I didn’t get any sleep on Saturday Night. Maybe an hour at best, and broken at that. When I forced myself out of bed at 9am (rather than the usual 7-8am), I was groggy, nauseated and feeling rather broken and frustrated. Yet I set out to try and do a drawing anyway, despite the many misgivings I had to do so.
The figure in red in the picture above is the drawing I ended up with that morning. It’s incomplete and there was something about it that I just couldn’t feel happy about. It’s one of what was supposed to be two young figures playing around on a beach, but by the time I got the final penciling done I just gave up. I felt like throwing things against a wall and just THIS figure took me two hours to even get to this point.
So this morning, after I had actually got a decent night’s sleep, I went back to it and decided to trace the figure in the original photograph to help me see where I had gone wrong. Lo and behold, to no real shock of myself, I found out that the head, as usual for me, was the main culprit here. I had simply, even after drawing it over and over and resizing and trying hard to see the proportion properly, made it too small.
Once the head was wrong, the rest of the figure sort of just fell into line. As you see by my notes, the small head put the shoulders on the wrong plane, which caused me to get the torso proportion wrong, and then overcompensate the legs to make the overall length of the figure make some sense… and I draw a lot.
So even though I’m pretty experienced in drawing this sort of drawing, and have a lot of practice and a bit of skill, it always goes to show that one ALWAYS has some learning to do…. or even re-learning. Sometimes it takes more that just knowing how. You have to keep reminding yourself and take some time to figure out what’s not working and work on those aspects more.
For me, it’s working on that pesky head size. It’s always JUST SO SMALL.
WHY IS IT ALWAYS SO SMALL?!
One day I might get it.