Lesson 4, Part 3

Well, I know I'm making progress because it's easier for me now to see my mistakes on the paper, before I dash off to the scanner and do a Photoshop comparison. The problem is... I see my mistakes on paper. So drawing is taking longer and longer. I keep drawing, noticing it looks wrong, figuring what is wrong, fixing it and checking again. Over and over and over.

Using blue pencil, I worked on a drawing of the duck with the slingshot for nearly an hour. When I thought I was done, I realized it was fundamentally wrong. So the next night I started over on a new sheet of paper, and spent another fifty minutes just on the blue pencil. When I was done, it was close, but still visibly wrong. So the next night I spent another half hour fixing the blue, and then tracing it in black. An hour and half on a single drawing!

This is the result:



That looked pretty good to me. At least it was as good as I could get it without doing the comparison in Photoshop. It did seem somehow that the head was bigger than it should be, but the neck also looked just a tad longer than the original, so I couldn't figure out how the head could be bigger.

Finally I did the test:


It's okay (or maybe pretty good), but the mistakes are all too obvious.

Maybe I'm spending too much time on this. But now that I can self-correct better, I'm really trying to get each drawing as good as I possibly can. Also the time I spend, I'm training my eyes and hands, which after all is the point (at least partly). Hopefully this is a just a stage along the path, where I'm getting more discerning (a good thing) but I'm still not as skilled as I need to be.

I'm gonna leave this angry little duck be, and move on. There are three more characters in Lesson 4.