Garlic sketches

I started a drawing tonight that I couldn't finish in time to post, so I'm showing these preliminary sketches of "Lauren's garlic". Or, to be more precise, I started a drawing tonight that I needed to walk away from before I destroyed it for not being what I wanted it to be. The poor drawing is now facing the wall so I don't spend the rest of the evening being mean to both it and myself.

I love "Lauren's garlic" for the way it looks so loose and free, but I had to sketch it several times to capture that feeling. That's something I didn't have patience for twenty years ago. I hated drawing in college. I thought it was outdated and tedious, I was only interested in design. I learned to smear charcoal around in a way that made it look like something important was happening. But the underlying structure wasn't there. It wasn't there because I was a burst of passion and chaos, and I didn't have the focus and patience needed to find it. Structure, light and shadow, composition, and proportion, those are the things I'm trying to learn about now.