Back in the 60's when I was an art student at the University of Georgia, we were taught to draw in the dark. That's right! The lights were all turned off, an image was thrown on a big screen and our task was to draw it. It was one of the best training exercises I was ever taught. We learned to feel where our marks were going and to look
carefully at our subject. Any failure to see showed up.
Over my decades of teaching college students and those in my own school, I saw the same mistake repeated over and over again: the subject was
being scanned, but not looked at. But it's easy to train ourselves to see all the nuances of a subject.
Try this: Using the image below as your subject, do the following:
- Attach a small painting surface to a board
- Prepare your palette with the colors you gauge you will need
- Either print out the image or bring it up
larger on your screen. (You can right click to save the image to your photo app.)
- Please the image on an easel, but put your painting surface in your lap
- Looking ONLY at the image, try doing a study without looking at all at what you are
doing until it is finished. Feel your way around the painting surface with the brush
- You might need to do several of these to get the hang of it
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