A Bug's Life

Waay back in the 90s, I used to enjoy drawing occasionally. I rather got stuck at a certain point in style and never moved on, partly because I didn't know how or couldn't see why there were problems (other people could!), and the style suited my purposes adequately for cartoony line drawings that would have to survive a couple of iterations of photocopying, or Pictionary.

The first sort of drawing I had any competence in was lab diagrams for school science lessons - plants, glassware apparatus, internal organs, all in glorious black and white line drawing, no sense of perspective or composition required, no shading of contours or shadows, no expression, and you got to label every component. My diagrams were clear and precise, and did their job of communicating an experimental setup or identifying parts. This, I find, is what has stuck with me (right down to an unfortunate tendency to label things on drawings in case you can't tell what they are), and I've never worked at developing the other aspects.

Time for a change, eh? "If you can write, you can draw;" "Drawing is just a matter of seeing in a certain way." "Practice, practice, practice." With a borrowed copy of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (ooh, now available on the Internet!), a commitment to practice, and an embarrassingly untouched 400+ pages of sketchbook paper (the clean white pages, I cannot resist buying them), I shall see where I get.

The obvious choice for a first attempt, given my familiarity with the laboratory world, was a conical flask of boiling water drawn with 2B pencil and trying to avoid just drawing an outline. In hindsight, I could have picked something easier than something transparent and roiling with bubbles inside something else transparent. Doh! And thinking hard about perspective and shading doesn't make them happen. Apparently. Yet. And it might have been easier to do from life instead of 1987's memories, what with the emphasis on seeing feeding into drawing. If I've not looked at a flask differently in the last 20 years, why should I be able to draw it differently? Still, it'll do to show me where I've come from...