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Steven, I really appreciate the encouragement. As you've discerned, I've been seduced by Lon's drawing methods. Yes, I highly recommend "You Can Draw". If you read Lon's posts and look at his work you'll know what to expect. His writing and drawing styles share many similarities.
I got interested in Lon's techniques at least partly because I thought it would be a great method of doing lots of quick studies for paintings, and I still think it's going to be invaluable for that purpose. What I didn't anticipate was getting hooked on the aesthetic of the little drawings. It's one of those seemingly constrained art forms like haiku, or sonnets, or Chinese brush and ink paintings: it looks simple and it is simple, but there's a infinitude of nuance and variation contained therein.
The good aspect of the constraint is that it forces you to consider only three things: line quality, shadow mass, and value. Then everything proceeds from upper left to lower right, or the reverse for lefties. How you will start and proceed is predetermined; no thinking necessary. Leave the eraser in another room, you won't be needing it. Concentrate on every stroke because it's going to be final. When the last stroke is done re-sand a chisel point on your lead., practice the strokes that gave you trouble, and get ready for the next one.
I don't play golf, but up to a point my earlier golf analogy is a good one. The big difference is that in golf the primary consideration is whether the ball wound up in the cup or not. In Lon's "Primary Method" the trajectory of the stroke is as important as where it winds up.
It's obvious from the two scans above that I missed many strokes, both in trajectory and final destination. Furthermore the quality of line needs a lot of work. That's all a matter of practice. What's interesting here is that in spite of my having missed a great deal, there is still a considerable resemblance between the two drawings; such that I think I could accept that they were of the same "person", even if I hadn't been involved in the process. I've trimmed the two drawings so that only the eyes, noses and mouths remain and posted the result below. The re-scaling of my drawing isn't perfect, but it can be seen that the pupils, nostrils and basic mouth line would very nearly coincide were the two images overlaid. I think this is an important component of what makes us see a "likeness". Other details contribute, but these features dominate. Based on this and other drawings I've just done, my gut feeling is that "Primary Method" is helping me locate these cardinal features without actively thinking about it (And despite errors in other aspects of the face, provided they're not too egregious). This is a contrast to my "old ways", where I did a lot of thinking about it.
I don't know if this works for everyone or if it will continue to work for me. My next task is to do a bunch of drawings from life to see how things fare under those circumstances. I'm hoping I'll improve in line quality and speed and not backslide on the cardinal feature location. I have a hunch that it's going to work, hence my current enthusiasm!
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