The trouble with art, in the D.I.Y. sense is that it just
isn’t like riding a bicycle, there are lots of aspects of the primary artist’s
skill, which when you really get down to the nuts and bolts of the thing, is
drawing something so that someone else can recognise what is you have drawn,
that just get worse and worse if you don’t practice them regularly.
What I mean here is that if you reach a point where you can
draw reasonable likenesses of horses (that’s Red Rum) reasonable likenesses of
people (that’s the queen) and like old Stubbs you just draw horses for a while,
you go to draw the king with his winner and it’s just any old king.
As I guess most people know I work in a bookshop and so I
thought that while I ought to practice drawing likenesses as my ability here
has gone right off, but as I like to think I am a conscientious bookseller I
would start with authors.
The main website for fiction is Fantastic Fiction www.fantasticfiction.co.uk the
authors are in alphabetical order, I have just done the ones that have photos
where you can see the whole face with a background with some contrast.
Embarrassing really as not only do the sketches not look much like the authors
but David Lodge’s parlour game called 'Humiliation' comes to mind as I don’t
think I have read any of them either.
All of the sketches were done using a B hardness 0.5mm
propelling pencil on a £2.99 pad from The Works, you may have heard plenty of instruction
about drawing faces, like drawing an egg first, these are about A5 size, being
half of an A4 and even at this size one of the main problems is smudging your
drawing with your hand. So for the most part I find you have to work from the
top left corner to the bottom right, assuming you are right handed like I am.
The pictures will probably expand if clicked on compulsively,
so you can see just how bad they are, I have pencilled the authors names on the
pictures as I didn’t want to put them up in text with them not looking much like
the people I had drawn as the search engines would have picked them up.
and so it goes on, even some I've read
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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.