At my house there are books everywhere. Partially it’s because all of us love reading and love collecting books, partially it’s because my younger sister is homeschooled and I’m a recovering homeschooler, partially because my mom just went to the library and got a lot of books on dog training. So when I sat down at the table to draw today, I started with a huge pile of books that were literally within arm reach… It was a little too ambitious so I narrowed it down to three in order to:

A. Keep it all on one page

B. Do more detail.

C. Finish the drawing with sanity intact.

And then I added a pink background (actually table) because it seemed… fun? Or because I had a pink marker next to me (wow, I’m really basing my decisions based on location today)? No, obviously it was a conscious choice. I don’t really like it. But it was a choice.

One thing that I love about trying to draw realistically is that it makes you really focus on the honesty of shadow, meaning that it’s difficult to think what a shadow actually looks like in your head. Where it is going, where is your light source, etc. When you are just doing a line drawing and focusing on shape you easily forget the shadows, but they are actually what is making the shape visible to your eye in the first place if you think about it. Well, the light is what your eye sees I suppose, but if you didn’t have any shadow everything would probably just look like a white page! Which can be terrifying! Don’t be like Peter Pan and forget your shadow!

DISCLAIMER: This is not a scientific view. This was a tangent on my personal feelings about shadows.

However, I was googling around the idea of light and shadow and your eyeballs and came across an interesting scientific study: neuroesthetics, “an attempt to combine neurological research with aesthetics by investigating the experience of beauty and appreciation of art and other visual stimulus on the level of brain functions and mental states.” I’ve always been only passively interested in science… and I’m not sure how I feel about combining art and science together… but I am intrigued.