A little learning

I did a little learning in spite of myself this week.  I heard an interview on NPR with Chuck Close, who is a pretty famous artist.  Chuck has a condition called face blindness.  He can't recognize faces.  He forgets names too.  So if you go meet him and you met him before he won't know who you are, even if you're his mother.  In fact, he can't even recognize his own face.  This has influenced his art.  He paints faces.  What he does is he takes a photo of a face.  Then he draws a grid over it.  Then he chooses a giant canvas and draws a grid on that.  Next he carefully copies the details in each grid of the photo onto the canvas, while increasing it in size dramatically.  Finally, when the whole face is finished, he can actually see the face.  He does faces of people who are important to them so he can see their faces.  Now, if that same person came into the studio right then, he still wouldn't be able to recognize them, but at least he can see, from the drawing, what they look like.

My drawing books have finally come in!  I've taken a look at them and they seem pretty good.  I'm almost out of dyes and can't buy more at the moment, so i suspect that I'm going to have a lot of time to work on my drawing.