40 Days of Art: Layers of Drawing

It can be intimidating even to start trying to put down on paper the infinitely complex, fully realised world around you. Much beginner art is compromised by an evident desire to draw everything at once, but this has a way of flattening a drawing, or making it look silted or stiff – even a still-life can look stiff if the artist is ill-at-ease. There is a lot of information to get on your page, and if you have unlimited time to do so it's very tempting to start noodling from the outset, but your result will not be as honest or evocative as it would be if you'd gotten down to the essence of the subject matter at the very beginning and layered on detail from there. You have to look at your subject through a series of different lenses: each is a different way of seeing what is going on, and each individual one is plenty to think about on its own. If you try to process the information from more than one or two lenses at a time your mental drawing software will freeze and/or crash.

This is a complicated idea and could be worth a whole week of illustrated posts, but you can find that information much better explained in Drawing From the Right Side of the Brain and Force, so I advise you to take your reading eyes in that direction.

( A Brief Demonstration )