My Right Hand is Growing on Me

About a month into my non-dominant hand drawing practice, my sketches probably don’t look vastly different, but my right hand feels very different. Now when I pick up the drawing instrument with my right hand, it no longer feels like I’m trying to manipulate it with a mitten on. My left hand doesn’t have the urge to grab the pencil away. I can’t say it feels “natural” to draw with my right hand, but it’s no longer frustratingly slow, either. My right is still not as strong as the left, but it probably takes a long time to build strength.

At the bottom of the post, I’ve included my latest writing sample and the one from a couple of weeks prior. This time, I can definitely see improvement. I’m not practicing my writing at all – I’m just taking a sample once a week, so any changes in my writing are a direct result of the drawing practice.

8/6/21 writing sample

8/21/20 writing sample

International Left Handers Day

First observed in 1976, Aug. 13 was International Left Handers Day. (Who knew, right? Well, of course, I did!) I took a break from my ongoing right-hand drawing practice to draw with my left that day, and what a relief! The ease and swiftness, the agility and motion: Left hand – how I missed you!

A change of hands for International Left Handers Day!

I took a writing sample the other day – not much improvement compared to the week prior.

Any improvement compared to 8/6 (below)? Not much.

Fine Motor Skills

I’ve had to go through physical therapy a few times in my life. If I did my exercises regularly and correctly, I was usually rewarded with less pain and my PT telling me she was seeing improvements in my strength. Although the exercises were always mind-numbingly boring, they worked. 

This lefty has been sketching every day with the right hand for two weeks now, and I’m pleased that I can already feel it getting a bit stronger. Unlike my drawing skills (which have always gone up and down, up and down, like a series of rolling hills instead of on an upwardly progressive line), the physical development of my right hand seems more consistent. Presumably, my right hand’s drawing skills are also improving, but it’s harder to see that progress. The development I feel is more in how easily I can move a pencil to make a curved mark in the right location and even how quickly I can move it. It’s satisfying to feel those changes. 

Drawings of my hand, however, don’t seem to show improvements in fine motor control as I thought they would. Here’s where that skill is much more apparent: in writing. Just for fun, I thought I’d make a writing sample (bottom of post) with my right hand. I won’t test it every day, but often enough to see progress, if any. If my self-directed “physical therapy” is successful, I should ultimately see improvement in my penmanship along with my drawing. We’ll call this sample the baseline.

A redo of the pose from Day 140, which I wasn't happy with. I like
this one better.

8/6/20 writing sample

Red is the New Black

Here’s the change I hinted at when I finished my black sketchbook: Red is the new black. This notebook was given to me by a friend who knows how much I enjoy sketching in red Field Notes Sweet Tooth notebooks. The color is similar, but it’s an A5 size, so I have enough room to make hand drawings at the same scale as the rest of my series. Best of all, I can now take advantage of the same feature that made me fall in love with Sweet Tooth in the first place: Red can be used as a strong mid-tone, so I can use both black for shading and white for highlights.

But the bigger change? Right is the new left! Way back in April when I had done only 23 hand sketches, I drew with my right hand as a novelty, but quickly switched back to my dominant left hand the next day. Since I’m in this series for the long run, I thought it would be an interesting experiment to continue making right-handed drawings daily until this red sketchbook is full.

My brain has gotten a lot of practice in proportion and form from the previous 132 sketches, so using my right hand is about physical training more than skill. Fine motor control and strength are its main weaknesses; it’s more like physical therapy than drawing practice.

I also learned from that April sketch that ballpoint was a poor medium choice because it requires a fair amount of pressure to make strong, dark marks. I’m now using the softest media I could find in my arsenal, such as pastel, charcoal and Conte crayon, which also smudge easily with little pressure.

So far, it’s slow going – literally. My left hand keeps wanting to grab the pencil out of my right hand: “Oh, gimme that – you’re so slow.” But this is exactly the new challenge I needed to keep this series going.

Oh no, I just realized I counted Day 135 twice!

I didn't skip any days... I just caught up on my
incorrect numbering!

A change of hands.

I Appear, I Leave

10/28/19 Gloria (10-min. pose)

My current reading is Ways of Drawing: Artists’ Perspectives and Practices, by the Royal Drawing School. It’s a collection of essays about the practice of drawing by students and faculty of this classical drawing school in London. While most of the essays are by artists, a notable exception is by a long-time art model, Isley Lynn. Not an artist herself (in fact, she’s a playwright), she has experienced a range of encounters with artists who spend many hours scrutinizing and interpreting her nude body. 

I appear, I leave, and the artwork is the trace of my visit. Thousands of people have seen me intimately without knowing me. They never see me, they see a reflection of me, a version of me, someone else’s story of me. And art to a model is like money to the dead – you can’t take it with you when you go. – Isley Lynn

20-min. pose

10-min. pose

10-min. pose

Life Drawing Lessons from Apples

11/4/19 Clara (20-min. pose)

As you know, I sketch a lot of simple still lives consisting of no more than one or two pieces of produce. These aren’t especially inspiring compositions or subject matter, but they give me practice in working on values in color and blending with colored pencils, and fruit is easily available in my home. The forms of apples and pears are so simple that they aren’t very challenging to draw, but anything three-dimensional is good practice in rendering form and interpreting light logic.

One day at a Gage life drawing session last spring, I suddenly made a new observation: In addition to the strong shadow under the breasts (which I always expect), I saw subtle arcs of light reflected from the model’s thigh or some other plane of lighted skin. I know it sounds like a sophomoric joke to compare breasts with apples, but I realized that the reflection was exactly the same as the reflected light I always see in my sketches of fruit that I place on white paper to help me see the shadow easily. I’ve been going to life drawing for years, yet this was the first time that reflection on the model consciously registered in my brain – and the light bulb turned on. All that fruit I’ve been sketching had taught me something – though it took a long time for the lesson to sink in.

Now I always look for that reflection as well as the shadow. It might take a while to learn, but once seen, a lesson cannot be unseen.

5/8/19 Shannon (20-min. pose)

4/29/19 (25-min. pose)

2/8/19 Lessons from apples and other handy produce.

Life-Drawing Retrospective

This old cowboy and I have been through a lot together.

How long does it take me to fill a 100-page, 9-by-12-inch sketchbook?

Apparently five-and-a-half years. On Feb. 28, 2013, I took a brand-new Strathmore toned sketchbook to a life-drawing session at Gage Academy (according to my blog, I completed my first five-visit life-drawing punch card that day, which felt like quite an accomplishment). Since I want to have time to take advantage of toned paper by practicing shading and highlights with dry media, I usually use that book only for poses of 10 minutes or longer, so I only use a few pages per session (I use a water-friendly sketchbook for shorter poses). At some sessions, I don’t use it at all. And I tend to go to life drawing only during the wet, cold months, not all year. Consequently, the toned book doesn’t get filled very quickly.

Last week, I finally sketched on the last page, and like each time I fill a Gage punch card, it felt like an accomplishment. As I took the sketchbook out of my life-drawing bag to replace with a fresh one, I thumbed through it before storing it on a shelf. The torn cover indicated how many times it’s been in and out of my bag. All the pages are badly warped and buckled from a water bottle incident years ago. This Strathmore and I have been through a lot together.

Unlike most of my location sketchbooks, which individually cover only a short period of time, this single book has become a retrospective of my progress (or lack thereof) over the past five-and-a-half years. (It’s very similar to my panorama landscape sketchbooks, which I tend to use mainly when I travel. I filled one in 2016 and another in 2018, and each included travels over several years.) For a process-oriented sketcher like me, it’s interesting to page through the book and observe the changes.

For example, when I compare sketches made from poses of the same duration, I can see that I am now able to get more detail or greater tonal definition in less time. Below are two 10-minute drawings from 2014 (Randy at left) and 2018 (Melissa at right). Last week, I even tried making five-minute drawings with tone using a dry medium (Conte), which I rarely do. It means my eye is getting faster at gauging and assessing form, and my hand must be moving faster, too – both skills I want to continue developing for sketching on location.

1/30/14 10-min. pose

6/4/18 10-min. pose

Sadly, not all of my skills have developed at the same rate. My single-biggest challenge at life drawing has always been, and continues to be, proportions: I tend to make the head too small in proportion to the body (look at poor Randy, above!). I have learned many times, from books and instructors, that the average human is about six-and-a-half heads tall. Whenever the model is standing upright, I always measure, sometimes more than once, to determine how many heads tall he or she is. Below left is a 20-minute sketch on the very first page of the book, done in 2013. I don’t know whether I was measuring back then, but as I’ve drawn him, the poor model is about nine heads tall (I couldn’t even fit his feet on the page).

At right is another 20-minute pose sketched just a couple of weeks ago. I recall carefully measuring Pete at six-and-a-half heads, yet now that I measure the drawing, he is more like seven heads tall. This is how it goes: I draw the head, measure out six-and-a-half heads, and make a mark where the bottom of his weight-bearing foot should end up. I also mark where the bottom of the torso should be. I draw from top to bottom, and when I hit the foot mark, I realize I am still at only about mid-calf. Drats. What happened?

2/28/13 20-min. pose

9/16/19 20-min. pose

A few years ago I took a life-drawing workshop from Mark Kang-O’Higgins. By that time, I was already aware of my difficulty with proportions, so I was trying to be extra conscious of this issue in class. During a critique, he came over to my easel, and after making a couple of comments about things he liked, he pulled out a pencil and started measuring the model (I cringed because I knew what was coming) and then my drawing. In reality, the model was the average six-and-a-half heads tall. My drawing was more than eight heads tall, and I only saw that as he counted out the heads.

Mark told me that making the head proportionally too small is one of the most common mistakes of beginning life-drawing students. He said there’s a natural tendency to get bigger and bigger as you go, so if you start from the head on a standing model, the body just gets longer and longer toward the feet. He said the exception to this tendency seems to be students who have had some portraiture experience but not as much full-body drawing experience. Those students tend to make the head disproportionately large because they are used to putting emphasis on the face.

Fascinating, right?

 

4/11/13 20-min. pose (I was so focused on the lovely curve of her back that I didn't see that I had drawn this model to be at least 10 heads tall!

As I leafed through the sketchbook from beginning to end, I could definitely see that my proportions have improved over time. And yet even as recently as a couple weeks ago, I still wasn’t hitting the mark. It’s good to review now and then to avoid getting cocky (and acknowledge what I need to focus on).

On the other hand, it’s also good to review for the gratification of seeing how much I have improved. I’ve seen some artists who use charcoal at life drawing immediately rub out each sketch after they’ve finished it so that they can simply use the same piece of paper for the whole session. Maybe for them, life drawing is nothing but practice, so they have no need to keep the evidence of that practice. If that’s true, they must be the ultimate in being process-oriented rather than product-oriented.

Yet I can’t help wondering why they wouldn’t keep their practice sketches so that they can have the gratification of seeing their progress over time. Compared to my urban sketches, which are meaningful and important to me as a record of the world around me, my drawings of nude models mean nothing – they are just the evidence of my practice. But the evidence of my progress is very meaningful and important. For that, I’m grateful to this Strathmore book, and I look forward to filling the next one.

Below are a few more sketches from the book.

2/22/16 10-min. pose

4/10/18 20-min. pose

4/17/18 10-min. pose

12/4/18 20-min. pose

1/17/19 10-min. pose

2/14/19 10-min. pose

9/23/19 5-min. poses

9/23/19 18-min. pose (This is the last drawing in the book.)