This is the key I think. Whether Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is right or not about right brain perception, there is one point the book makes which I have no doubt is true: When we draw, we generally don't draw what we see, we draw our inner symbol for what we see.
The reason that most adults draw like children is that they haven't drawn since they were children. When we are young, learning to draw, we evolve a simplified symbol system for our drawings - circle with rays for the sun, triangle for nose, stick arms and fingers. When we come to draw, we have a strong tendency to reproduce these symbols, rather than what we really see. In fact, we don't really see at all, not in any real sense. We look. Our brain categorises what we're looking at and tells us what it is. We draw our symbol for eye, chair, table - not what we would see if we bothered to look properly.
This is the crux of the problem, it's the same with painting, which is why I'm so happy that I called this site Learning to See - because that's exactly what I need to do to produce good representational drawings and paintings. The skill I'm slowly regaining is not limited to techniques with the materials, or measuring, or even mainly those things, I'm slowly regaining my ability to look at something and to see it.
Today, for whatever reason, I was seeing better. I certainly think that contributed to this being a better drawing than the three others so far, not just laying off with the grid and getting things in the right place. I think this is the best likeness I've got so far.
It made me wonder about how little I could get away with drawing and still have it live as a portrait. It struck me as a good idea to use this 'self portrait a day' project to try and reduce down the drawing to the bits that count. Just what's required to make a face recognisable and describe (or infer) the form. So I'll try and repeat the same method of making the drawing for the next one, and see if it makes the drawing easier (as it did today) and better.
The truth is I know a lot of it is down to how I feel on the day, just whether I'm drawing well that day or not. It would be nice to think that by evolving and applying a method I can get some consistency into the work though. On days when I'm really not firing, and I produce crap, I look at how far I've got to go and it seems unreachable. Today it doesn't seem quite so far away, maybe I can walk it if I keep going. I need to remember that each piece of work is just a preparation for the next one.
<added 11th December>
This drawing is one of those odd ones where you see one thing when you've just finished it, and something completely different when you come back to look at it later. I did think it was pretty good when I'd done it, but I can't see why now. I like the left eye (as you look at the drawing) but that's about it. Three out of ten, see me.