drawanyway.com

Here is a very boring picture.

If you don’t think too much before you start drawing, you are likely to place your subject - be it person, vase of flowers, building, whatever - in the middle of the page, without actually having made a decision about it. It’s the safe option: you have plenty of space on either side should you need it, and it’s quite clear what the main subject matter is for the observer.

A very quick way of making any picture more interesting - and this very much applies to photographs as well, is to move the main focus to one side or the other. Even if there’s no background, you can see how the big area of empty space, contrasting with the detailed area of drawing, just makes for a more interesting whole.

Once you’ve got to grips with that idea, you can take it a bit further. There’s no law, for example, that says a portrait has to show the whole face. Often, in real life, we don’t see a whole face anyway, for example, if we’re looking through a car window. So, by simply bisecting a face like this, you are even beginning to suggest context.

And before you know it, you can start having a lot of fun with the whole idea of placing your subject.

Your task for Monday: choose a subject - anything, it doesn’t have to be a person - and draw it four times, in different positions on the page; cut bits of it off if you want to. Come back and share!