Small Victories

For the past couple of years, I've been attending a Life Drawing meet-up every Thursday morning; it's one of the highlights of my week. Over the weekend I was sorting through the drawings I've kept and it was a bit humbling. Some weeks have produced more than one "keeper", while others had none. I'm not sure I'm even getting better—my Parkinson's may be starting to affect the looser strokes that I've been trying to attain. I also saw that the hands and feet in my earlier drawings are better than the more recent ones.  Of course, heads, hands and feet are notoriously hard to draw; many art schools have entire courses devoted to them. And there's no "faking it" as you can sometimes do with other subjects: unless they're really accurate, they stand out like, well, like a sore thumb.

Most of the time, part of a drawing works while other parts don't. So, rather than dwelling on the parts of this drawing that hadn't been completely successful, I decided to scan it and crop it to highlight this area—I think it stands alone as a nice little intimate portrait. Small victories.