Since we have a public library in my hometown, I’m borrowing books by the bag. Not novels, because we have plenty at home, but research materials for my annotated Rapunzel: three or four fairy-tale picture books (Paul Zelinsky has one where Rapunzel is this Renaissance maiden with red hair – it’s almost painfully gorgeous) and a book of critical essays on fairy tales and three books on drawing.

            So I’ve read the picture books and thought about what direction I think my Rapunzel should take and I’ve skimmed the essay book but I have spent most of my work time doing these bizarre exercises from the drawing books, which are all a. intended for ‘the hobbyist’ and b. from the late fifties and c. have not been checked out in thirty years.

            I am okay at drawing but my talent lies mainly in composition and patterning. My flowered sofas, for example, are probably the best flowered sofas ever drawn, but if I need to put a person on that sofa I am in trouble, or at least badly out of practice. So I am working on two books for drawing people and one that is supposed to help me draw trees.

            The people one is going okay. I am pretty good at faces and my hands and feet are getting better (fingernails are still difficult – they have a funny curve to them) and I have successfully completed the Person Standing Exercise, which is helpfully described as:

 

You may think that all people stand the same way – that is, on their two feet. But if you think of the postures assumed by these three people: an aged grandmother, a sprightly young maid, and a middle-aged cavalry officer, soon you’ll see that a subject’s stance is as individual as their personality!

 

Ha ha ha. Now I am almost ready to start on Hairstyles and Costume, which looks fun – lots of permanent waves, double-breasted suits, and New Look dresses.

            Trees, which are practically required for fairy-tale illustrations, are more difficult. For an obsessive detailer like me, it’s incredibly hard to balance the shape of the tree with the detail in the leaves and bark. The book says to “become familiar with the mass of foliage” and I dutifully mass in my foliage but it still looks like nothing and I get all twitchy with the pencil and before long I have spent fifteen minutes on one branch’s worth of massed foliage and the whole drawing has become lopsided and overworked. Oh, my poor trees – I wish I could scan a few in for illustrative purposes so you can appreciate the difficulty; so far the best one I have done is a dead one that has also been struck by lightning.

 

The artist can find many good subjects in deformed, dead, or simply leafless specimens.

 

But whole experience of sitting down with conte crayons and paper and an instructive manual is a happy one. I forgot how much fun it is to sit and draw something for practice, even if that something is a leafless specimen or a lady in cat’s eye glasses. Will I be ready to start drawing Rapunzels and towers and blind princes by the time we go back to Dubai? Possibly not, but I think I will at least have that fingernail thing down.