Sometimes it is a good idea to take two steps back and reflect upon your progress in drawing (like DaVinci stated… ‘you need to get away from your work so when you return you see it with fresh eyes’)
We will not be literally abandoning our work, but will just use our imagination to help us understand better where we started from, where we are right now and where we need to go.
Although in 99% of the cases building you skill sets is what will push you forward with arch drawing… sometimes contemplation is what does the trick to move you past certain sticking points.
You basically thinking about more profound things about drawing… and seeing as you will be investing hundreds of hours throughout you career in drawing, it is a good idea to invest 30 minutes once every month or so to think of better ways of doing the same things and so on.
This lecture is going to teach you how to think like a talented architect. The reality is you need to rewire certain parts of your mind if you want to achieve drawing succes. It is just how things are: you can either do this retiring proactively right here and now or wait for these insights to come by themselves after hundreds and and thousands of hours of practice time.
Go for the easy way out and be proactive right now to save a lot of time, effort and heartache.
I want you to get multiple A4 papers and just do some mental exercises.
Firt of all, I want you to open up the note you made the previous month.
How many of the things written there have you learned?
How different is the writing on that piece of paper? (You wrote it, but how does it seem different?)
How can you
1. Short recap of what you learned in the last month.
I want you to list ten things you have learned. Make it a point to be a specific as possible.
1. We will write another list of ten things you want to learn or problems in your drawing style you want to solve. There is a catch -I want you to split the page in half with a vertical line down the middle and then after you write the list of ten things on the left write a possible solution for each of the things.
For example:
I want to draw faster –>> *possible solution* put a timer at 15 minutes so I pace my efforts within a set time frame
I want to try different color compositions –>> *possible solution* do 30 minutes of different complementary color compositions using the 80/20 principle.
At a certain point your head will hurt… this happens because you are using your imagination to materialise a future concrete outcome. Turns out us humans are not taught to use this part of our brain as much, so you need conscious effort to keep yourself on track.
Line Drawing Exercise
This is probably the most important exercise you will ever come across for improving your line drawing.
This is the moment when you will get to the next level for you line drawing.
So, the way this exercise works it that you have multiple abstract compositions where you will get to improve your line drawing.
You need to be able to have a line drawing which has gradients by itself, without any help from hatching.
So if until now we drew staring, clear lines which were either construction lines, contour lines or thick lines and focused on hatching for a gradient… we can switch to a more sensitive drawing style by means of having a gradient through the line drawing.
The abstract compositions need to be thoroughly studied so you understand where each line has different inflections – either getting darker or lighter.
It also matters to not lift your pencil off the page – the key to getting the line drawing sorted is to have a continuous line drawing and be able to vary it in accordance to the context.
The top exercises are the ones with the spirals that are continuous and need to diverge into looking 3D… these will help you with a lot of things – spontaneous composition, understanding that things overlap when drawing them – so you will have larger spirals, smaller spirals etc
Another thing you can do is draw the rectangular variant of this composition, so it will have the same consistent, ‘no pen off the page’ line drawing, but with rectangles instead of spirals.
You can do all the other exercises, and I advise you actually go through each of them three times at least.
