Drawings

A while ago I did a post about my inability to draw hands and how I had sat and practised a bit using an old book from the 1940s.

I am not too bad at copying other things when it comes to drawing, not so great at doing something from scratch but I did say that I would put up some of the old drawings I have done – they are copies of other pictures but done from just looking at them, so no tracing or anything. (Caution: Some nudity!!!)

The first two are copies of an Edvard Munch picture and the famous The Kiss by Klimt (one of my favourite artists – don’t look at the hands…)

Then copies of some Salvador Dali sketches and an Alphonse Mucha painting (another of my favourite artists – again try to ignore the manglewurzel hands!)

Then copies of some Salvador Dali sketches and an Alphonse Mucha painting (another of my favourite artists – again try to ignore the manglewurzel hands!)

Then some baby feet copied from a book about drawing and a sailor pin up girl by Gil Elvgren (another favourite of mine.)

And finally a nude from a book on drawing I think!

I shall make an effort to draw more and to try and work out what my own style is. The problem with preferring to copy is that I don’t really know what my style is (other than drawing rather bizarre cartoons but that’s different!)

Manglewurzels

What, pray tell, is a Manglewurzel? Well it’s a type of beetroot, also called Mangold Wurzel, usually used for animal fodder.

It is also the term myself and a few close friends use to describe when I draw hands. It’s a bit of a shambles.

Some years ago my husband got me an old book ‘How to Draw Hands’ by Oliver Senior – a book printed in 1944. It has that old book smell about it.

You can tell it’s old as the first picture is someone holding a cigarette…

So last night, after my bath, I dug out my little sketch book and got some pencils, a sharpener and an eraser and flicked through the book. I picked two pictures to copy the technique and although they aren’t perfect and perhaps I picked the wrong hardness of pencil but here are my two goes and hopefully they are not manglewurzels!

Hand sketches by Alex Cleverley