An exercise in spasticity

Exercise #16 was to "get a looser and more varied line weight" by drawing today's model, David, with his cup of tea, with your non-dominant hand. In other words, if you're a righty, draw with your left, and vice versa.

There was absolutely nothing loose about this process. Spasticity was the word, as in, "a condition in which certain muscles are continuously contracted. This contraction causes stiffness or tightness of the muscles and can interfere with normal movement, speech and gait." By the end, I thought my hand would refuse to let go of the pen.

Drawing with my left hand was an alternation between careful though slightly tremulous lines, and wild random strokes resulting from the deathlike grip sending my hand into jerky noncooperation. I also kept having this intermittent compulsion to reach over with my right hand and snatch the pen out of my left!

I managed to get something of a likeness of David; and his one hand holding the teacup looks almost like what you would expect, but the other, supposedly holding a saucer, disintegrated into parts that never summed up into a whole.

After my experience with the drawing, I decided that watercoloring with my left hand was going to prove too much for me today and stopped with the Uniball impression.

Perhaps venturing into non-dominant drawing occasionally is good for keeping the brain elastic; but for making a pleasing drawing, not so much.

#30Faces30Days

"David, with tea" on Sktchy

Uniball pen, in Bee sketchbook