Weird…but useful.

This morning I was doing a preliminary sketch for a Halloween drawing I'm making.

One of the weird things about drawing is I can finish one, think it's as good as I can make it, then hours, days or even weeks later, I can notice a glaring mistake that I can't believe I missed.

I've spent hours lovingly inking a drawing, only to discover days later that a forearm is twice as long as it should be or an ear is totally in the wrong place.

Then today, something strange happened.

I'd finished the pre-lim sketch and was almost completely happy with it. In fact, I liked it so much for a forty-five minute sketch that I decided to take a picture of it and post it. So I grabbed my camera, set it to 'copy' mode, stood by my drawing desk and lined it up…

…and I instantly noticed a major issue.

When I was sitting at the desk, I didn't notice anything wrong. Looking at the picture on my cameras tiny 1.5" screen, I saw that the one of the character's legs and feet were just plain wrong instantly. You can see it here:

There's on old drawing 'trick' where in order to check your anatomy and proportion is right, you flip the image by looking at it in a mirror. For some reason, looking at it flipped makes any errors far more easier to notice. I kinda understand how that works, because it's literally making you look at your image in a new way.

What I don't understand is how it's much harder to notice an error on an 11"x14" drawing when you're standing right in front of it, than it is to look at the same drawing on a 1.5" screen…especially when the flash is making the graphite from your pencil glare.

So, basically, I spent half an hour today swapping between sitting at my drawing table and standing up looking at the drawing through my camera.

Very, very odd…but also highly useful.