It's not at all what you think

Drawing is hard. One of the things that makes drawing difficult is nothing is anything like anyone would said it would be. At times, drawing is the world's most disappointing exercise. You go in thinking you know exactly how you'll approach everything, then you find out that nothing you're looking at is quite as you thought it was.

Tricky that way.

In the end, drawing is a puzzle. It's a matter of seeing how things fit together, then fitting them together again yourself. That line intersects that other line at a 45-degree angle. The finger meets the thumb one inch from the first joint. The round of the shoulder makes a shape like a teardrop. These are all abstractions, but at the same time, they describe a truth that's hard to replicate unless it is abstracted. You can't just "draw a nose". A nose isn't a nose. It's a combination of lines and forms that create the shape we recognize as a nose.

Realistic drawing is perhaps even more an abstraction than abstract drawing, when you think of it. Or else, you could say, the abstract artists just take it all two-hundred steps further.

At any rate, my thirty minutes went by very quickly today and ended up turning into 40 minutes before I decided I had to stop and get on with the day. I still haven't found the brushes I want in Painter, but I'm getting there. At least I know what I want to look for.

One of the real challenges of drawing digitally - unless you're lucky and have something like a Wacom Cintiq - is that you can't bring your measured angles via sighted-along-a-pencil to the page. All I've got under my hand is this blank gray 4x6 plastic pad and and my drawing is sitting vertically on the screen in front of me. More challenges.

Anyway, here is the result of 40 minutes with a photo of Helen Mirren.


Yeah, I didn't get near finished. "You didn't even add a highlight to her lips! That would have only taken a moment!"

But I'd gone on 40 minutes already! Ah well, practice practice.