My jab at sketching!

First of all, survive a new year.

Sketching, or in general, any form of art is not my cup of tea. All my life, everyone else has done that on my behalf. My sister drew birthday and anniversary cards for my parents, and all I had to do was to go cry in front of my mom to have my name written in the 'from' section of the card. In school, all my journal diagrams were done by friends or mom. I think, I am just too lazy to write or draw. Lucky for me, I can just get away with typing for weeks at stretch now.

Anyway, back to the point. God hasn't really given me much of a right brain, hence, I'm horrible at drawing, to say the least. But by the virtue of my left brain, and hours and hours of training, there is one thing which I can make really well. The Scenery. If you have taken a single art class in Indian Education System, I'm sure you know what I am talking about. Biswa explains it perfectly -

It's so true to the core. It's so deeply ingrained in me, that I can literally whip up a 'scenery' in less than 2 minutes. Just like this one -

But this got me thinking. That it's about time to try something new. So, one fine Saturday morning, I head of to National Portrait Gallery, to sketch something. First 15 minutes was spent in figuring out the most easiest painting I can sketch. Finally, I landed on this - 

It's been a while since I last wrote something, let alone draw anything. So I thought, lemme do a quick 2 min sketch of the portrait, something on the lines of warm up. It didn't look pretty, but at least it will make you appreciate my final sketch more. ;)

Next, I spent an hour trying to sketch my chosen portrait. Mainly, I tried using a technique taught by my geography teacher back in high school. Basically, you divide the original painting in a grid of equal sized squares, and just concentrate and copy the things in each square one by one, rather than thinking about the big picture. The only problem with that is, since I cannot draw the grid on the original painting here, I tried to do it mentally, as much as I could.

Another trick that helped me with my proportions of things, was to measure them relatively with the length of the pencil, when it is kept at a fixed distance from my eye. This made sure that the ratio of horse's height to the length of its leg is 1.618. No, it is remotely not close to that, I am not Da Vinci.

Anyway, after an hour of sketching, erasing, eye squinting, and "almost giving up", I produced this -

Comments (aka appreciation :p) welcomed.