I came upon Struthless’s youtube channel and watched this video, which is worth watching in it’s entirety (all 10 mins of it!) – the upshot of it is that I have decided to trial the advice he got, and which he elaborates on in the video. Honestly, he’s great, I’ve watched most of his stuff (his burger video is spot on, too!). I decided I had nothing to lose and much to gain, so this is my post of month one of “draw the same thing every day for a year”.
I picked horses for a few reasons. One source material is everywhere; i started by going through my art history books and using them. I liked horses as a kid, (which girl didn’t!), I still like them. A horse is fairly immediately recognisable.
By a few days in, I’d worked out that horses might be painted well in historical art – but they are drawn almost universally terribly. So many were out of proportion or a bit wrong looking. All different to each other. I’d literally never noticed this before. Lots of long backs, poised rearing legs, tiny heads, tiny ears, strange muscle placement.
So I ordered some picture books, and also got out my picture book for “The Black Stallion”, a movie I unaccountably loved as a kid. Turns out black horses photograph about the same as black cats: voids with eyes. But some good silhouette shots! I have a horse anatomy and another picture book to turn up (I prefer working from photos rather than the internet, i may end up printing out some I find).
Sometimes I draw more, sometimes i draw less. It has inspired me to do more OTHER drawing I must say…if I’m sitting down having started on the horse, I’ve often just kept going. I spent hours drawing last weekend, most art I have done in months… And i have to observe what I’m doing carefully to get everything to look OK. I’m wondering how I’m going to go with this. I am looking forward to hating on these horses and then seeing what comes out of this. I mean, 31 days of horses, this is more horses than I have ever probably drawn in the rest of my life combined. I have to do 11 more of these. EEEEK. So we’ll see how it goes. Here is the first month: