Another image from this excellent book. I have to mention that the book is primarily landscapes. There are fewer than 4-5 nude images. I have chosen to try them for drawing since I thought they are a good place to start. The tone is even and that lets me focus primarily on the shapes and lighting. I suppose landscapes are more simpler for some but to someone starting out, the varied textures, earth, sky, trees, leaves, rocks make it very challenging. I am not sure how I can bring the variety of textures using pencil / charcoal.

Seems to me that the nudes are more a neutral place to start as I have to bring out only the skin tones. I am not pleased with the outcome yet as the original image has a very nice sheen in the highlights… Maybe with  more practice and trial, I will get to understand how to make the shine work.

The images are not very clean as I drew them using charcoal on paper and took a picture with my iphone in fluoroscent light.  Not the best of conditions but atleast, I can share the latest work.

Recently, borders book shop had a sale in Expo. I was there to collect the race pack for my marathon (will write about it another day) and happened to ‘find’ the sale going on. Not one to miss a good deal and given I have been hunting down good sources for drawing ideas, I hopped in and after a long search through many aisles of paperback fiction, cook books and Guinness record publications, I was about to give up the search when I passed through the ‘reference’ section.

They had a large pile of encyclopedias and I found some hardbound photography books buried under. I found 2 good photo books:

• Fragile Earth: A collection of images showing changes to the earth due to natural events and some due to human intervention. A great coffee table book (though I don’t have coffee tables).
• Ancient shape of man: A beautifully printed set of black and white images. The prints are great and images grand. I think this is probably one of the nicest photo books I have. I think I would start collecting good ones if I can. And I am not complaining the price either, I got it for literally 5 USD

Monochrome is a great medium to admire textures without being distracted by colors and I suppose that is one of the reasons I would like to learn and understand building images in mono. Inspired b yone of the images, I tried my hand at depicting one of them here.

I am reading this book called “Drawing on the right side of the brain“. The book is pretty nice in assuring that ‘anyone’ can draw. Which is my belief too. Like I mention earlier and often, this does not mean that one can immediately be creative. However, it is possible to pick up the technical aspects of trawing and the ability to see what is out there and be able to put it on paper.

One of the exercises was to create a baseline before reading the book. The author asked the reader to draw 3 things, one of which was your hand. It stuck me that there is very little reason to go around hunting for complex images to draw when we have one literally at the end of our hand (heh). The play of light and teh complex shadows it creates makes it challenging to draw it properly. Well I have tried and may be by the end of the book, I can do better.

Note: My hand is naturally crooked with too many bends. Come to think of it, I wonder how I can function normally with fingers shaped the way they are…