Drawing from Memory

The goal for this week's blog was to chose an image of a stranger and draw a picture of the person from my memory. This was much tougher challenge than I had anticipated since I've never been good at drawing, especially drawing faces, and picking a stranger made me wonder what type of person I would be most comfortable drawing. I did look through my classmate's drawings and found them very helpful - I avoid pictures with more than one person and one picture reminded me of a beard growing contest so I chose one of those images.

The proportions in my drawing are completely wrong but I had concentrated on the image of the beard and the top hat with less emphasis on the person's face. Luckily the picture was focused on the person and his beard, so I did not remember the background at all. I should have centered my drawing a little more and the beard doesn't look as thick in my drawing but overall I was able to remember the basics.

I draw the outline of the image quite quickly, knowing that my memory would lose some of the details quickly, and then I went back and added some color and filled in the image a little more. It still looks like a stick figure but overall it's not too bad, considering my serious lack of drawing skills.

I had also decided to use markers to draw the picture instead of using pencil so that I'd be forced to outline the drawing and was not able to go back and second guess myself by erasing some areas and trying to perfect them. This also forced me to concentrate on the details first and accept them as they had already been drawn. I wish the details of the beard were more accurate and the face has very little detail. The suit coat and body part of the drawing has more detail than actually present in the photo, my memory filled in those areas based on men's clothing in general. So I missed several details and added in a few extra ones, overall an accurate depiction as described in our textbook of my short term memory. (Although I felt better about my drawing before I uploaded the pictures and placed them next to one another.)