Exercising Discipline

Still at it and, frankly, some nights I am just not in the mood for such a regimented, prescribed exercise.  The evenings I spent drawing ears about did me in...an eerie experience (old, unfunny teacher-pun).  However, when I thumb back through my sketch book I am seeing progress.  My estimation of measurements is getting more accurate and my eye is getting better at seeing what is incorrect.

Drawing my nose is literally up against the paper and I am absolutely certain that the marks I make are accurate.  Then I step back, or in this case look at a photo, and I can see the mistakes clearly.  You do see the funny "bobbles" along the edge of the foot, no?  Regardless of the piece I am copying I am fairly certain that a real foot would never "read" this way, right?

I can see now why we gaze so longingly at works of the old masters...this is how they were trained.  And today we take a few painting classes or get an "MFA" and expect to make money off our results.  Back in the day most apprentices spent years with these exercises before ever touching a brush or mixing paint.  Whew.

Occassionally we are "allowed" to digress and given something off the grid to draw.  So I present Virginia Wolfe, the author.  Today I can see the errors loud and clear while, maybe a year ago, I might have been satisfied with the current results.  During class I also observed that our esteemed teacher, while commenting on our work, casually mentioned how many other photos of Ms Wolfe he had looked at before starting on his rendition of the piece.  He didn't realize it but he was teaching me to do further research on any subject before tackling it....

The difficulty here also was to enlarge the drawing and keep the proportions accurate...this involves math so it gives me a little hyper-ventilation just thinking about!  I won't list the errors but you can see my notes got covered as her hair got larger....

Is there anything currently that you are intentionally disciplined about learning?  Whether it's tennis, music, drawing or cookie baking, I think the take-away lesson is that the age old phrase we hated as kids: practice makes perfect has merit.