Learn to Art post #2: Still Life!
Before I get into this, I want to direct your attention to this fabulous post on how to shoot and use reference from the artist who illustrated the Murderbot omnibus from Subterranean Press.
I've done much the same except that I have no friends...
...within a close enough driving distance, so that![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
myrialux is forced to take all the poses so I can bodge them together. XD (The perils of living in a giant metroplex.) Also, people keep telling me to pose myself, but the thing is that I am fat and weirdly lumpy and while I can take a smaller body and draw fat on it, since I have a decent idea of how fat deposits work on the body and with gravity*, I cannot go in reverse, so I cannot pose myself unless I am drawing a character shaped like I am.)
*Gravity: the failure point of using 3D work for reference.
Now, onto how to draw a still life without being intimidated!
Hahaha, I lie, you'll still be intimidated, even if you've done it before. This is because it's complex and you haven't figured out in what order to draw things. This is normal.
So! Build yourself a still life!
Start with a cloth. Drape it over a surface and something that stands somewhat tall, to form a backdrop. Here I am draping a cat-furred hoodie over an empty cereal box that is waiting for me to cut it up for cardboard.
Black velvet (or velour) is the traditional material, because they have very deep, velvety darks and distinct lights, but you work with what you have. Bonus points if it's got stripes on it, because drawing draped stripes is also a classic art exercise.
Pile together a bunch of random shit with different textures, different surfaces, different types of lines (curved and straight), different reflectivity. Rearrange them until they're stable and pleasing. Make sure things are overlapping and touching each other, and that they're pointing in all directions.
Put something glass on there as well, because drawing glass is really intimidating and you won't start unless you're forced to.
Oh, come on! Black ink in a glass bottle is EASY MODE! Let's add something better: a clear plastic bottle. If you've got a desk lamp or two that you can move around, point them at it to create shadows and highlights.
Now take a photo of your composition. Not for reference, because you won't be using it for reference, but because the cat will come up on the table and want to take your rat away.
Even if you don't have a cat, take a photo. I've been in classes where we spent several sessions drawing the same still life, but the room was used by other classes so the instructor had to re-set it every time. And in the days prior to smartphones, this meant using every student's drawing to figure out how it was set up, with all of us going "I think I remember the cow skull was at more of an angle...?"
Anyway, grab a sketchbook or clip some printer paper to a clipboard. Crappy paper is FINE, this is an EXERCISE, not THE GREAT AMERICAN ARTWORK, although drawing paper is nicer to use.
Feeling intimidated by a blank white-ish canvas? Draw a frame on the paper.
This does two things: (1) messes up the paper so you don't feel bad about drawing on it anymore and (2) gives your image boundaries, so you don't accidentally find yourself running off the edge of the paper.
Also, a word about tools. I am using a plain #2 pencil, the commonest sort. It's not a drawing pencil. It doesn't have a great range of shades from darks to lights. It's fine for beginning practice, but you'll want to jump to a set of drawing pencils in different hardnesses soon. You'll see the problems with this pencil by the end of this post, especially because they feed directly into my biggest weakness. More on that anon.
Another problem is that the pencil has an ERASER. THIS IS BAD. DO NOT ERASE. ERASING LEADS TO LOOSE WOMEN, DRINKING AND IMMORALITY. OK fine, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but if you erase, you won't learn to THINK about the lines you're putting down.
I have a secret weapon! My secret weapon is that this pencil is so old the eraser has calcified and smudges instead of erasing, like so:
This keeps me from erasing, no matter how bad I want to. And I really, really wanted to, make no mistake.
DO NOT SMUDGE. You will want to! I have done MANY FINE ARTWORKS by smudging pencil to create lights and darks! It is a specialty of mine, in fact! It is an excellent technique! IT IS NOT FOR THIS EXERCISE. This exercise is to learn your tools and to develop your eye. Don't muddy it more by smudging at this stage.
Start by lightly sketching in the overall outline of the mass of stuff.
Then start lightly sketching in the general shapes of the stuff inside. Be loose, be sketchy. Try to judge the general position of each item as compared to the overall mass, and as compared to the other items.
I kinda sucked at this, as you will see.
A note! This is how I found myself holding my pencil. I had my middle finger steadying it, not my index, and had the end captured against my hand, which meant that I could not draw tight little lines and was forced t be loose and sketchy. Good!
Here is my rough sketch. I've got all sorts of proportions off, and things placed badly in comparison to each other. Next time I'll try to do better, but for now, THIS IS FINE. Just keep in mind what you did (or failed to do) to keep it from matching reality and consciously try to do it differently next time. That is the important part: conscious practice.
This is how I found myself holding the pencil during this stage, and for most of the picture. The eraser end was jammed into my palm. It forced me to use the side of the lead, not the tip. I switched to the tip to define some lines, but ...
...the world is not made of lines. The world is made of surfaces and edges that blend into each other. Unless you're drawing in a specific line-heavy way, try to avoid drawing lines and coloring them in. You sometimes use lines to define edges, but you really want to try to use dark shades up against light shades to define edges instead. The lines you've already put down are a GUIDE, not a MAP.
My hand rotated so you can see the pencil. Note in this pic and the pic above that I'm steadying my hand by touching my pinkie to the paper. I am not placing the side of my hand on the paper (something I am frequently guilty of). That constrains your movements and also gets pencil on your hand, which you then smear all over the paper. If you HAVE to do that (tremor, weakness, working on fine detail), put down a piece of paper to rest your hand. Painters use something called a mahl stick for this, BTW. (Reader, I did not do this and ended up with pencil all over my hand and smeared my work.)
Starting to shade stuff in! I arbitrarily picked the ink bottle to start with, It has several vertical highlights, which I tried to leave alone, and a lot of black.
Working on the rat! Whose body is really way too big, but hey--I was looking at the assemblage from a different angle than the picture is taken, plus its relative lightness made it stand out more and appear bigger than it was.
I switched to diagonal strokes (I turned the paper, really) in an attempt to indicate the direction of the fur, and was trying to leave the area of light on its butt, mid-greys on its back, and darker on its belly. Had I left it like this, it would have been FINE but as always I ended up overworking it later.
OK, problem #1 is that I didn't take enough time to sit there and study the values, to figure out what was the darkest, what was the lightest, and where each thing fell on that spectrum. I also didn't practice with my #2 pencil, which led to me not really having a good idea of how much pencil should be laid down for each degree of darkness/light.
Starting on the drapery behind them. The drapery should have the darkest blacks and some highlights. It is not done yet, in this picture. I also gave a quickly, light shade to all the drapery to help keep in mind that it's supposed to be dark. Ideally I'd have shaded it to the level of the highlights on the cloth, but ain't no one got time for that.
Getting on to more items! Shading more of the drapery. When shading drapery, THINK about WHY those shadows are there. Don't just draw the shapes without understanding how they work. The big shadow to the upper right of the chipboard notebook in back is there because there's a big fold of cloth coming out towards me and the overhead light is casting a shadow from it to its left. Other shadows are because a fold of cloth is overlapping another, or because there's a gentle dent in the cloth...that works ACCORDING TO GRAVITY. Don't just draw random folds and dents: they need to obey the laws of physics, the characteristics of the fabric, and the masses underneath the fabric that are interacting with the fabric. There is a reason for each fold and crease, and you need to understand that to shade it correctly.
THIS IS HARD TO LEARN. THIS IS VERY HARD TO LEARN. Very experienced artists can SOMETIMES calculate the folds and creases according to why the fabric is being distorted (leg bending, wind blowing, etc.). I cannot do this. I must have reference. If you look at my artwork you'll see that most of the time I half-ass folds and creases because I am impatient. This is a bad habit.
MOAR SHADING! Starting to work on the plastic bottle in front, the scissors and tape in the middle,and the spool of thread.
This is also where I started getting tired and...stopped looking at the assemblage. Instead of frequently looking at real life, I got stuck staring at the artwork, and started shading according to what I THOUGHT was right, not according to reality.
THIS RIGHT HERE IS WHY PEOPLE DO NOT GET BETTER AT ART.
THIS RIGHT HERE IS WHY PEOPLE DO NOT GET BETTER AT ART.
THIS RIGHT HERE IS WHY PEOPLE DO NOT GET BETTER AT ART.
See the bottle up there? I have drawn glass and plastic bottles before. Empty Coke bottles, glass vases, etc. Ones that have shapes and distortions, and dramatic lighting. My brain started insisting and I SAW this on the bottle, even though it did not exist!!! that the highlights and lowlights on the bottle were DRAMATIC.
Reader, they are not. In fact, the bottle is almost completely transparent, with subtle streaks of highlights. Light reflecting on the plastic actually makes the darks within it slightly lighter and the lights slightly darker. It has less of a range of dark to light than the stuff behind it and around it.
THIS IS HOW YOUR BRAIN DECEIVES YOU. It "knows" that plastic bottles have dramatic highlights and lowlights, and therefore it gives significantly more importance to the ones that are there.
I also shaded in the rest of the drapery, and got to work on the cat-faced cup. This is also where I completely lost it on the tape.
BTW you'll note that I didn't carefully draw in the arabesque cutouts on the chipboard notebook. Ain't no one got time for that. I'm not going for 100% realism, I'm going for, say 85% realism.
Here is another thing that my brain told me that was contrary to reality. My brain said "The rat is sitting on a white box." So I left it mostly white up til now. Yup, it's sitting on a white box...that is dark grey because of dramatic shadows. I finally noticed that, and shaded the box in.
Also note that the spool of thread does not have distinct edges. It fades into the drapery behind it.
Here's the final drawing! Well, the drawing at the point where I gave up. You're never really finished.
PROBLEMS WITH IT:
Now, some of you are going to have an urge to leap in and say "Stop being harsh on yourself! You did a great job!"
Here's the problem: If I don't consciously pick it apart and figure out where I went wrong, then I don't improve. That's fine if I'm doing it for fun, but if I do an exercise like this, picking it apart is one of the most important parts of the process.
So!
1. I don't have good control of the values. This is partly the fault of the tools: the #2 pencil doesn't go very dark or very light, however in the hands of a master it can produce a masterpiece so it's not the only problem.
Value control is one of my biggest weaknesses, and it's something I need to consciously work on. The rat should be a little lighter, the scissors should DEFINITELY be lighter, the ink should be one of the darkest spots and it's not, instead of subtle gradations in shading on the fabric, I ended up resorting to lines to define stuff.
2. I stopped looking at the scene. I ended up just drawing random dark shapes in the drapery to define vague folds and dents. I got the values on the tape and the scissors wrong. I fucked up highlights and lowlights on the clear plastic bottle. The shape and position of the tape roll has nothing to do with reality. Let us not even discuss the scissors.
3. I wasn't able to get in the specular highlights--the tiny pops of WHITE on shiny surfaces like glass, plastic and ceramic--because I didn't plan for them to start with. I should have lightly drawn them in to start with so that I wouldn't ham-handedly shade over them.
4. That's mostly it? Not to say there aren't problems--I have lines in the shading instead of even shading, although that's partly from using the wrong pencil, my perspective is off, I placed items too close to the middle instead of more spread out--but those are fairly minor as these things go. Value control is the biggie here.
SPEAKING OF VALUE CONTROL:
Red is DARKER than you think! It's saturated here, which is why the tape dispenser is the focal point of the color photo. But when you change it to black and white...
the red is DARK!
I knew that, and tried to shade it that way. I SHOULD NOT HAVE. This is where you DEVIATE FROM REALITY. To keep the tape as the focal point of the composition, and to keep the middle from being a muddy mess, I should have made it lighter. And made the tape itself lighter. OH WELL.
WHAT DID I DO RIGHT? This is equally as important!
1. I am embarrassed to admit I haven't sat down and drawn a still life in over a decade. I did pretty damn good for not having done it in over a decade. You can see all the items, they more-or-less fit together and look like they're in the same place in reality.
2. I'm really happy with the way the spool of thread and the cat mug interact with each other. That shadow, even though I drew it wrong compared to reality, actually looks 3D. I got the facial features of the cat off, but not so much that it looks that wrong until you compare it to the photo.
3. I can actually see what's wrong with it instead of staring at it going "This doesn't look right...why?" I have spent SO MANY HOURS looking at images saying that, that being able to ID what the problems are feels great.
4. I have a decently good instinctive grasp of composition. That's partly in the way I built the assemblage, and partly in the way I drew it: while I got things wrong, I didn't mess the composition up and I think it actually might be slightly stronger than in reality. (This isn't to say I don't mess it up on other occasions!)
There you go. A still life, at length. YOUR TURN! If you're interested in art, please do try! No need to post it unless you want feedback from others: you have my permission to suck.
You also have Ursula Vernon's permission to suck: here is her Certificate of Bad Artistry. Print it out and hang it on the wall where you can see it.
I've done much the same except that I have no friends...
...within a close enough driving distance, so that
myrialux is forced to take all the poses so I can bodge them together. XD (The perils of living in a giant metroplex.) Also, people keep telling me to pose myself, but the thing is that I am fat and weirdly lumpy and while I can take a smaller body and draw fat on it, since I have a decent idea of how fat deposits work on the body and with gravity*, I cannot go in reverse, so I cannot pose myself unless I am drawing a character shaped like I am.)*Gravity: the failure point of using 3D work for reference.
Now, onto how to draw a still life without being intimidated!
Hahaha, I lie, you'll still be intimidated, even if you've done it before. This is because it's complex and you haven't figured out in what order to draw things. This is normal.
So! Build yourself a still life!
Start with a cloth. Drape it over a surface and something that stands somewhat tall, to form a backdrop. Here I am draping a cat-furred hoodie over an empty cereal box that is waiting for me to cut it up for cardboard.
Black velvet (or velour) is the traditional material, because they have very deep, velvety darks and distinct lights, but you work with what you have. Bonus points if it's got stripes on it, because drawing draped stripes is also a classic art exercise.
Pile together a bunch of random shit with different textures, different surfaces, different types of lines (curved and straight), different reflectivity. Rearrange them until they're stable and pleasing. Make sure things are overlapping and touching each other, and that they're pointing in all directions.
Put something glass on there as well, because drawing glass is really intimidating and you won't start unless you're forced to.
Oh, come on! Black ink in a glass bottle is EASY MODE! Let's add something better: a clear plastic bottle. If you've got a desk lamp or two that you can move around, point them at it to create shadows and highlights.
Now take a photo of your composition. Not for reference, because you won't be using it for reference, but because the cat will come up on the table and want to take your rat away.
Even if you don't have a cat, take a photo. I've been in classes where we spent several sessions drawing the same still life, but the room was used by other classes so the instructor had to re-set it every time. And in the days prior to smartphones, this meant using every student's drawing to figure out how it was set up, with all of us going "I think I remember the cow skull was at more of an angle...?"
Anyway, grab a sketchbook or clip some printer paper to a clipboard. Crappy paper is FINE, this is an EXERCISE, not THE GREAT AMERICAN ARTWORK, although drawing paper is nicer to use.
Feeling intimidated by a blank white-ish canvas? Draw a frame on the paper.
This does two things: (1) messes up the paper so you don't feel bad about drawing on it anymore and (2) gives your image boundaries, so you don't accidentally find yourself running off the edge of the paper.
Also, a word about tools. I am using a plain #2 pencil, the commonest sort. It's not a drawing pencil. It doesn't have a great range of shades from darks to lights. It's fine for beginning practice, but you'll want to jump to a set of drawing pencils in different hardnesses soon. You'll see the problems with this pencil by the end of this post, especially because they feed directly into my biggest weakness. More on that anon.
Another problem is that the pencil has an ERASER. THIS IS BAD. DO NOT ERASE. ERASING LEADS TO LOOSE WOMEN, DRINKING AND IMMORALITY. OK fine, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but if you erase, you won't learn to THINK about the lines you're putting down.
I have a secret weapon! My secret weapon is that this pencil is so old the eraser has calcified and smudges instead of erasing, like so:
This keeps me from erasing, no matter how bad I want to. And I really, really wanted to, make no mistake.
DO NOT SMUDGE. You will want to! I have done MANY FINE ARTWORKS by smudging pencil to create lights and darks! It is a specialty of mine, in fact! It is an excellent technique! IT IS NOT FOR THIS EXERCISE. This exercise is to learn your tools and to develop your eye. Don't muddy it more by smudging at this stage.
Start by lightly sketching in the overall outline of the mass of stuff.
Then start lightly sketching in the general shapes of the stuff inside. Be loose, be sketchy. Try to judge the general position of each item as compared to the overall mass, and as compared to the other items.
I kinda sucked at this, as you will see.
A note! This is how I found myself holding my pencil. I had my middle finger steadying it, not my index, and had the end captured against my hand, which meant that I could not draw tight little lines and was forced t be loose and sketchy. Good!
Here is my rough sketch. I've got all sorts of proportions off, and things placed badly in comparison to each other. Next time I'll try to do better, but for now, THIS IS FINE. Just keep in mind what you did (or failed to do) to keep it from matching reality and consciously try to do it differently next time. That is the important part: conscious practice.
This is how I found myself holding the pencil during this stage, and for most of the picture. The eraser end was jammed into my palm. It forced me to use the side of the lead, not the tip. I switched to the tip to define some lines, but ...
...the world is not made of lines. The world is made of surfaces and edges that blend into each other. Unless you're drawing in a specific line-heavy way, try to avoid drawing lines and coloring them in. You sometimes use lines to define edges, but you really want to try to use dark shades up against light shades to define edges instead. The lines you've already put down are a GUIDE, not a MAP.
My hand rotated so you can see the pencil. Note in this pic and the pic above that I'm steadying my hand by touching my pinkie to the paper. I am not placing the side of my hand on the paper (something I am frequently guilty of). That constrains your movements and also gets pencil on your hand, which you then smear all over the paper. If you HAVE to do that (tremor, weakness, working on fine detail), put down a piece of paper to rest your hand. Painters use something called a mahl stick for this, BTW. (Reader, I did not do this and ended up with pencil all over my hand and smeared my work.)
Starting to shade stuff in! I arbitrarily picked the ink bottle to start with, It has several vertical highlights, which I tried to leave alone, and a lot of black.
Working on the rat! Whose body is really way too big, but hey--I was looking at the assemblage from a different angle than the picture is taken, plus its relative lightness made it stand out more and appear bigger than it was.
I switched to diagonal strokes (I turned the paper, really) in an attempt to indicate the direction of the fur, and was trying to leave the area of light on its butt, mid-greys on its back, and darker on its belly. Had I left it like this, it would have been FINE but as always I ended up overworking it later.
OK, problem #1 is that I didn't take enough time to sit there and study the values, to figure out what was the darkest, what was the lightest, and where each thing fell on that spectrum. I also didn't practice with my #2 pencil, which led to me not really having a good idea of how much pencil should be laid down for each degree of darkness/light.
Starting on the drapery behind them. The drapery should have the darkest blacks and some highlights. It is not done yet, in this picture. I also gave a quickly, light shade to all the drapery to help keep in mind that it's supposed to be dark. Ideally I'd have shaded it to the level of the highlights on the cloth, but ain't no one got time for that.
Getting on to more items! Shading more of the drapery. When shading drapery, THINK about WHY those shadows are there. Don't just draw the shapes without understanding how they work. The big shadow to the upper right of the chipboard notebook in back is there because there's a big fold of cloth coming out towards me and the overhead light is casting a shadow from it to its left. Other shadows are because a fold of cloth is overlapping another, or because there's a gentle dent in the cloth...that works ACCORDING TO GRAVITY. Don't just draw random folds and dents: they need to obey the laws of physics, the characteristics of the fabric, and the masses underneath the fabric that are interacting with the fabric. There is a reason for each fold and crease, and you need to understand that to shade it correctly.
THIS IS HARD TO LEARN. THIS IS VERY HARD TO LEARN. Very experienced artists can SOMETIMES calculate the folds and creases according to why the fabric is being distorted (leg bending, wind blowing, etc.). I cannot do this. I must have reference. If you look at my artwork you'll see that most of the time I half-ass folds and creases because I am impatient. This is a bad habit.
MOAR SHADING! Starting to work on the plastic bottle in front, the scissors and tape in the middle,and the spool of thread.
This is also where I started getting tired and...stopped looking at the assemblage. Instead of frequently looking at real life, I got stuck staring at the artwork, and started shading according to what I THOUGHT was right, not according to reality.
THIS RIGHT HERE IS WHY PEOPLE DO NOT GET BETTER AT ART.
THIS RIGHT HERE IS WHY PEOPLE DO NOT GET BETTER AT ART.
THIS RIGHT HERE IS WHY PEOPLE DO NOT GET BETTER AT ART.
See the bottle up there? I have drawn glass and plastic bottles before. Empty Coke bottles, glass vases, etc. Ones that have shapes and distortions, and dramatic lighting. My brain started insisting and I SAW this on the bottle, even though it did not exist!!! that the highlights and lowlights on the bottle were DRAMATIC.
Reader, they are not. In fact, the bottle is almost completely transparent, with subtle streaks of highlights. Light reflecting on the plastic actually makes the darks within it slightly lighter and the lights slightly darker. It has less of a range of dark to light than the stuff behind it and around it.
THIS IS HOW YOUR BRAIN DECEIVES YOU. It "knows" that plastic bottles have dramatic highlights and lowlights, and therefore it gives significantly more importance to the ones that are there.
I also shaded in the rest of the drapery, and got to work on the cat-faced cup. This is also where I completely lost it on the tape.
BTW you'll note that I didn't carefully draw in the arabesque cutouts on the chipboard notebook. Ain't no one got time for that. I'm not going for 100% realism, I'm going for, say 85% realism.
Here is another thing that my brain told me that was contrary to reality. My brain said "The rat is sitting on a white box." So I left it mostly white up til now. Yup, it's sitting on a white box...that is dark grey because of dramatic shadows. I finally noticed that, and shaded the box in.
Also note that the spool of thread does not have distinct edges. It fades into the drapery behind it.
Here's the final drawing! Well, the drawing at the point where I gave up. You're never really finished.
PROBLEMS WITH IT:
Now, some of you are going to have an urge to leap in and say "Stop being harsh on yourself! You did a great job!"
Here's the problem: If I don't consciously pick it apart and figure out where I went wrong, then I don't improve. That's fine if I'm doing it for fun, but if I do an exercise like this, picking it apart is one of the most important parts of the process.
So!
1. I don't have good control of the values. This is partly the fault of the tools: the #2 pencil doesn't go very dark or very light, however in the hands of a master it can produce a masterpiece so it's not the only problem.
Value control is one of my biggest weaknesses, and it's something I need to consciously work on. The rat should be a little lighter, the scissors should DEFINITELY be lighter, the ink should be one of the darkest spots and it's not, instead of subtle gradations in shading on the fabric, I ended up resorting to lines to define stuff.
2. I stopped looking at the scene. I ended up just drawing random dark shapes in the drapery to define vague folds and dents. I got the values on the tape and the scissors wrong. I fucked up highlights and lowlights on the clear plastic bottle. The shape and position of the tape roll has nothing to do with reality. Let us not even discuss the scissors.
3. I wasn't able to get in the specular highlights--the tiny pops of WHITE on shiny surfaces like glass, plastic and ceramic--because I didn't plan for them to start with. I should have lightly drawn them in to start with so that I wouldn't ham-handedly shade over them.
4. That's mostly it? Not to say there aren't problems--I have lines in the shading instead of even shading, although that's partly from using the wrong pencil, my perspective is off, I placed items too close to the middle instead of more spread out--but those are fairly minor as these things go. Value control is the biggie here.
SPEAKING OF VALUE CONTROL:
Red is DARKER than you think! It's saturated here, which is why the tape dispenser is the focal point of the color photo. But when you change it to black and white...
the red is DARK!
I knew that, and tried to shade it that way. I SHOULD NOT HAVE. This is where you DEVIATE FROM REALITY. To keep the tape as the focal point of the composition, and to keep the middle from being a muddy mess, I should have made it lighter. And made the tape itself lighter. OH WELL.
WHAT DID I DO RIGHT? This is equally as important!
1. I am embarrassed to admit I haven't sat down and drawn a still life in over a decade. I did pretty damn good for not having done it in over a decade. You can see all the items, they more-or-less fit together and look like they're in the same place in reality.
2. I'm really happy with the way the spool of thread and the cat mug interact with each other. That shadow, even though I drew it wrong compared to reality, actually looks 3D. I got the facial features of the cat off, but not so much that it looks that wrong until you compare it to the photo.
3. I can actually see what's wrong with it instead of staring at it going "This doesn't look right...why?" I have spent SO MANY HOURS looking at images saying that, that being able to ID what the problems are feels great.
4. I have a decently good instinctive grasp of composition. That's partly in the way I built the assemblage, and partly in the way I drew it: while I got things wrong, I didn't mess the composition up and I think it actually might be slightly stronger than in reality. (This isn't to say I don't mess it up on other occasions!)
There you go. A still life, at length. YOUR TURN! If you're interested in art, please do try! No need to post it unless you want feedback from others: you have my permission to suck.
You also have Ursula Vernon's permission to suck: here is her Certificate of Bad Artistry. Print it out and hang it on the wall where you can see it.
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I've just got my first tablet and downloaded AutoDesk Sketchbook, which I'm trying to learn, so maybe I'll do 2 tries, one digital and one analog with pencil or charcoal, and compare them.
I quite like how you handled the spool of thread, especially the top end with the strong value contrast. and the left side of the draped backdrop captured both the drape and something of the velvety texture.
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Oooh? (Medievalist & novice artist here).
I inadvertently found out how *some* of the shapes were created; I've drawn them myself. There's a certain level of 'getting it wrong' that looks extremely medieval...
I'm also more and more convinced the closer I look at marginalia, that some of what we're looking at is... comics, for want of a better word. Stylised drawings that exaggerate certain features and that aren't meant to be realistic, so when people critique them through a realistic lens they come to the conclusion that the artists sucked, but if you do the same with a modern comic book, you'd come to the same conclusion.
I've tried to do marginalia and struggled, so I draw my hat.
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But I think it'd be a mistake to generalize that medieval figure drawing isn't meant to be realistic, or even that just the 'sucky' (to a modern realist eye) examples aren't meant to be. Then as now, artists were not homogeneous; even within a style tradition, individuals had greater or lesser skill at different aspects of their craft, and were trying to use their skills to accomplish different effects or purposes. And, sometimes their success or failure was determined not by skill or intention, but by things outside their control, like access to accurate information. Some of the most hilariously terrible medieval art I've seen has been drawings rendered with at least modest technical competence, of real people, creatures, or locations that the artist was evidently rendering from description or shaky memory, rather than from life or a reliable reference from life. Elephants, giraffes, whales. A well-known bridge in Italy as drawn by a Briton. They end up looking cartoonish and unrealistic for the same reason (and, sometimes, in some of the same ways) that a modern police artist's sketch from a a witness description looks odd and fake.
Though of course there are playful, intentionally cartoonish illustrations too -- especially seen in marginalia, as opposed to the more 'serious' art given pride of place in frame.
The book Illuminated Manuscripts by Christopher de Hamel has some striking examples of the variety of medieval illustration, including, fascinatingly, examples of the results of attempts by one artist to duplicate the work of another-- some very exact replicas, others, uh, not so. Medieval Craftmen: Scribes and Illuminators also by de Hamel, delves more into methods by which these artists produced their work, and a bit about how they developed their skills. Some learned from manuals that taught step-by-step how to draw, paint, shade, and highlight common figures to give a desired realistic or stylized effect. Light-boxes and guide sheets could be used for tracing.
A main idea I want to convey when I introduce book arts of the middle ages to people new-to-art or new-to-medievalism, is that expectations of that time were quite different from the modern popular idea of "good" art being at least one of very realistic or very creative--a new vision unique to this particular artist's genius-- or preferably both. Those ideas, especially the union of them, arose out of the Hellenistic ideals of the Renaissance and have been with us in one form or another ever since, but they don't seem to be the motivating ideal for book art in the Middle Ages, when faithful copying was more often seen in the highest-prestige works, and good-faith attempts to produce recognizable-enough illustrations to amuse or inform made up much of the rest.
Er, I seem to have got on my soapbox, perhaps more than was called for. ::stepping down and backing away slowly:::
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