Hello 

Welcome to the FLOAT-YOUR-PIGMENT Newsletter #98,  Mindseye Drawing

What a huge weekend for the Dillman's Festival of Artists, it started in Addison, moved to McHenry and ended up in Madison WI., yesterday. Thank you to all of you that attended, I hope you enjoyed all the demonstrations. All the instructors donate their time to bring you these demonstrations. There were instructors that traveled all the way from Colorado and Wausau, Wisconsin on their own dime to bring you some amazing free teachings. We, instructors, do this for you in hopes that you come and take our workshops up at Dillman's. If you ever want to take an amazing 4-day workshop, you will not go wrong with a workshop at Dillman's. I give it a 5star rating and hope you will join me up at Dillman's this year either in the spring or this fall.

This coming Sunday I will be demonstrating in Hopkins, Minnesota.

David

Yes to Class at the Civic Center in Libertyville on March 23rd
Yes to Class at The Studio in McHenry on March 25th

This last weekend I was talking to many students about learning to draw. Learning how to draw for me didn't come easy and after 4 years of life drawing and getting a job in the storyboard illustration business, I became aware of how the 4 years of life drawing didn't help me to learn how to draw from my mindseye.

Drawing from the model is great for learning about proportions, anatomy, lines, contour, shading and a whole lot of others things but one thing it doesn't teach you is memorizing and downloading that info into your brain for later use. 

Drawing from my mindseye after 4 years of life drawing didn't work for me. I was a great copy machine, as long as the model was in front of me I could draw amazing pictures, but once that model stepped away I was lost. Then when I got a job where I had to use my imagination and draw things that were not in front of me I couldn't do it. I learned very quickly so I wouldn't lose my illustration job that I had to practice drawing in a sketchbook from my mindseye.

I am going to teach you how to do this and if you want to learn to use your mindseye you will have to do it many many times over and over. It will be hard at first but you will have to keep on trying, it does get easier as you keep on doing it.

Study the bike that is pictured below for as long as you want and then look away from the picture. Now draw it from your memory. Do not look back at the bike photo when you are drawing. Only look back and compare your drawing when you can no longer remember what else to draw. Don't finish the drawing you started, but instead start again on a new drawing. Do this over and over until you can draw that bike from memory.

The sketch below I did from looking at the bike for 10 seconds. It is very rough but and I only want you to remember the big things you see in bike picture. Don't try to remember the small things like the spokes or where the wires go, you want to remember the big shapes of the entire bike. The more you do this and the longer you study it, in time you will also remember the little things.

Do this in your sketchbook and please show me how you did at my Sketchbook Challenge on Facebook.