February Drawing Month (Planning)

Cafe Society
1

Febdrawary? Febrification? Arty Art Art… ary… Feb… thing? <Clever Name like NaNo WriMo>? Okay, needs a catchier title. Anyway…

I can’t draw. I mean, I can draw a moderately decent representation of a fairly unremarkable lamp, and I can draw something you can tell is human… as long as it’s viewed from the front, but I’m not going to be winning any awards. I have a lot of issues that I need to work out, but reading all the art books in the world is never going to help me at this point. No, I have to actually draw things. Yeah, I could do it myself, all alone and make this a personal challenge, but where’s the fun in that?

So, for the chronically uncoordinated, for those that couldn’t color inside the lines. Hell, for the artisans who want to improve, for the bored masters, I present a challenge: draw something!

I haven’t worked out the exact logistics for how this should go. But at the very minimum:

Starting February 1st, 2013…

  1. Try to spend at least one hour a day drawing. (Non-binding, obviously, this challenge should absolutely not come before real life obligations)

  2. Any work that’s completed, upload it (to your personal webspace, photobucket, wherever), and share it with the thread.

Some ideas for how this could work:

  1. A set of words, phrases, objects, topics etc are proposed every day. Make a drawing involving one, some, or all of them.

  2. If you don’t want to do one piece of art a day, and would prefer to work on longer, more involved pieces, just share one every few days, or one a week. Try to work at least one thing from each day into your piece, but if you really want to really, really focus on one or a couple categories, by all means.

  3. Hell, maybe you could make a drawing a day, but every day weave a little more into the tapestry, if you will. Make the same piece bigger and bigger each day, like an ever expanding dream.

  4. Make suggestions!

Obviously this could be completely freeform if people want, i.e. “draw whatever the hell you want every day.” That’s fine. The reason I propose a bit more structure is to help get people working outside their comfort zone, so people don’t lazily go “I’m good at drawing seagulls flying out into a horizon, I think I’ll do that every day!”

We could also have a mini-contest. Separated by skill level, judging categories could be creativity, best use of categories, etc. Not sure who would judge, however, or if we would make another thread for voting after nominating in this thread (maybe).

Any medium is okay so long as it’s “drawing” (3D modelling too?). Pixel art, painting (take a picture of it), drawing on your tablet, pencil etchings, logos, animation (for the overachievers), whatever.

One ground rule though: No put-downs (or obviously back-handed complements, etc). No telling somebody that they suck, or their art sucks, a lot of us KNOW we suck, it’s not helpful and will just make people not want to participate. However constructive criticism is welcome. That means that if you want to say something bad about somebody’s work, at least say it in a way that suggests a way to improve it, i.e. “your lines are a little uneven, try using a ruler” (etc). I know really bad behavior is against the rules of the board anyway, and I know I have no actual power, personally, to enforce this rule, but I would very much like people to abide by it.

So anybody on board? Any ideas for a format?

2

Drawuary?

I think this would be boatloads of fun, and I’d definitely participate. I have no artistic ability whatsoever but I’m always trying to draw things, and as long as everybody agrees not to laugh too hard at me—no, never mind, I like making people laugh, too :D.

All of your ideas sound great. We could also try doing our own peculiar versions of a well-known artwork. I’m looking forward to seeing what ideas others come up with.

3

Hey there!

Last year I borrowed my brother’s copy of ‘Drawing on the right side of the Brain’ by Betty Edwards, a great book about learning how to draw. There’s a lot of brain lateralization stuff that Edwards talks about, which is apparently oversimplified or unsupported by the current state of brain science. Still, whatever my brain’s actually doing, I’ve found her tips on approaching drawing in a ‘visual, perceptual, gestalt’ mode of thinking very helpful so far, as opposed to my usual verbal/analytical mode.

I haven’t drawn at all in January, it’ll be good to get back into it some with some Doper company!

4

I think this is a really good idea to encourage people to draw more for fun without worrying about being brilliant artists.

However, unless you’re desperate to start it next month, might I suggest a different month? February already has something similar to Nanowrimo: FAWM - February Album Writing Month, which I think is fairly well-known and has thousands of participants. I know art and music don’t compete directly, but neither do art and writing, and it’d still be better to not have drawing month in November too.

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We could call it Artch.

6

Okay, I’m going ahead with this, but tweaking the guidelines a bit… I’m resolving to do something with drawing 6 days a week through February. That may not be drawing every day - if I read a lot in the book and want to let that settle through before trying a drawing, then I figure that’s okay.

When I go to the trouble of getting the scanner set up, I’ll probably scan through my backlog all the way to the ‘pre-instruction’ drawings I did in late October, and share them with y’all.

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I like this idea; put your own spin on a well-known piece of art. Who’s with me??

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Hmm… I was thinking of mostly doing still lifes with what I could find around the apartment. :smiley:

9

I haven’t updated the thread because I agreed with the “moving it to March” idea, but was too lazy to post my agreement. I was thinking of maybe setting up a quick website for it. We can still do stuff here, obviously, but a website would allow this idea to become a “thing” like the already existing “do stuff” months. My web development friend said that the features required for such a site should be easy to fulfill with any halfway decent open source CMS. I like the name “Artch” (though I came up with it independently before I checked this thread again, I swear!). :stuck_out_tongue:

Anyway, this should give us a little more planning time to get the kinks worked out.

10

Cool. I was hoping you didn’t get discouraged and give up on the idea. I’ll watch for updates.

11

Well, dagnabbit, I’m not waiting until March! For one thing, that’s National Novel Editing Month still. :wink:

Is anybody interested if I post my drawings here during February?

12

Go ahead :slight_smile:

13

Well, you can kinda see the drawing I did for today on my blog, along with the explanation of why I’m gonna need to find a different scanner to use. :wink:

14

Hey! Got to use a decent scanner at work today, so you Dopers get the sneak peek before my blog followers. I’m going back to the start of my sketches with ‘Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain’ here.

In late October, I did a couple of ‘pre-instruction sketches’ that are kinda supposed to be the before picture for how much you learn with the book - just looking at something and trying to draw what you see. First, a self-portrait of myself done in a mirror:

Another of my left hand and arm:

When I got back to the book in December, the first exercise was drawing the corner of a room - I did my living room, commemorating my TV and VCR that have since been taken to the recycling depot:

The book talked about different kinds of lines to draw, and suggested doing a warm-up exercise just messing around with different types, not trying to draw anything in particular:

I just realized when typing this post that there was another sketch I’ve lost track of - completing one of those ‘two faces or a vase’ optical illusions; you trace one face from the book, then try to draw the other side to mirror it, but you name the parts of the face as you go. It’s kind of a sucker exercise; naming the parts puts you into left brain mode and sabotages your natural left-brain drawing talent, or whatever. I’ll look for that and scan it in next time if I find it.

I got to my first upside-down exercise just before New Year’s, a copy of a Picasso sketch of Stravinsky:

Getting back into the drawing in February, I’ve done three more upside down sketch exercises. You take somebody else’s drawing, turn it upside down, and cover everything but the very ‘top’ (so the bottom of the original.) The idea is to try and keep yourself from recognizing and naming what you see, but just freehand drawing what you see on a new sheet of paper. My results have been a bit hit and miss - I’m not sure if I’m staying in left brain mode without trying to, or if I just need to work on building my right brain’s sense of space and shape.

I really like this one, even if I misjudged how much paper I had, so parts of the horsey are next to or off the margins of the page:

This horse and rider was much tougher, partly because of all the shading, I got confused and was having a hard time keeping the shading light enough that you can see the bolder lines against it:

And this sitting woman has good and bad aspects…

So - what do you guys think?