Monday, November 5, 2012

Leonardo's Homework

After Leonardo
I ran across a page from Leonardo's notebooks the other day, in Drawing Lessons from the Great Masters. It was absolutely covered in drawings, colliding into one another. It reminded me of "scratch paper" from student homework. And clearly, it was. It was Leonardo working out all sorts of ideas and practicing mark making.

I was rather humbled by that. Do I have any pages like that in my sketchbooks?

So I filled up a page with copies of his homework.

After Leonardo
The above eyes were very small in my reproduction, maybe a inch in total size. I wanted to see if I could just follow the dark shapes at a larger size and get the same moody result. My drawing is more like 5 inches across.

2 comments:

Jennifer Rose said...

I was always told sketchbooks wer enever ment to be neat :p things can be jumbled and overlapping, can be themed or not but as long as we drew something it didn't matter

Rose Welty said...

Yes, sketchbooks should be what you want them to be. I suppose it is just easy to assume that masters were born that way - as opposed to having worked hard to get where they are/were.