Just about finished Betty Edward's book- Hooray!

I know I have been plugging this book through-out my blog this summer, but as the holidays are soon to be over, I gave a final push to complete the drawing practice in Drawing on The Right Side of The Brain (by Betty Edwards).  I thoroughly recommend this book to anyone who wants to have hands on drawing practice and a structured way of re-defining the drawing / learning tutelage process.

So here they are!  my final exercises!

so guess who this is, - with and without the glasses, and with a hair cut in between! (No, really, - I did have my hair cut after I'd done the line drawing, but before the blocked in drawing on toned paper.....)

Wehey!! - Got my Arc Welder working today!

It's been a long time coming, and today I finished the extra special high duty cable wiring into my workshop so that I can power up a 160 amp arc welding rig.  I've had the welding machine for over 18 months now, and it's been languishing in my special tools cupboard.  But today, I was able to dig it out and rig it up to the new high current commander style socket I've installed.  (Welding machines need BIG current, and so standard domestic UK plug and sockets are not capable of handling the extra power / current).

I haven't wielded an arc welder for over 30 years!...  I can still hear the immortal words from my welding instructor during my time as an apprentice, learning just about every fabrication method... I'll never forget him saying in a very broad "Manc" (Manchester for readers further afield) accent, whilst peering over my shoulder - "Hadfield lad - you wan£$r, that welding looks like bird Sh#t !!!".
He was a good old boy, I wonder whatever happened to these old legends... Never minced his words but we all thought he was brilliant and would have follwed him into battle anywhere.   Anyway, I followed the newer and more exciting electronics and computing route that was opening up, and the need for mechanical technicians with welding skills at the time was drying up.

So I just about got the hang of welding when my year of mechanical engineering training was nearly over.  I've never needed to do it since, but I always had a hankering to give it another go.  So here's my first attempt after some 33 or so years...


It's not total bird sh£t either, just a bit around the edges perhaps,  (ha ha ha) - and it was my first attempt in such a long time...



My second attempt was a bit better, but like all things, I will need to practice....

Third time better still....

A few more reflections from sketches from Peebles / Selkirk & Northumberland...

Well, I've been back doing the usual admin today and generally tidying up both mine and my late brothers financial affairs.  It's  easy to come back to the real world again from a holiday, however I think we can all benefit from practising some creative art form, as any nice memories are so much more cemented and crystallized if one tries to capture these magical moments through drawing or painting.

I looked at a few of the simple line sketches I made whilst on our little sojourn in the northern latitudes, - there's no doubt in my mind that a drawing or a painting is far more rewarding than a hard disk or DVD of instant photographs, which from my own experience, often contains images that are snapped and then forgotten. I thoroughly recommend to anyone who is considering taking up creative arts to start drawing!  Well, that's the broadcast over, here are some more reflections from the last couple of weeks.

A couple of weeks in retreat, drawing in Scotland and Northumberland

A nice summer "chilled out holiday" for the last two weeks has been just enough to recharge my batteries.  I've done some good sketching practice too, mainly focussed on portrait sketches of my lovely wife, and also some architectural sketches as well, with a couple of more illustrative style line drawings with mixed media paints to compliment the work over the fortnight.

I think I am making slow improvement. My drawing is becoming a bit more confident, as I seem to be equipped now to at least attempt to tackle most subjects, however I know that it is, without doubt, essential to practice my sketching every day.    "Never a day without a line" still resonates in my mind as a regular reminder to make time for this most (in my opinion), essential of skills in any art practice.  I do find it hard though to make time some days, what with so many distractions, which quite often, are of my own making.  I wish I could drop out of all the hustle and bustle of our everyday on-line existence (like e-mails, social interactions, surface mail, banking duties, Facebook, twitter etcetera), and just live to paint and draw!...

Well, here are some examples of the sketches over the last fortnight, in no particular order...
;

 Continuing the exercises from Betty Edwards Book, "drawing on the Right side of the Brain", I sketched a small abstract from one of the great Masters of 20th century art, that being

  "Self-portrait", by Edward Steichen. Published in Camera Work No 2, 1903

The next exercise I gave myself was to do a toned paper (3B Graphite stick) three quarter sketch of Julie.  Now, I also bent the rules a little bit here to experiment, and it seemed to work!! - I tried to draw Julie with much thinner features and younger look, - amazingly, I seem to have pulled this off and I (and of course Julie too) was very pleased with the result.

  So onto some further 3/4 portraits, but this time, from different facial expressions and an angle looking down  on a seated model.  These too, came out pretty well.

But it wasn't all portraiture, and later in the first week of our stay in Scotland, I spent an hour or so doing a simple water colour sketch in my travelling notebook, of the cottage at the head of the glenn, = Yes, it really did look like a top of a chocolate / biscuit tin scene!  The colours were magnificent, the purple heather was in full bloom, and the wee bothy had just recently been re-whitewashed....

The watercolour inspired me to take some more photos of the area and use them as reference materials...

 For example, Traquire house has so much history I just have to paint this properly!

 

And Abbotsford, near Melrose, which was the home built by the 19th Century novelist, Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet, FRSE (15 August 1771 – 21 September 1832) a Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet.  his house architecture seduced me into a good hours worth of sketching, which only ended when I had to take shelter from the rain!

A technique for producing ideas

I found a brilliant text through Tumblr today, and I thought it is worth sharing....

A 5-Step Technique for Producing Ideas circa 1939

by Maria Popova

“The habit of mind which leads to a search for relationships between facts becomes of the highest importance in the production of ideas.”

Literature is the original “inter-net,” woven of a web of allusions, references, and citations that link different works together into an endless rabbit hole of discovery. Case in point: Last week’s wonderful field guide to creativity,Dancing About Architecture, mentioned in passing an intriguing old book originally published byJames Webb Young in 1939 — A Technique for Producing Ideas (public library), which I promptly hunted down and which will be the best $5 you spend this year, or the most justified trip to your public library.

Young — an ad man by trade but, as we’ll see, a voraciously curious and cross-disciplinary thinker at heart — lays out with striking lucidity and clarity the five essential steps for a productive creative process, touching on a number of elements corroborated by modern science and thinking on creativity: its reliance on process over mystical talent, itscombinatorial nature, its demand for a pondering period, its dependence on the brain’s unconscious processes, and more.

Right from the introduction, original Mad Man and DDB founder Bill Bernbach captures the essence of Young’s ideas, with which Steve Jobs would have no doubt agreed when he proclaimed that “creativity is just connecting things”:

Mr. Young is in the tradition of some of our greatest thinkers when he describes the workings of the creative process. It is a tribute to him that such scientific giants as Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein have written similarly on this subject. They agree that knowledge is basic to good creative thinking but that it is not enough, that this knowledge must be digested and eventually emerge in the form of fresh, new combinations and relationships. Einstein refers to this as intuition, which he considers the only path to new insights.

To be sure, however, Young marries the intuitive with the practical in his formulation:

[T]he production of ideas is just as definite a process as the production of Fords; that the production of ideas, too, runs on an assembly line; that in this production the mind follows anoperative technique which can be learned and controlled; and that its effective use is just as much a matter of practice in the technique as is the effective use of any tool.

In a chapter on training the mind, Young offers:

In learning any art the important things to learn are, first, Principles, and second, Method. This is true of the art of producing ideas.

Particular bits of knowledge are nothing, because they are made up [of] so called rapidly aging facts. Principles and method are everything.

[…]

So with the art of producing ideas. What is most valuable to know is not where to look for a particular idea, but how to train the mind in the method by which all ideas are produced and how to grasp the principles which are at the source of all ideas.

But the most compelling part of Young’s treatise, in a true embodiment of combinatorial creativity, builds upon the work of legendary Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto (of Pareto principle fame) and his The Mind and Society. Young proposes two key principles for creating — that an idea is a new combination and that the ability to generate new combinations depends on the ability to see relationships between different elements.

The first [principle is] that an idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements.

[…]

The second important principle involved is that the capacity to bring old elements into new combinations depends largely on the ability to see relationships. Here, I suspect, is where minds differ to the greatest degree when it comes to the production of ideas. To some minds each fact is a separate bit of knowledge. To others it is a link in a chain of knowledge. It has relationships and similarities. It is not so much a fact as it is an illustration of a general law applying to a whole series of facts.

[…]

Consequently the habit of mind which leads to a search for relationships between facts becomes of the highest importance in the production of ideas.

STEP 1: GATHERING RAW MATERIAL

Young talks about the importance of building a rich pool of “raw material” — mental resources from which to build new combinations — in a way that resonates deeply with the Brain Pickings founding philosophy, and also articulates the increasing importance of quality information filters in our modern information diet. This notion of gathering raw material is the first step in his outline of the creative process:

Gathering raw material in a real way is not as simple as it sounds. It is such a terrible chore that we are constantly trying to dodge it. The time that ought to be spent in material gathering is spent in wool gathering. Instead of working systematically at the job of gathering raw material we sit around hoping for inspiration to strike us. When we do that we are trying to get the mind to take the fourth step in the idea-producing process while we dodge the preceding steps.

Even seven decades into the past, Young knew that the future belongs to the curious. His insistence on the importance of curiosity would make Richard Feynman nod in agreement:

Every really good creative person…whom I have ever known has always had two noticeable characteristics. First, there was no subject under the sun in which he could not easily get interested — from, say, Egyptian burial customs to modern art. Every facet of life had fascination for him. Second, he was an extensive browser in all sorts of fields of information. For it is with the advertising man as with the cow: no browsing, no milk.

[…]

The process is something like that which takes place in the kaleidoscope. The kaleidoscope, as you know, is an instrument which designers sometimes use in searching for new patterns. It has little pieces of colored glass in it, and when these are viewed through a prism they reveal all sorts of geometrical designs. Every turn of its crank shifts these bits of glass into a new relationship and reveals a new pattern. The mathematical possibilities of such new combinations in the kaleidoscope are enormous, and the greater the number of pieces of glass in it the greater become the possibilities for new and striking combinations.

(I once used a similar analogy with LEGO.)

STEP 2: DIGESTING THE MATERIAL

In his second stage of the creative process, digesting the material, Young affirms Paola Antonelli’s brilliant metaphor of the curious octopus:

What you do is to take the different bits of material which you have gathered and feel them all over, as it were, with the tentacles of the mind. You take one fact, turn it this way and that, look at it in different lights, and feel for the meaning of it. You bring two facts together and see how they fit. What you are seeking now is the relationship, a synthesis where everything will come together in a neat combination, like a jig-saw puzzle.

STEP 3: UNCONSCIOUS PROCESSING

In his third stage of the creative process, Young stresses the importance of making absolutely “no effort of a direct nature”:

It is important to realize that this is just as definite and just as necessary a stage in the process as the two preceding ones. What you have to do at this time, apparently, is to turn the problem over to your unconscious mind and let it work while you sleep.

[…]

[W]hen you reach this third stage in the production of an idea, drop the problem completely and turn to whatever stimulates your imagination and emotions. Listen to music, go to the theater or movies, read poetry or a detective story.

STEP 4: THE A-HA MOMENT

Then and only then, Young promises, everything will click in the fourth stage of the seemingly serendipitous a-ha! moment:

Out of nowhere the Idea will appear.

It will come to you when you are least expecting it — while shaving, or bathing, or most often when you are half awake in the morning. It may waken you in the middle of the night.

STEP 5: IDEA MEETS REALITY

Young calls the last stage “the cold, gray dawn of the morning after,” when your newborn idea has to face reality:

It requires a deal of patient working over to make most ideas fit the exact conditions, or the practical exigencies, under which they must work. And here is where many good ideas are lost. The idea man, like the inventor, is often not patient enough or practical enough to go through with this adapting part of the process. But it has to be done if you are to put ideas to work in a work-a-day world.

Do not make the mistake of holding your idea close to your chest at this stage. Submit it to the criticism of the judicious.

When you do, a surprising thing will happen. You will find that a good idea has, as it were, self-expanding qualities. It stimulates those who see it to add to it. Thus possibilities in it which you have overlooked will come to light.

* * *

Years later, upon reissuing A Technique for Producing Ideas, Young recounted the many letters he had gotten from “poets, painters, engineers, scientists, and even one writer of legal briefs” who had found his technique empowering and helpful. But what’s perhaps most interesting is the following note he made to the postscript of a reprint:

From my own further experience in advertising, government, and public affairs I find no essential points which I would modify in the idea-producing process. There is one, however, on which I would put greater emphasis. This is as to the store of general materials in the idea-producer’s reservoir.

[…]

I am convinced, however, that you gather this vicarious experience best, not when you are boning up on it for an immediate purpose, but when you are pursuing it as an end in itself.

An updated Schedule...

Hopefully, I can create a schedule of work activities over the next twelve weeks or so. In order to do this and publish it to the blog, I will have to delve into the realms of html editing and will try to compensate for screen sizes, width constraints and so on. Meanwhile, I've been continuing the life drawing classes at Sheffield's Millennium Gallery, and they are now holding a further exhibition on 20th century landscapes, which I had the great fortune to see on Friday last week.

So, hopefully my formatting and line spaces will accommodate this schedule. Like all schedules, it's not set in stone as people often think, but is really for me to use as an aide memmoire... Scroll to the bottom of this page to read the schedule...

Continuing drawing transformations - Negative Spaces

I spent some time today re-immersing myself in Betty Edwards "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" (Penguin Group, 2013), and conducted a little experiment.

Interesting results... In the first sketch, I used Betty Edwards approach to sketching, and I performed in a very methodical and systematic way, - as her book prescribes.  This is the result of about 45 minutes work;

Whearas, in this second sketch, I just did my usual thing, - I sketched freehand, using my normal process of building up the image based purely on my internal schemas to draw the garden chair.

I think (in some way to my confusion)... that the first drawing, that followed the Betty Edwards process, is a lot better! - It looks more accurate, it is more finished, and overall, I think it has much more going for it!

SO, LESSON LEARNED! - I NEED TO DO THIS COURSE!!!

Back to the drawing board for me then.... Drawing negative spaces makes for a much better drawing!