Not exactly the Mona Lisa

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a lousy drawer. I can’t even get stick people right. So I was pretty apprehensive when I signed up to take Drawing Techniques in May. It’s one of the 11 core courses in the Residential Decor program that I’m enrolled in. I figured, since I have to take it, may as well do it and get ‘er done!!

It was a lot of work — we had to produce 35 drawings (our choice) plus 6 assignments in 7 weeks. I thought I’d share some of my drawings with you to show you that if I can draw, then anyone can draw!!!

I have this problem where I can envision in my mind how I want my drawing to look, but somewhere between my mind and my hand, that vision gets totally messed up. My biggest problem is scale — I just can’t seem to draw things to the right scale. They come out too stretched out or too scrunched up.

After frustrating myself with drawing #9, hubby taught me what I thought was a silly trick, but turns out to be the proper way to get the scale right. You hold your pencil straight out in front of you and use it measure the height and width of the item you’re drawing. Sort of like when you see an artist holding up their thumb and squinting their eye. I used the pencil technique to draw one of our leather armchairs, and it actually turned out right!!

Using this technique helped a lot. Not to say that every drawing came out how I wanted, but there are a few that I’m happy with. I was originally going to draw just a section of our car, but I got on a bit of a roll and ended up drawing the whole thing. Other than the tires, it came out pretty good :-) I hope you can tell what kind of car it is!!

One afternoon, I sat out on the front porch with the intention of drawing the trunks of our birch tree. But that didn’t quite go according to plan, and I ended up drawing the porch instead. I must have been really into what I was doing, because I didn’t even notice how hard the concrete step that I was sitting on was till two hours later!!

The next drawing is one of our assignments. We had to choose a picture of a room provided by our teacher, and then we took home half of the picture and had to draw a mirror image of it. This was actually one of the easier assignments for me. Not sure why, because I’m so not into symmetry!!

By the way, this room belongs to designer Anne Hepfer. I selected it because I absolutely love everything about this room, especially the mirrored coffee table and screen :-)

You can see more of Anne’s beautiful home at Canadian House & Home and in the book, Spectacular Homes of Toronto.

I like how this patio chair came out. The table, not so much, so you can just ignore it :-)

Do you remember my sexy copper toaster??

Not quite as sexy in pencil, but not too bad :-)

And finally, for our last two assignments, we all had to draw the same room with a chair, fireplace, curtains, and bed.

Then it was up to us to elaborate with accessories, details, texture, and shadowing…

For the final assignment, we had to create a colour version of our room. I made some changes from the pencil version, because I wanted to glam it up a bit :-)

And finally, after more hours of thinking and drawing and colouring than I care to remember, the final version was done!!

Not exactly the Mona Lisa, but at least it’s a step up from deformed stick people :-)