What’s better than challenging yourself to do something different.

If you draw something often enough you get to know its shape, whether its a drawing of a car, or a landscape, or a face.

If you want to see things more clearly when you are drawing it can be an idea to turn your picture upside down. then you can identify areas you need to adjust.

This is an extension of the idea. Draw the object upside down then turn it the right way up. It’s a way of learning. I find myself talking through what I am doing. Is the nose too long, are the eyes too close together. Just think how you would draw someone if they were standing in their head? How does the hair on their head fall? Where would the shadows be. In this case I can turn my phone round and clearly see that the face is too long, the eyes are too small and the face is too thin. But it doesn’t look as bad from the normal perspective. I think that’s because of foreshortening. Tablets and phones tend to be held horizontally where pc screens are vertical.  With phones that means the top of the image is further away from your eyes than the bottom of it. Consequently the top half may be drawn slightly bigger than it should be so that when viewed upside down you can see the distortions.

When I was a child I learned to draw by copying from cartoons and photos,  but also by drawing people from life and from memory, the old adage is right, practice makes perfect. I just need to spend the time to learn and hone my work.