This spring and summer, I had planned to practice drawing from life more often, and I had a few locations I hoped to go to and draw—a big park, the main street nearby with all the city life on it, a canyon outside the city, etc. But between complete quarantine in the spring and trying to not leave the house unless necessary for the rest of the summer, I never got around to drawing at those locations. Not to mention that some scenes wouldn't have looked as I had hoped... the main street was unusually quiet and not like its lively self for a while.
I still wanted to draw from life though! So I decided to draw some objects, scenes, and people from around the house. Most of these ended up staying as sketches, but they were really good for practicing observation.
For this first one, I was just in the mood for a shorter drawing rather than a big project like most of the others I had been working on. I looked around my room for an interesting object, and settled on this backpack.
All of the creases, pockets, and zippers were good to practice. I drew it out in pencil before going over it in pen, just to make sure I had all the proportions right so everything would line up how it should. I didn't do any shading on it, but I did vary the line thickness. For example, in some of the deeper creases, the lines are thicker, and in the smaller creases, such as the ones at the front and top, the lines are much thinner. This gives it some depth without needing shading.
As I had mentioned before, I also wanted to practice drawing people from life. Well, my parents were the only people I saw for a while, so I drew my dad!
Again, I left it as a sketch—I didn't want to keep him sitting still there for too long, and the line drawing already took a while. I realized it's much harder to draw someone else than it is to draw yourself with a mirror. When drawing yourself, you can take a break to move and then adjust back to how you look in the drawing, since you know which angle to hold your head, whether to look up or down, etc. When drawing others though, you have to learn to adjust to each movement they make. So this was definitely good practice for me! Looking at the drawing now, I think I could have added some lines in the hair so it wasn't just a big flat, white space. I also could have made the face slightly longer. Overall though, I'm happy with the realism of it and the general form.
For a landscape type drawing, but from the house, I decided to draw our balcony with the buildings and trees that can be seen from it. Instead of focusing on the other buildings and the street like in my View from Quarantine painting, I focused on the balcony in this drawing.
I added shading to this one, so it took longer than the others. I split it up over a few days since it was quite hot outside and I didn't want to sit out there for too long at one time. I also made sure to go out and draw around the same time each day so the light would be the same. With this drawing, I practiced vignettes some. Most of my drawings are just rectangles with nice, straight edges since I base a lot of them off of photographs. But vignettes add an interesting element to the composition of drawings, so I wanted to try fading the drawing to white around the edges. It was also good to practice simplifying the buildings in the background since I have a tendency to focus on lots of details, which can be a bit overwhelming at times for scenes like this one. Both the lack of details and the faded look of the buildings in the back gives it some perspective as well.
Lastly, I drew a couple rooms in our house. The first one was the kitchen. This sketch was mostly just for fun, and I didn't shade it or clean it up.
The second one was my room, and I added pen to this one and erased the pencil lines when I finished.
All of the little items in each room helped with observing details and were great practice for proportions and placement. I had to make sure everything was the right size and proportions so that they would all fit together correctly. This worked really well for the most part. The only object that got a little squished was the R. This was good practice for observing perspective as well, such as with the books on the dresser. I also had to decide on the right amount of detail to include. For example, I left the photos blank, especially since they were mostly people. At first I tried to draw out one of the photos, but it wasn't working to simplify the people in the photos to fit this style. I'm really pleased with the look of this one.
So I've learned that there can be really interesting subjects to draw, without even leaving the house or having to rely on photographs for realism. I enjoyed all these sketches and drawings and hope to practice more like them!