Day 11: Balls!

It was interesting feeling my way around the different ways of drawing and testing my current abilities out but its time to get back to basics. I found a load of sources providing exercises in drawing that start with very basic principles.

The idea is to repeat drawing each of the simple shapes with shading, depth, etc until you are seeing the "ones and zeros" of it. The understanding creeps in with repetition and practice so here are a couple of the practice sheets I've been doing. The subject is balls!!

Its kind of like the Karate Kid when Daniel is made to "sand-a floor", "paint-a fence" and "wax on, wax off". The more you repeat the more muscle memory you build up - in this case mental muscle memory.

If you master the basics of spheres and how the light and shadows hit them you can get more advanced as is obvious from the next practice sheet.

Learning the simple things allows you to visualise and then construct something much larger and more complex following the same rules.

These are still at the basic stage but I will be carrying on with practising this over the weekend and probably moving on to different shapes and exercises as I go.

To carry out the exercise I'm doing I've been using a .7 mechanical pencil, two different thicknesses of retractable eraser and...cotton buds!