I’ve finished the first 7 lessons in this YOU CAN DRAW IN 30 DAYS book, which has taken me through basic shapes and basic shading, and I’ve done some of the line work exercises from my Udemy drawing course. The next section in the “Learn to Draw in 100 Hours” project is basically… “practice that,” followed by some basic perspective stuff.
According to my very rough breakdown of the project, hours 10-20 on this thing are shading & basic perspective, so I’m going to kind of aim for a combination of hours 8-15 being going through the project’s various shading tutorials and using the Udemy course for more basic shapes stuff. The next sections of that (after doing more line work, which I haven’t fully caught up on yet) is “learning shape and form fundamentals”, so I feel like that’s fairly complementary to the project tutorials.
(Hours 8-15, she said, as if there wasn’t a real and terrible possibility that she would quit in another 45 minutes.)
Assuming I get through that, I’ll start moving toward the perspective work.
Let’s see. How do I feel about this so far? Partly that I’m annoyed the YOU CAN DRAW book only uses one light source/angle for all its stuff so far, which I understand is for the ease of learning to do a thing at all but I feel a little as if it’s…
…so when I was a child, my dance teacher, Jean McMaster, always made us start on the left foot when learning new steps, when doing our turns, etc, because most of us were right-handed/dominant and starting on the left forced us to LEARN on that side in a way that wasn’t naturally comfortable to us. I started dancing so young I was well indoctrinated into this by the time I was old enough to have an opinion, and while, once I WAS old enough, I DID have opinions, it was also ingrained.
I feel as if using one right-side light source through the first several lessons is teaching people to learn the steps on their strong side first, which will not strengthen them on their weaker side. I understand why it’s done: the writer/teacher wants you to feel as if you’re making progress with relative ease. But I feel as if it’s not helpful, and of course because I’ve actually been drawing and taking art lessons my whole life, my skill level is already above the very basic stuff being done here, so IDK if I’d be as annoyed – or even notice it – if I was actually a rank beginner. But. This is my ✨artistic journey✨ so I get to be annoyed by what annoys me.
Other than that…I’m not entirely sure I’ve learned much yet, but I’m practicing, which is more than I’ve done at all in literal decades, and even if I haven’t particularly learned anything new, I’m better than I was ten days ago just because I’ve picked up a pencil and drawn for several of those days. And since what practice I’ve had over the past Long Time hasn’t been any attempt at going back to the basics, I’m confident this is good for my skills, anyway. So. Onward, I guess, for as long as my attention span lasts.
