Just stumbled upon this paper:

Drawing rules: the importance of the whole brain for learning realistic drawing - Scott M. Clare

THIS is what I keep saying about the whole "right side of the brain" thesis (and this guy seems to have tested it in 83 - need to get this paper, though the result is predictable). Edwards herself ends up using "left-brain" techniques when she wants to correct the usual "shrinking skull visual fallacy". Why would she need that?

And why would one ever want to leave half a brain unemployed?

Gray wolf in colored pencil - copy from Carl Brenders

Time is still too short to go on with the triangulation tutorial. Maybe next week my students will be so busy they will give me some time off, but for now there is no way I can do it. So, to keep this place alive, here is something nice I did in colored pencil. Well, at least I think it's nice.

Making copies is a great way to learn. This is a very small copy (about 10x10 cm) done in colored pencil of a Carl Brenders (gouache?) original. It was pretty fast, maybe around three or four very relaxed hours over two sessions. Most of the trouble it gave me was self-inflicted. I wanted to do the whole thing just with four pencils (caran-d'ache orange, yellow, light blue (though I forgot and used a bit of darker blue on the nose, I think, quite without need), and red, and black for darkening and gray for desaturating. I wanted to prove to a couple of friends that you don't need the convenience colors, as the name implies, you can mix them as long as you have saturated colors, it's the opposite you cannot do - those glowing "neon" colors just can't be made from your payne's gray, burnt umber, sienna, or sap greens, I'm afraid, but the opposite is quite doable, though it will tax your patience (and therefore teach you a lot about your colors).

Oh, and the hairs were done with a blade.

Triangulating Yorick

A skull from an archeological dig, that we had around in our scientific illustration class. Yes, of course we called him Yorick. I wonder what blunt instrument made that indentation on his forehead (not to mention that ruined eye-socket and those zygomatic arches; but those are fragile and the poor guy was centuries old). I started by triangulating it, but then I got distracted by something (there was always something going on on those classes!) and I believe I just eyeballed the back of the head. It was just a joyous little drawing, the real job at that time was hard, time-consuming, mind-numbing stippling. 

Work in progress

At a very garish stage....just something to keep you guys (all two of you) happy while I'm too busy with classes to preach about the joys of triangulation for life drawing.

a small delay

Well, classes are starting and I am on a deathmarch to finish some course notes for my students this week.
This means that the calibration exercises for triangulation will have to wait for about a week or so.
Sorry to keep anyone waiting.

Calibration

This gentleman provides the same valuable lesson as a classically trained musician that keeps on doing scales time after time: you have to calibrate yourself. Yes, this is about cutting hair. So what?

Watch him after 2:00 if nothing else. He provides exercises to train the hand to feel the lenghth of the hair it is holding. He uses a ruler for the exercise. Of course he won't be using a ruler in his practice! The purpose is to get feedback. You cannot train the hand if you don't have accurate feedback. Immediate, accurate feedback, a guess/check/correct cycle, is essential to make you learn. It punishes and rewards your neurons according to your performance, and drives you in the right direction. Too many art teachers repeat the refrain "practice makes perfect". No it doesn't. It has to be the right kind of practice. If you keep practicing only complicated exercises (like drawing a full portrait each time) where the complexity is so great that you have no clear feedback, where you can't really know where and when you screwed up, where feedback happens at too great intervals, then you'll only make progress painfuly and after too much exertion, and almost in spite of practice (most of the time you'll be practicing and reinforcing precisely your worst mistakes). Yes, it may still work, but that is a credit to the wonderful ability of the human mind to learn even in the worst of circumstances: one has to ask, however, why should one pay good money to do it the hard, dumb way.

Watch this gentleman work and ask yourself what exercises in your routine, if any, correspond to what he is doing.

Next up I'll be making a post on an simple exercise that can help calibrate your brain for triangulation. (even if you don't use triangulation you should ask yourself what are your "scales" for your preferred measuring/drawing method. And like any musician you should practice your scales as often as possible)

Orange is what you are

Photoshop is your friend. Certainly, you'll say, the camera doesn't see as we do, it alters colors, etc. That is besides the point. Once you are looking at the colors on the screen, if they make up a good tromp l'oeil to you (and my gosh, isn't a photo almost as realistic as, say, a photo?) then there is something to learn from it.

The color prejudices of the XIXth century have been substituted by the color prejudices of the more recent years. Now everybody sees purple shadows, even when they aren't there, and everyone sees complementary colors in form shadows even when none are around. It is good to have a mechanical, innocent machine to tell you honestly what it sees. Take a photo, spot a color in photoshop, then make a patch with it. Working in HSV, then place side by side its maximum chroma at constant value. Sometimes you'll be very surprised. One of the first things I was taught in art class was that "yellow and black make green". I wondered why for a long time. No, it's not some weird effect of either yellow pigments or black, most blacks have a surprisingly flat spectrum, the fact is that the "fact" is untrue. Yellow and black doesn't make green, it makes dark unsaturated  yellow, as it should. But what does yellow look like at low chroma? Yes, it looks "green". The fact is that we get very confused at low chroma, if we don't have the training. If you do this little photoshop analysis as a habit you'll find that in most pictures of humans all you get is orange and red, none of the famous greens or purples. An amazing lot of seemingly purple and green shadows are nothing but honest unsaturated oranges. Orange is what we are. 

Note: on the picture I have also placed patches of maximum value at constant chroma and null-chroma patches. This last one is not useful in HSV mode, as value in HSV doesn't correspond to what you get by squinting. You should use LAB mode if you want to examine value (or lightness).