Drawing from Memory

 

My first try on this shoe wasn't very successful, so I tried again
the next day (below).

Sketching shoes and hair-dos from my imagined past was nostalgic fun, but to sustain my interest for 100 days, I had to up the challenge. Beginning with Day 15, I decided to focus on drawing less from imagination and more from memory after close, direct observation.

On the second try, I got more details right.

While I would like to continue developing my imaginative drawing skills, drawing from memory is actually a more useful skill for sketching on location. I know we all do some of that automatically: A person walks by, and we catch some part of the gesture, but they are long gone by the time we finish, so the rest must be drawn from a remembered image. It’s a fleeting image, though, and if anything interrupts before getting it on the page – poof! It’s gone.

Developing my memory muscles for this purpose is a worthwhile exercise. When I was practicing life drawing on Zoom, I tried covering up the screen for part of the pose time to see how much I could draw without looking at the model. It was a good exercise, but hectic to manage so that a portion of the pose time was saved for drawing again from observation. My current project is much easier in one way: I’m allowing myself to study the object for as long as I think is necessary.

So far, my process is to choose an object and observe it closely from all angles until I feel I have a firm, three-dimensional mental image of it. Then I walk away and do a few things for a while so that I’m not drawing immediately. I know the image fades quickly from memory, so I’m hoping to lengthen the time that I can retain the picture in my mind. I have deliberately chosen simple objects with clear forms (nothing amorphous like bushes), but if I improve with the simple objects, I hope to graduate to more complex ones eventually.

On the crank side, it should be red, not black! I did better on the front.

Because I know I have difficulty with even simple mechanisms (how parts are put together), I have been paying special attention to those parts. Ironically, I have focused so much on those parts that I miss really obvious details – like colors! In the first shoe exercise, I completely missed the red interior lining as well as the shape of the sole and how it connects to the leather. I felt I had missed enough that it was worth doing it again the next day, when I did much better.

I did fairly well on the red pencil sharpener (sketched with a new red Blackwing), but I couldn’t remember how the crank handle attached, despite what I thought was careful study of the mechanism. With the soap dispenser, I again focused on some mechanical details, which I did well on, but then the basic bottle shape wasn’t quite right. The soap was particularly illuminating as a subject: It’s something I look at and use multiple times a day, yet it was obvious that I had never really seen it until I made the effort to observe it with the purpose of drawing it.

I find it helps if I talk to myself (hopefully silently) and use visually evocative words to describe what I’m observing: The top of the soap pump is shaped like an alien head. The pump is wearing two turtlenecks. From the side, the bottle has rounded shoulders.

Ten years ago when I took my first-ever urban sketching class, instructor Jane Richlovsky gave us a challenging assignment. At the Ballard Locks one day, we had been sketching from observation in the usual way. Toward the end of class, she instructed us to choose a scene and visually memorize as much of it as possible. We were not allowed to take a photo. Then we were to wait several hours or even until the next day to sketch whatever we could recall. At that point, I had had less than a year of sketching experience in general, and I had never done that type of memory-drawing exercise before. I failed the exercise badly – I could barely visualize the scene beyond the very general, and I did not have enough technical skills to organize whatever I could remember into a drawing.

Now that I have 10 years of observational drawing experience under my belt, drawing from memory is certainly easier than it was that day at the Ballard Locks, but it’s still extremely challenging. I’ll keep at it for as much of the remaining days in the 100 Day Project as my brain can stand! Whew, it’s exhausting!

I did well on most of the details, but I didn't get the shape of the handle right.

I waited 6 hours after observing to draw... which was too long, it turned out! I missed a lot of details that I had mentally repeated to myself and revisualized during the day to help me remember, but by the time I put pencil to paper, I had forgotten. Way off on the proportions! But I'm pleased that I got the hexagonal shape of the button right.

One thing these exercises have taught me is that "everything is designed" (as a designer has been quoted saying), yet I take for granted the design elements of common objects like this electric kettle. It has no straight lines anywhere -- everything is roundish. I would not have noticed that if I hadn't drawn it, and maybe especially from memory.

I missed key elements like the basic shape! You can check my work. ;-)