The purpose of a sketch a day is just to do it - sketch! It doesn't matter if it is an involved sketch or if it is a simple contour or gesture drawing. There are no rules except to sketch each day.

Life parameters can dictate the time investment, but a sketch a day commitment is designed to elevate the personal priority of sketching ... to enforce sketching. Making it into a "resolution" validates the activity (invests it with a bit of a challenge even!) and defends against competing demands. The sketch a day is designed for practice - to reinforce basic skills, and to provide daily contemplation on the issues of two dimensional representation.

Several of us are doing a sketch a day, and I would enjoy hearing from anyone else who decides to join in. We share our efforts, support each other, keep each other honest and... hopefully we'll have some fun doing this!

Click on any of the sketches to enlarge...
and don't forget to check out older posts!

Friday, April 1, 2011

March 26, 2011

     A pinedactyl from the H-Mart. A pineapple looks like a great thing to draw (I was even thinking I'd draw it when I bought it), but then you start with all those tessellating shapes - that don't really exactly tessellate and change subtly top to bottom and rotate on a spiral pattern rather than straight around - and you start to lose the pattern, have to squeeze odd shapes in to make up for creep, get exasperated and look for ways to mentally code the shapes to be able to carry them to the page.
    That last bit - the mentally coding part - is where you start to notice odd things about your subject; like that the overlying scale that comes to the papery point looks just like so many little birds or like pterodactyls where the sections become wider across the middle. And of course, the fat little cushions under them look like pillows or stars and so on. With planning ahead, this could be vastly improved, but of course it wasn't planned...
     And maybe that's how M. C. Escher got started; while doing a perfectly straight-faced drawing of something with tiresome repeats he started to mentally code... with, of course, the mental apparatus of M. C. Escher! He decided "this is fun" and started having related ideas.
    Could be. 

   
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2 comments:

  1. Amy MannApril 1, 2011 at 4:30 PM

    OH, this is FANTASTIC! My favorite of yours so far! Until I enlarged it, I didn't know what was in there, I just thought this pineapple had a funny scar running down it. Then I blew it up, after reading your comment, and WOW! Pterodactyls waking up and flying off the pineapple. So Great!!!

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  2. AnonymousApril 2, 2011 at 6:17 AM

    It makes sense, there IS something prehistoric about pineapples.

    cp

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