#197 - When You Draw Really Slowly, You Get To Control The Movement Much Better While Still Training Your Muscle Memory
Practice Drawing This Draw-along.
did a book review of the excellent The Talent Code a while back. One interesting training method it mentioned was to make the motions you had to perform slower.
Translated to drawing: if you practice drawing, say, circles, ellipses, straight or parallel lines or boxes or cylinders, et cetera, try to draw slowly. Your mistakes become more apparent, and you train your muscle memory just as well.
This Week
I forgot to show you what the blob models ended up looking like:
Based on feedback from people on our Discord server, I added isolines so you can understand the underlying forms better. They are slightly different from cross-contour lines, which suggest the underlying form better, but the isolines are useful, too, as they tend to have shapes similar to “terminator lines” when drawing shadows: the lines where the light turns dark. It’s useful to practice that multiple times on the same model, while still drawing lines that also suggest the form underneath it.
I had used color to make the models readable, but now, with the isolines helping you understand the form, I could use shadow instead. I use only black and white, making the models easier to read.
Another change I made was to models that are basically shapes traced along a line. I made the sides or bottoms a different color, making the model easier to read. It was a challenge to develop color pairs that work well together.
I also changed the “Matrix of Boxes” model so that the boxes are rotated around a point away from them.
It made the matrix of boxes more useful. This was always what it was meant to be anyway; I don’t know why I didn’t finish it. This allows you to practice drawing boxes rotated from reference, so you can then place things inside these boxes and, therefore, practice drawing things rotated in rotated boxes. That’s the theory, anyway. I need to test it out myself.
I was thinking I could do this with the 3D models themselves, as they are also drawn inside a box. I could have a matrix of slightly rotated skulls. This would probably only work well on a bigger screen, not a mobile, but it could still be useful.
Another YouTube video that premiered last Saturday. I didn’t want to add it to last week’s newsletter article because it doubles as a timeless guide.
