For a friend I made a drawing of a lion, after a very long hiatus of my pencils.
The model is a beautiful portrait on Wikimedia that I took a long time to pick. I tried to match the expression of the lion with the personality of the receiver of the picture, and I hope I found a good match 🙂
A few days ago I challenged myself to draw horses’ ears. I have been drawing horses for as long as I can remember, but with a moderate and varied amount of attention to detail. Therefore I am able to draw horses’ ears somewhat by memory, so that they don’t look that convincing. Thanks to a library book with a lot of pictures (I prefer to copy from printed images instead of from a screen) I found plenty of portraits from which I could draw. Here is the result:
As usual, the first two sketches are a warm-up. From the third onwards I tried to notice something characteristic from each sketch, and for the forward-facing ears of sketch #3, it’s the angle in the inner ear side (I used to draw round ears by default – some horses have a less pronounced angle, but it’s always there). The same angle is visible when the ear is turned backwards: in sketch #6 I drew the ear as a trapezoid|trapezium, instead of a triangle. It felt strange to draw the ears like that, but in the end they look more realistic. The following sketches are more about ear positions and differences among breeds and individuals.
My next focus will be on hooves/feet, stay tuned for next post!
The yoga class I have been attending since January is becoming really interesting for me. I have been a very sport-averse person until recently, and I have been using my body with the bare minimum of awareness possible. Through this yoga lessons I have finally started to notice that: 1- my body is actually able to do more than sit and walk; 2- practicing a physical activity like yoga requires more than simple strength, flexibility and endurance, and this means: concentration, balance, awareness of posture and alignment, memory (for longer sequences, and the details of each posture), coordination, perception of effort so that it doesn’t harm any part of the body.
At first it was a new activity for me and I was trying to follow the teacher’s instructions, but was often distracted by tension in some part of the body, or had to focus on keeping balance and could not think of anything else. Now I start to notice how I can guide my attention to each part of the body and check if it’s in the right position, if there is the right amount of tension in the muscles and ligaments of that part, then go on to the next one. Sometimes it happens that I feel the overall tension of the body as a whole, that there is a good amount of strength in every part of it, nowhere too much, and I take it as the sign that I’m doing the posture correctly. And it’s so rewarding!
This kind of experience is quite far from my initial learning process with music (and a bunch of other things in life), where usually the opposite worked fine: especially with the drums, I have previously been able to make (temporary) progress by producing a lot of tension on the arm(s) or wrist(s) or finger(s) and therefore produce the sounds at the desired speed and intensity. However, it’s a dead end, because tension is both damaging to the body on the long term, and it is a sign that some technical challenge is being forced through instead of properly processed – and that means that progress actually stops there. Jared Falk mentioned something along these lines in the beginning of a longer video on Drumeo, and I’m glad that there is a convergence among the various disciplines I am practising, so I can reuse the mindset everywhere 🙂
Today I had to give back this book about budgerigars, from which I wanted to copy a few pictures. I went to the library with the book and my sketchbook, and drew seven birds in funny poses, as suggested by John Muir Laws in his video about drawing birds: front, back and 3/4 views. Here is the result:
Budgerigars are really cute and funny, and loud too! They are very athletic and like to climb branches and trunks using both feet and beak. They like to hang upside down and roll around branches. I had a couple of these birds when I was a kid and I remember how lively they were. Their cage was near the telephone, so people often asked if we lived in the jungle! We let them free almost every day and they quickly learned every corner of the house. Drawing today made me remember them with a smile 🙂
Last weekend I talked with my friends about introducing changements in our lives, and more precisely, what makes each one of us hesitate before changing anything in our routine.
We agreed that we all find difficult and risky to introduce a changement from one day to another, with no plan to rollback, even if it’s a change for the better. I find it daunting to turn a page forever, and have to adjust into the new habit because there is no other choice. What I look for is to be 100% (OK, at least 80%) convinced of the new plan, therefore I need to test it for a while, because I could discover that it’s not the right solution to my question, or I could need to adjust some details and test it again.
For example, some time ago I decided to draw more regularly. I initially resumed drawing, but in drawing sprints (with a drawing a day) that were too demanding for me to be a permanent task. I have since revised the plan and am aiming to draw once a week, but still I find myself struggling to respect the schedule. For the time being, I’ll probably settle for a finished drawing every other week, and scribbling everytime I feel inspired. I feel that the important thing is that I keep this activity in my schedule, rather than dropping it completely because I can’t work on it often enough. Of course the lower limit changes for every activity (running once every two weeks can’t count as training) and determines how much progress I can expect on that domain (I’m really behind with my practice with the trombone, but I won’t give up, and I want to practice more often in the near future!). Even for what falls below the lower limit there can be a positive thought: it has been tried, but this time it didn’t work out – if I want, I can analyse why, and try again with a better set of conditions.
Overall, I feel more inclined to introduce a changement in my schedule if I can have a trial period before adopting it on the long run. Amusingly enough, it is a widely accepted practice in Germany, so much that there is a (colloquial) word for introduction course: Schnupperkurs – based on the verb schnuppern, that means “to sniff, and in broader sense to get an idea about something new”. The goal of these courses is to give newcomers a good overview of a discipline, so that they know what it involves before committing to it.
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What do you think about introducing changements in your schedule? What works for you and what doesn’t? Let me know in the comments!
I have started a new yoga class and I’m starting to adjust to the amount of effort and stretching required. The previous class was more relaxing and exploring, while this one is definitely more demanding. The first few lessons felt really hard, and I was unsure if the muscle discomfort I felt in the following days was OK, or a sign that I asked too much from my body. After a month I can say that it’s OK, and I’m getting better at knowing how much to exert myself in order to get the benefit from the stretch, and where to stop.
I have started quite conservatively, by stretching only a little, and stopping as soon as I felt pain. I knew that the exercises require to go past my comfort zone, and that Iyengar Yoga, the yoga style of my teacher, was above my current level of fitness. But only after a few tries I trusted the teacher and finally myself in doing a bit more. The result is that I feel less and less tired and aching after each session, and I become more aware of what my body can do. I’m lucky that the sessions are attended by a handful of people, so that the teacher can give each one of us a lot of attention.
I’m glad I met another person who doesn’t simply whip me forward, but gives me information about what they observe about my current state/skills, and give me useful and feasible next steps. I was about to add “until I don’t need them anymore” – but it felt rather arrogant. I feel I will benefit from experienced people’s feedback all my life long! I’ll maybe need them less, but appreciate them all the same.
I was looking for great nature photography books in my local libraries and stumbled upon this one, that narrates the friendship between a vixen and two humans: the three met almost every day for a few months in a specific point in the woods, and from there they walked together, with the humans observing the behaviour of the animal and taking pictures. It is a fascinating narration, full of awe and respect for wildlife, and of incredible close-ups of the vixen.
As I have to give back the book in two days, I decided to draw a few portraits of the fox just now:
As usual, the first two sketches are a bit off. From the fifth onwards I got a better grasp of the typical marks that make the drawing look fox-like: the large ears (still, I made many of them too small), the white patch on the sides of the nose and cheeks with its sharp boundaries, the colour pattern, the black back of the ears, the pointy muzzle. I think the last portrait sums up that quite well. Her ears are really huge 🙂
I’m getting hooked to this 10-sketch sessions, I’ll post more of them with new species – if you have preferences just leave them a comment below!
Yesterday I visited a new library in the city, and was very happy to find a lot of books about drawing and painting, as well as great collections of animal pictures. I went there with the goal of drawing ten heads of a given animal species, and I picked two books about dogs with high-quality pictures. Here are the outcomes:
You can see each sketch as a single picture on my Flickr share. Overall I find that the drawing session was worth it: I started with somewhat flat and simple portraits, then understood more and more about the subjects and also worked faster. I think I’ll keep the suggestion to draw ten items per session, because I noticed how the first ones don’t look so good, and if I manage to draw more than five or six, I get at least three decent sketches. It was also useful to draw different dog breeds, with different proportions and fur length, and also test a few angles other than the front or 3/4 view. I have other pictures to copy from, so stay tuned for next update!
It’s a few days I plan to post on my blog and can’t find the quiet half an hour to write a good post. The reason is that I’m preparing a concert with a new orchestra, as guest percussionist. I had two weeks to get acquainted with the pieces we will play, and I spent the whole weekend with the orchestra in a musical retreat in Brandenburg – catching up was definitely not easy, moreover I had to learn to properly play tubular bells and xylophone, and these pieces are the most difficult I had played yet (or at least it feels like it!). As I joined the rehearsals so late, I’m listening to recordings of the pieces while reading my parts, and I’m adding a LOT of annotations:
What I usually add are colors for the different instruments I have to play (it’s quicker than reading the tiny names on the score!) and annotations about the instruments that play right before me – that saves me from counting the empty bars, and prepares me better to the moment when I have to jump in. These annotations are especially necessary, as I have not been playing with the full orchestra often enough, and it happens very often that I don’t know who is supposed to play, and at which point of the piece we are. I’ll be watching the conductor closely, but I’ll definitely not getting cues all the time; for sure I’ll keep an ear for my fellow percussionists, as we studied our parts together and know them well. Let’s hope for the best 🙂
Here are a few studies I made this week: the first is about goats and sheep. I found a book of livestock breeds and decided to draw some of them. I found out that some sheep look like goats and vice versa, but chose to draw rather typical breeds to practice proportions and textures. Well, I tried… the sheep with black head and legs is a bit off, the back too high, maybe the head too large. I think I didn’t work on the proportions long enough, as I wanted to draw the details of the wool (and I find it came out great!)… Next time I also want to draw more horns, as the goats’ horns in particular have a peculiar section and therefore make funny spirals that look different at every angle. Sheep horns make more regular spirals.
The second set of sketches is about lions’ noses. In the library I found a great photography book on big cats (Raubkatzen: wild und faszinierend) and could easily examine quite small details. I decided to make a kind of plot and position noses according to the angles of the head:
Next time (next species in my list will likely be another big cat, or the fox) I will make a plot with axes meeting in the center of the page, so that I can draw noses pointing to the left or pointing upwards. There are otherwise too many pictures I couldn’t use, or had to mirror during drawing (and it’s really too difficult for me now).
That’s it! Stay tuned for more updates 🙂
aghisla draws 
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