After the first day of learning, I’m feeling fairly confident in my ability to complete the challenge of learning to draw a realistic car within one week. My baseline was far better than I thought it would be although there is still a lot of work to be done. Here’s my first drawing:
After analyzing the drawing using research I did online, I see a few specific things I can work on.
First, I need to get appropriate materials to work with. A single HB pencil doesn’t give me much in terms of contrast. I figured this would be the case from the beginning, but couldn’t find my sketching pencils and was forced to make do.
I also need to avoid specifically drawing lines. What I mean by this is that when you look at things in real life, there are never any outlines of things. Lines are defined by differences in the amount of light. When you see a cube in real life for example, you don’t see all the specific lines of edges, you see the fact that the side closer to the light source is brighter than the side away from it.
Although I identified that my car needs to be in the center of the page in the video before I even started, I feel I could have made the car take up more space on the page. I’ve left a bit too much white space around the edges. Working too small means that I have less margin for error. If my drawing is the size of a billboard and I draw some feature one centimeter away from it’s actual location, the drawing still looks fine. If my drawing is on a letter size paper, a one centimeter error makes a huge difference.
I also stopped drawing too early. Even with this imperfect drawing, if I had spent more time on the details I think it could have had a profound impact on the finished product. I think my final drawing will have to be done over the course of 2 days at least. That’s going to make completing this task harder because I lose a day of practice.
I’ll have to come up with ways to target each of these problems in the next 4 days. I’m excited to see the final result.