I drew a charcoal head on 16 June 2022 and didn’t draw again until 23 July 2022. I had some reasons or explanations – I was supposed to be away for two of those weeks but ended up being horizontal for one of those weeks from a neck issue and with the help of painkillers, I had to rebuild my ability to sit at desk for periods of time. Work took priority over drawing practice. Then coming back after my second week away, I accepted that I had broken the habit. Once I recognised that, I went back to the beginning and forgot about set amounts of time and just did practice.
It is probably worth noting that it took about 3 months to build a habit, stamina and momentum. But it took a further 3 months to undo all that – May I spent a lot of time on the website which I think broke the momentum and then June and July came along with the various illness etc to get rid of the habit and stamina.
However, I don’t think I am necessarily went back to the beginning in terms of skills acquired though. And today is the 10th of August and I’ve drawn 6 of those 10 days but each day, it is getting easier and easier. The bulk so far has been digital but that is only because I’ve lost a bit motivation around charcoal – it is much harder than I thought.
The digital practice has more or less snapped back even though the stamina isn’t quite there but I am trying to get the most out of the practice:
- taking a moment to think about lines and which should be darker and lighter ones
- remembering to use the tools of the program to move the canvas, expand to get cleaner lines (as opposed to contort myself)
- remembering to use layers
- seeing beyond the reference image and draw what I think should be there
- plants and other herbage requires some research
- introducing some colour is a good thing but will need to think about how to do that with layers
For the charcoal –
- I really struggled with the blockin using charcoal but didn’t do much better with pencil
- getting finer details with charcoal is a real skill – trying to do teeth on a skull was incredibly difficult
- charcoal is a quite forgiving medium though
- I think I need to switch reference images because a) I dont have that many skulls left anyway, b) maybe it is better to use simpler objects to get use to charcoal
- bought some sandpaper to make charcoal powder
- not sure my paper is all that great but will persist with it until I’ve used up my stock and can then experiment
Right that is me done for this post and lets hope that I can re-build the habit, stamina and momentum this month!