What am I doing?

This is another attempt at deliberate practice for artists, I suppose. Deliberate Practice. The act of making yourself do exactly what you are terrified of doing. Something you’re sure you will fail at miserably. Something that will demonstrate to everyone, and specially yourself, that you are and always will be outstandingly inept at this chosen pursuit, this pursuit that means so much to you that you don’t even want to take the chance that you will have to face that ineptness, to realise no chance of ever being good at this pursuit and slink out the studio door, lock it, and throw away the key. So, no pressure then.

Exactly.

This blog is personal, and will chronicle my attempt at learning to draw and, eventually paint, portraits. I’ll be using the same subject, my friend and lover Chuck. Again, no pressure, eh? 

Here’s my first attempt. This particular drawing breaks the first important rule of drawing anything. That first rule is dead simple: When you’re drawing, your drawing pad and the subject you’re drawing have to be at similar top to bottom viewing angles. If you are looking straight ahead at your sketch pad you must be looking at the subject straight ahead. If you have your subject lying on the table and you are drawing on a vertical sketch pad what you’re producing is an unwitting attempt at anamorphic art. In order for the drawing to look even slightly like what you were seeing, the sketch pad has to be viewed at the same angle you saw the subject at. I fucked up. Not for the first time, and probably not the last. I first made this particular mistake way before the days of flat screen computers. There I was, a programmer at work, sitting in front of a monitor the size of a milk crate, with a photo of my old Mastiff taped to the side of the screen. I’d just made some changes to a program and was waiting for the program to compile, wondering if the newest version would work properly. What to do? Photo of dog on the upright computer screen, pad of sticky notes on the desk. Well, why not draw the dog? Wow. Was that drawing ever deformed! Anyway, here's photo #1 with a somewhat less deformed shape.