Against all odds (as far as I’m concerned), I’ve hit the 50 hour mark in the 100 hours project. I genuinely figured I’d crap out in the first twenty hours or so & have been baffled by peoples’ supportive conviction that I would, although my friend Kate pointed out people are REALLY ACCUSTOMED to seeing me finish creative projects, which, true! But those are BOOKS! I start & fail OTHER creative projects in public all the time!
I tell you what, though, I like this so much more than knitting. -laughs- I hope to go back to my dishclothes a little in the next few months because I have a lot of yarn to get through, but my ambitions don’t really go beyond that. This artsy fartsy, thing, though, there are a bunch of follow-ups I’d like to do…
Anyway, so my thoughts at the halfway point are…mostly that I’ve always believed I was a good enough artist to know how good I wasn’t*, and to have an idea of how good I might be if I practiced a lot. I feel like so far in this project I have gotten better at a few technical aspects and those put together may make a significant difference in my skill level when I’m done with this, but right now I can’t really tell if I’ve gotten better, per se, or if I’m just ACTUALLY PRACTICING, which I haven’t done in decades, and am therefore regaining some long-neglected skills.
A thing I AM better at is getting proportions right; I’m pretty pleased with this parrot (I have never drawn this many birds in my LIFE, wtf is it with birds in these practice things???):
not at ALL pleased with this STUPID CHAIR (i’m not THAT much better at proportions, apparently, christ non-organic objects are hard)
and pretty happy with the two lil’ birbs that were the last four-five hours of drawing:
These birds were a “follow along” (the top one), then “try one yourself.” I’m pretty happy with both of them, although I like the first one better, mostly because…
…see the instructor for that one had a photograph HE was working from, and he’d scanned it and put it in the corner of the video while he worked. It turned out that the photo he had had a great deal more fine detail, but I was trying to work from the photo in the video, because I felt I was supposed to be trying to draw the bird, not trying to draw the picture of the bird he was drawing.
So the second one had a more detailed/closer photo, and I was trying to draw it more closely to what the picture actually showed. About, mmm, a little more than halfway through, though, I concluded that…I’m not that interested in trying to capture reality as accurately as a photograph does, basically. So I sort of feel the first one is more stylistically something I’d do, and I therefore like it better. I’d do the second one differently if I was doing it again, basically. But I’m not going to. :)
At this point I’m feeling cautiously optimistic about actually finishing, although at the moment (having finished a book and done a 2 hour drawing on the day I’m writing this), I’m EXHAUSTED. :)
Next up in the 100 hours part of the course is drawing trees, which I actually kind of like doing but cannot at the moment gather the desire TO do (I mean, obviously not RIGHT now, and maybe I’ll feel differently tomorrow, who knows), so I think I’m going to switch back to the Udemy course and draw a banana next.
*Looking back at some of my college stuff, I think maybe I was better than I give myself credit for. My husband gave me a real “no, REALLY?” look when I said that to him.