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Wrinkled Paper |
 Here's another exercise that will show you that
you can draw forms and shapes and not just symbols. Take
a blank sheet of typing or printer paper and crunch it
up in a ball in your hand. Now open it up again, but
don't smooth it out. Open it enough so it'll lay
relativly flat on your desk. Now, tape or clip a few
pieces of paper to your board and TURN AWAY from the
wrinkled paper so you can't see it. Turn only your head
so you can see the wrinkled paper, but are no longer
looking at your drawing board. Now, look intently at the
creases and dents and wrinkles in the wrinkled paper,
and draw them WITHOUT LOOKING AT YOUR DRAWING PAPER.
Outline each fold with your eyes and mirror that fold's
outline with your pencil on the drawing. Try and gauge
the spaces between the folds mentally and move your
drawing hand to where you think the next fold or shape
goes. DO NOT LOOK AT THE PROGRESS OF THE DRAWING - KEEP
DRAWING!! If you feel your drawing hand fall off your
paper, just pick it up and drop it back on the paper
without looking at where you've placed your hand. Draw
every wrinkle and shape you see in the paper, and draw
for five minutes. When you're done go ahead and look
at the drawing. It's a giant mess, right? What could possibly be the point to an exercise like this? There's no
meaning to the composition and it looks nothing like the
wrinkled paper. But look closer, compare it again with
the paper. Find a line in the drawing and then find the
corresponding wrinkle in the paper. You found it, didn't
you? As you look at the drawing you can find every
wrinkle from the paper. This shows you that you CAN draw
what you see, you didn't draw your "paper symbol". In
this exercise the final product isn't the reason for the
exercise, the process of seeing and drawing the
wrinkles as you see them is the object. Here, as in the
first exercise, you probably were not thinking about
what it was you were REALLY drawing, rather you saw the
individual shapes and forms that make up the whole. |
