SKULL project- part 1.

Drawing from imagination.

When drawing something realistic, one can either draw what you see before you, or draw a picture from your mind’s eye; a piece of imagination if you will.

As much as I enjoy drawing the world around me, it has for a long time been my goal to draw from imagination just as well. It seems a simple enough thing to do; I have quite a visual vocabulary, as all adults with working eyes do, and I have very little trouble breaking down what I see into geometrical shapes. So, piece of pie, right?

Apparently, wrong.

I have found drawing from imagination frustrating and ugly for a long time. The main problem, I feel, is usually the faces of the people I draw. At some point it was suggested to me learning to draw  skulls would help me draw faces. So I joined in a levelup Conceptart assignment to draw 99 skulls. Half of these would be from reference, the other without. 

I bought myself a skull replica and started drawing it. I drew from that, and I drew from photos. Pretty soon I had reasonably nice drawings like this one:

Then came the hard part of course; I picked up my tablet, and tried to draw the same skull – from a different angle – just from memory.

I ended up with this:

I think most people reading this will understand that I was a little… upset.

Still, as upset as I was, I did somewhere ask myself the big question. Which is:

How did this happen? Where did I go wrong?

And this time, I figured it out. 

When I was drawing, I’d ask myself the right questions, like:

"What shape is the ball of the head?"

And I’d answer:

"It’s like a ball. But with pieces taken off from the sides. It’s higher and deeper than it is wide."

The return question –of course- is:

"How much is taken from the sides? How much higher and deeper is it than wide?"

I did not have a clue.

Not knowing made everything worse. I would try something like 1.5 times as high as wide, then decide it didn’t look right, and try something a lot less high. But guessing one thing and finding it didn't look right made me second-guess even the things I did know, until I ended up with the mess above.

Learning the correct measurements.

It occurred to me that as long as I kept doubting my measurements, I would never get these skulls right. I had to memorize the correct sizes and shapes, and I had to know them so well I would not start doubting myself when drawing. Still, I had done about 30 skull drawings from reference in the last months and so far none of that was sticking. 

Now, I am not the best for learning facts, I know. In school it was always a problem; but I am good with numbers, and it’s not like there is that many measurements to keep track of.

So why did I keep forgetting?

1. I divided my attention to too many things at once, ending up learning nothing. At around this time I was also studying for a scrum exam. Scrum is a way of project ‘managing’. One of the things they mentioned is working on one project at the time and minimizing outside interference as that ruins productivity. They gave figures that suggested that if a person worked on 5 different things, as much as over 90% of one's time would be spend just switching from one project to the other.It occurred to me the same might be true - or perhaps even more true - for studying. I mean let’s face it, I’ve been studying skulls, anatomy, light, line use and whatever else just randomly at a moment’s whim, switching from one subject to the other several times a day.  Perhaps it was too much, and so I reasoned focussing on one field of study for let’s say 2 weeks would be a lot more productive.
2. I did not write down any numbers or make exact diagrams of the things I wanted to remember. A different thing that occurred to my later, when studying is that I hardly ever wrote down or verbalized my measurement. This made it harder to remember, because there was no actual measurement stored in my head, just an image of ‘bigger than’, or ‘this fit 1 ½ times into that’. Remembering an image is a lot harder then just remembering a number. I vowed to write down my measurements.
3. I did not repeat or rehearse the things I wanted to remember. Lastly, the way to remember – on study- turned out to be the simplest in the world. Repeat. So, I vowed to draw and write out my measurements until I could do it without any difficulty.

At this moment I decided to try a scrum-based project of 2 weeks of just studying skulls.

It worked out so well for me, I would like to give a detailed account here and in the next installments of this blog. Perhaps this form of study can be beneficial to others as well. I will go into the principles I used for study in my other blog, how to study art.

 

My project’s goal

I decided my goal would be to learn the measurements of the skull well enough so that if I wanted to just draw them from the top of my head, I’d never have to worry about wondering if I knew the correct sizes again. On the side I figured I might also finish that 99 skulls assignment.

 

Drawing skulls from memory

SKULLS: (low level features/deliverables?) -inventory how many more. (from ref, from no-ref)                           -get measurements right, from life-skull. Side                                      -get measurements right, from life-skull. FRONT                  -get measurements bottom                                                                      -get measurements top                                                                             -get measurements back                                                                           -make shape simplification.                                                                        -memorise measurements and check by drawing. (front/side)         -memorise measurements bottom, top, back                                      -memorise simplifications                                                                         -compare measurements and simplification to literature   -check skull-to-face positions.                                                                 -re-read line quality piece.                                                                        -finish remaining skulls using measurement and line quality.

1p 2p 2p 2p 1p 1p 4p 12p 6p 12p  4p 4p 1p 59p

Okay so that’s not quite honest- all the red text I missed my first time around and added them during the first week. I just kind of dived into this project after all, starting it on the Monday I wrote out these goals. It is normal in scrum to try and do this in advance, but I felt I had incentive now, and it would be a shame to let go. As for the points, this is a measurement of amount of work. It is not supposed to be the same as time, but min aligns rather closely with about 1h of work, and I guessed I would have between 20-25p p available per week. It was obvious from the start I would not finish this entire project in 2 weeks. I figured the main thing was memorizing the shapes and measurements so that’s what I did first.

 

Project Log summary

I will add my project log in the next post, maybe divide it into several as there is a lot of items I want to highlight as interests of study.

Suffice it to say here that it took me several days to adapt SCRUM to something workable for my project, then another day or so trying to figure out how to study a thing like measurements. I wasted more time not measuring precisely enough (drawing lines freehand etc), and not writing down my measurements. Another several days were wasted trying to line up two completely different skulls for the front and side view. In spite of all that, I had the rough measurements and shapes memorized by the end of the two weeks, and trying to create a turned skull view from memory ended me up with pieces like this.

Which is, considering where I started, quite the improvement. I checked if I could still remember the basic measurements after two weeks, and they seemed to all still be there. Though I need to check again now as it has been over a month now. The point is, after all, to have this information at a ready at any time in the future.

 

Conclusions

Remembering the measurements and shapes turned out to be a simple thing in retrospect; all it required was to draw out from an example the front and side view –and for another view days the bottom, top and back as well. The check if I remembered those measurements the very next morning until I got it 100% right.