Eating pancakes comes at our home always with a warning: careful, due to unresistable deliciousness you tend to eat to much of them. May cause serious stomachproblems!
Drawing ellipses is a very good drawing exercise, but can also become very boring. What I try to do to lighten up the exercise is making a subject out of the ellipses. For instance: donuts. They come in a very basic form, are therefore easy subjects, they can be bought mostly everywhere and, last but not least, after finishing your exercise you can eat your drawing model! Is there any other hobby with such an advantage?
Although the name is "Brussels witloof", where "wit"stands for "white", the subject tends to be yellowish greeny white.
Another attempt to draw white subjects against a white background: mushrooms. Luckily these weren't as big as the ones we once grew by ourselves. That was a fun thing to do, growing our own mushrooms. Very easy with a 1-2-3 starterskit, but it became such a success that we couldn't see mushrooms for a while!
As an ongoing practice I sometimes put a test on myself. For instance drawing white objects against a white background. I thought some pieces of garlic would be a nice challenge. It turned out to be less difficult then I was afraid of. When I looked close at the garlic, I saw all kinds of colours hidden in what I thought was a white surface. All I had to do was to exaggerate those colours to give depth and 'life' to the drawing.
Last saturday I attended a beginners workshop portrait drawing. One of the exercises was to draw a selfportrait. The difficulty was that you weren't allowed to look on the paper to see what you were drawing. Purpose of the exercise was to let your hand 'feel' where the different parts of a face are. At the end I'm glad I don't look like my self-portrait!
One of the things that is important for your brain to recognize a face, is mainly the shape and size of stains that are 'hidden' in a face. Your brain doesn't really recognize a person by the looks and number of detail in his or her face. So one of the exercises was to make a portrait just by painting stains.
I must say it was very enlightening for me, also because I'm used to draw in a very detailed way. It's nice to know that there are other ways to make a drawing. Or portrait, in this case. Certainly a very well spend day and challenging to see what I can do with that knowledge in the nearby future.
