I’m finally finishing chapter 1. This time I’m supposed to sketch a “complicated mechanical object.”

The purpose of this exercise was to learn “focusing.” The idea is to draw the main areas and then choose a section and develop it in detail while one still has energy while leaving the bulk unsketched.

I choose the back of my watch to draw — a hand wound chronograph movement certainly would satisfy the requirement of being “complicated”. Moreover, a classic movement, this one being based on the Venus 175, would have a parts that are round or curved and thus prevent me from relying on Procreate’s Quickline feature.

I mentioned previously I was procrastinating on my last drawing, so I actually started this one before the previous. This is why the early strokes were done with a very thick pencil.

I tried to roughly sketch out the all the quadrants except the one I was going to focus on (the bottom left). But after completing it and getting to the column wheel (the turreted thing on the bottom just right of center), I realized that the proportions were all wrong. To diagnose the problem I made a duplicate of my work and superimposed a photo I took with my iPhone on it. That’s when I realized that it was caused by a lopsided outer circle! Since I was sighting everything relative to the center or the edges of the circle by the time I got areas nearly equidistant from both, things would be sized incorrectly.

I fixed this by using the a blurry photo to trace out the large areas and the outer circle of the display back. I then imported that tracing into my work and corrected it.

I went back to re-focusing on the bottom left, not realizing that I had accidentally shifted part of the image off the canvas. When trying to fix this, I discovered thatwhile Procreate saves everything, it only makes available a finite number of undos whereupon the app crashed. So I ended up drawing the same area three times. How’s that for focusing?

After I completed it, I decided to fill in the other quadrants and do a layer where I traced over the parts in colored ink. If I was serious (and a better artist), I’d probably have imported the sketch into Concepts and finished it off there. But I don’t know how to use Concepts.

I found out that I have no patience for drawing gear teeth. Also I noticed that my knuckles brushed up against the drawing causing a stray mark to appear that I never noticed until I played back a video.

Overall, if I had the patience with drawing I had has a child, this drawing would have gone much better. That’s okay, because it looks like something my elementary school friend, Bruce, whose father was an inventor and started an “inventors club” in school, would spend recesses drawing.


Baby steps, Terry. Baby steps.

Next up: Who knows? I finished a chapter. Time to get drunk and celebrate!