May was not a good month for drawing. It didn’t start out like that but it ended up being like that. Before the month, I wanted to kick start the digital drawing and I figured that I would prioritise that. Ideally I would do a bit of both but when time or energy were short, I would do a digital drawing. However, the big mistake I made is that I didn’t have a set of reference images in place (like I did with the 100 heads).
In addition, May was a bit of a broken month in terms of being around. The previous few months, it helped that my routine didn’t get broken by being away. May was different as I went away early in the month and then when I came back, I had work etc.
Also during May I redrafted many of the pages on this website with slightly different designs. I also added the digital drawing target pages with the various resource pages, some of which took a while to do.
As a side note, the digital resources page is going to be time intensive and there was a question mark over that value ie the time it takes me to make notes legible may be better spent drawing. I am not sure because one of the first things to do is set your drawing page in Sketchbook Pro and that wasn’t easy to understand. Because I was writing the website page at the same time, it forced me to take a systematic approach and really understand what it did. Yes, that took a long time but I am now reasonably confident on how it works and if not, then I can just read my own website.
I’ve also begun researching and pulling together the stuff to underpin use of colour – whilst I don’t plan on delving into colour anytime soon, it would be good for it to ruminate in my brain so I can work out exercises that will help me learn use of colour well.
In addition, I’ve now updated the visual references page and there are a lot of references images. At the moment the vast majority are Pinterest boards but I will add more (for example images of my own cats) as and when I can. There is more than enough there to keep me occupied and remove the decision lag. For the digital drawing first target I am using buildings and I’ve screen grabbed some of the Pinterest images and numbered them to go through sequentially.
For June and Traditional Drawing, I had wanted to set a new target a more medium or technique focussed one. June is month 6 and I think it is now time for more aggressive learning targets. I got stuck on whether to go with charcoal or cross-hatching. I’ve gone with charcoal because I think there is less to research. I’ll aim to write out the target soon.
I’m not bothering with the stats for May because I only drew 5 or 6 days in total and it isn’t worth it!