Challenging

I’ve lately been feeling the itch make art — to do more drawing and the like. It’s been hard to make myself do it though. So I have begun a 30 day drawing challenge, to break the ice and get in the habit. Again, it’s something I came across on Pinterest.

As much as I am able, I will share my drawing journey with you folks in order to motivate me to keep going. There is just something about having an audience.

Yesterday was Day One, so I drew myself in pencil.

While I was student teaching, my Art A class (six graders), were in the midst of a self-portrait unit, so my mind is fresh with tips and tricks on how to draw portraits. For instance: the distance between your eyes is one eye-width. That’s pretty much universal-try it. Also, the outer edges of your mouth usually line up with the center of your eye. Most of the middle schoolers did not believe this one and kept drawing their mouths too small, but you can easily confirm it by looking in mirror and using a pencil to line up the edge of your mouth with your eye and see where it ends up. One more thing-when one is drawing a nose (which can be tricky) once should only draw the bottom of the nose–the nostrils etc–and then the rest of the nose is just shading. People have a tendency to want to draw the whole nose with lines, but that ends up looking wrong. This is true when drawing a person looking at you straight on, not in profile.

Of course, you could break all of these rules of and still have a legitimate piece of art.

Portrait of Dora Maar, 1937, Pablo Picasso

It’s important to know the rules first though, so that you can know how to effectively break them.