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40 Days of Art: Optical Flipping
There are a lot of tricks to drawing from life, and learning how to see, but I'm going to leave things like negative space, relative angles, contours, and the like to the capable Ms Edwards and her book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. She describes them in much greater depth and with much greater authority than I could, and there are visual aides!
I would like to share with you one trick which I don't think is in her book, though, and that's something that my life drawing teacher called 'flipping with your eyes' – remember the idea of flipping I introduced a while back? Well, you can do that without having a piece of paper to physically flip. Instead, cast your glance up to the model, then back at your paper, then up, and back, making the transition as abrupt as possible. You should be able to compare the two images with adequate precision. Practise this enough and you will actually be able to see lines you've gotten wrong move – if you've drawn a forearm too long, for example, it will appear to stretch when you look at your paper, or if a leg is too far to the right it will look like it's jumping to the right. It's a crazy effect, but it works! And of course, it works on all drawing from life, not just people.
I probably should have posted this before yesterday's, but ... too late now.
I would like to share with you one trick which I don't think is in her book, though, and that's something that my life drawing teacher called 'flipping with your eyes' – remember the idea of flipping I introduced a while back? Well, you can do that without having a piece of paper to physically flip. Instead, cast your glance up to the model, then back at your paper, then up, and back, making the transition as abrupt as possible. You should be able to compare the two images with adequate precision. Practise this enough and you will actually be able to see lines you've gotten wrong move – if you've drawn a forearm too long, for example, it will appear to stretch when you look at your paper, or if a leg is too far to the right it will look like it's jumping to the right. It's a crazy effect, but it works! And of course, it works on all drawing from life, not just people.
I probably should have posted this before yesterday's, but ... too late now.