Day 176: Week 26 Summary

This week turned out to be a little chaotic.  I had to take a few breaks from the perception training exercises in "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain".  It's really hard for me to qualify the book because on one hand I can see why it's so highly recommended by artists and on the other I can see why reviews become more mixed when you look at popular ranking sites like Goodreads.

The first exercise was to draw the two opposing faces in profile.  It might be hard to recognize in my own drawing below, but it's the wonky looking chess piece on the top of the page.  This drill was pretty neat and I tried it several times throughout he week to see how far I could draw the faces before I started drawing the chalice.

The next exercise was to draw an upside down copy of the famous squiggly line guy.  This was particularly hard for me because I have already honed my ability to draw the things I'm looking at by recognizing what I'm looking at.  Making the subject confusing by flipping it upside down was supposed to trick my brain into focusing on the simple details like distance and curvature of the lines.  Instead I ended up rapidly losing scale and proportion throughout the squiggles.  The end result wasn't awful, but I feel confident it would have turned out much better if the source wasn't inverted.

I stumbled a bit on that chapter and decided to doodle to remind myself that I am drawing for a hobby to have something that I enjoy doing in my spare time.  If you're noticing a quality drop it's because I'm trying to shift to drawing from memory or imagination and not from observation.

I'm also working up a character redesign for the next club meeting, so my attention is really scattered right now.  From Monday I'm going to try to get back to nailing down at least one chapter a day from the book so I can narrow my goals down a bit.

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Metrics

Pages Read This Week	18
Total Pages Read Since Launch	1520
Books Completed Since Launch	13
Total Tutorial Run-time	14 hours 33 minutes
Days Since Launch	176
- Active Days (1 hour or more of practice)	164
Drawing Time This Week	7 hours 10 minutes
Drawing Time Total	160 hours 15 minutes

* I'm considering Friday to be the end of the week for tracking metrics so that it lines up with my summary posts.

** I had to use a some fuzzy math to figure the page count for some of my Kindle books since they only have location tagging.