I don’t remember whether I mentioned it, but we were given a small exercise to do before next week’s session. We were given a line drawing by that Picasso bloke, and asked to copy it as best we can. Oh, but the drawing is upside down, so you won’t “recognise” it and you will see it “as an artist”. In other words, you will draw what’s there rather than what you’re expecting to be there.

On the other hand, it’s Picasso, so it’s unrecognisable when viewed the correct way up too. (It vaguely resembles a man sitting in a chair — and indeed, the explanation text describes it as a portrait of a man.) Since the original doesn’t look like anything, it’s not so bad that your copy of it doesn’t look like anything either.

It took me roughly 1 hour to make my copy. The image consists of a rather dense network of lines, and it’s really very hard indeed to copy it. Well, I managed to copy it, but only on finishing it did I truly appreciate how horribly wrong the proportions are. It seems that I’ve instinctively scaled the drawing in such a way as to produce a uniform level of detail across it. Small, complex details become enlarged, and large but simple features end up shrinking. The resulting image looks recognisably like the original, just rather distorted.

Man I suck at this!