One of the most important things you learn in art class is using reference. To put it simply, copy stuff. In doing so, you learn how things connect and when your oranges come out as squares, maybe you need to look into that.
Here’s an example of copying from source material I did when I was probably about 10 or 11–the drawing is untitled, so I can’t say for sure, but I’m reasonably confident I was around that age, as it jibes with when I was reading Disney comics.
It’s actually a pretty good representation of Pluto, the odd dog pet of Goofy–odd, because Goofy was also a dog, of course. I’m intrigued by the fact that I did this using felt pens, as I have very few examples of felt pen art and the majority of my stuff was done in pencil or, to a lesser degree, pencil crayon.
PLUTO:
And for the sake of comparison, here’s the same with the wrinkly, yellowed sketchpad background removed:
Ken Robinson tells this story: “A little girl was in a drawing lesson. [The teacher] said, ‘What are you drawing?’ And the girl said, ‘I’m drawing a picture of God.’ And the teacher said, ‘But nobody knows what God looks like.’ And the girl said, ‘They will in a minute.’”
Sometimes I miss the sheer awesomeness of being a kid and having no filters, no limits, no preconceived ideas to slow you down or stop you.
I’ve fallen a bit behind on my drawing lessons in part because I wasn’t following drawabox.com’s 50% rule:
This brings us to an extremely important rule: at least half of the time you spend drawing must be devoted to drawing purely for its own sake. Not to learn, not to improve, not to develop your skills, not even to apply what you’ve already learned. There are no restrictions on medium, no specific techniques you must use, no subject matter you must focus on. Draw the things you’d draw if you were the most skilled artist in the world; draw the things your brain insists you’re not ready to tackle just yet.
This can only mean one thing: It is time, at last, for more Gum Gum People.
The final exercise of the Lines part of drawabox.com’s Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes is Planes. The exercise requires two pages of work and I have only done one, so I have one more to go.
A few observations:
Rushing will always yield poor results. There is not a single time I rushed on the ghosting (drew in the air over the paper as I would when applying pen to paper) and it turned out well. Fast is bad.
Every time I loosened my grip on the pen my line quality improved, and quite often my accuracy did, too.
Likewise moving away from using the wrist, which is one of the main focus points of these exercises–to get you to draw using your shoulder and elbow, and not your wrist.
Focusing on the ghosting made it easier to stop at the endpoint instead of overshooting it. As you can see, my focus needs work. 😛
I did one plane using a ruler, so you can see what the page would look like it I had the precision of a robot or a really good artist. Or a really good artist robot named Drawbot 8000.
As mentioned before, when I finally complete Lesson 1 (in ten months), I am going to switch over to ctrlpaint.com’s traditional drawing lessons and try the first few there to see how they compare, then decide which one to go whole hog on. Because I never half-hog.
Tonight, I finally started doing actual exercises and actual drawing. Woo!
Specifically, I began Drawabox’s Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes and then started the homework. Much like in my school days, I did not finish my homework in one sitting.
The first section is on Lines and I did not quite make it through because I started late and don’t want to rush. I did finish the first two of three exercises on lines.
Superimposed lines
Two pages of lines where you start with a base line and then draw over it eight times, trying to achieve even, confident strokes that overlap as much as possible. My results are not exactly exact. I also noticed the copy paper I was using tended to almost create grooves, so if I got the pen tip into a certain groove, it was hard to get out of it. I switched to different printer paper after the first page.
Page 1:
Page 2:
The second exercise is Ghosted Lines, in which you trace out how you are going to draw a line connecting two points before committing to drawing the actual line. This is supposed to improve muscle memory, among other things.
Some of the lines are decent but I have a tendency to arc a little and overshoot the end point. The lesson addresses both of these things, so I am a bit of a noob here.
A few things I noticed:
The exercises are designed to get you to draw from the shoulder, not from the elbow or wrist. My worst lines were when I forgot this and drew from the wrist.
I often found I was gripping the ultrafine marker too tightly and would take a few moments to relax my grip before drawing. This definitely helped, but it is something I will need to keep on top of, since my natural tendency is to grip the marker like I must CRUSH IT TO DEATH.
Next up is the final Lines lesson, Ghosted Planes. I did a few as a finale for the night and my planes were not exactly air-worthy.
I need to better arrange my desk for drawing, too. Things are a little tight. I shall do so before completing the current lesson.
I have been delinquent in posting the past few days. I have no good explanation for this other than general laziness, so on with the lessons!
Having completed the Intro to Digital Painting 101 on https://www.ctrlpaint.com/getting-started I moved onto the series of videos on traditional drawing, in which Matt Kohr explains the tools to be used (mainly HB pencils and a combo of vinyl and kneaded erasers) and a few basics. The confusion came when he started referencing things in videos that I had clearly not seen. This made me check the user comments and for some reason, the videos are posted out of order. It wasn’t a huge thing, but it did not instill confidence in the rest of the material. I watched the following:
For those playing drawing along at home, the correct order as noted by a user, seems to be:
Welcome to Traditional Drawing
Crtl+Paint Unplugged road Map
The Pencil
Visual Measuring
Unplugged: Pencils and erasers
The first actual exercise is to draw soft, loopy ovals in pencil, to help train the use of shoulder movement and get away from the tight grip used when writing–and rarely for drawing.
After the confusion of these mis-sorted videos, I went over to https://drawabox.com/ and started their lessons. They take a different approach, swapping in ultrafine markers for pencils, with the notion that this is easier because it lessens the urge to fix mistakes (no erasing) and just focus on the exercises, and the pen produces a single thickness of line that requires no pressure (one of the things they emphasize is to not mix different pen sizes). With pencils, the pressure will affect the stroke, as will the tilt of the pencil. Pens keep things simple and presumably easier for the beginner.
I have completed:
Lesson 0: Getting Started, an explanation of the lessons and tools needed, along with an overview of the non-technical skills that will be needed and refined through the lessons (patience, spatial awareness, etc).
I have read through but not yet finished:
Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes. This includes the first actual drawing bits (homework, as the site calls it), requiring a total of five pages for the three subjects. Repetition is a key component here–getting better by doing.
I have not yet taken pen or pencil to paper, because I am pondering the following:
Try doing both sets of lessons together (potentially confusing/overwhelming)
Do one set of lessons first, then the other
Stick to one set of lessons, then only do the other if I feel it’s needed
I don’t want to turn this into an excuse for not diving in, so I will likely start doing both and see how it goes. It’s easy enough to drop one and go back later.
I am treating my art lessons as if I am a beginner, as my last instruction was in high school, which was…awhile back
I have chosen to start this particular adventure with Ctrl+Paint, a site featuring copious free lessons provided by freelance artist Matt Kohr. It helps that Matt has a really calm, soothing voice in the videos, as opposed to say, Bobcat Goldthwaite’s.
I have completed the first set of lessons, Digital Painting 101, which comprises six videos. It introduces you to some key functions, features, and handy shortcuts in Photoshop.
The Ctrl+Paint videos highly recommend using Photoshop for ease in following the lessons, so I have temporarily renewed my subscription. I also dusted off my Intuos tablet and so far things are working as expected.
In time I will drop Photoshop, and transfer what I’ve learned to Affinity Photo and Procreate on the iPad. For now, I am following dem rules to keep things simple.
The initial lessons are traightforward, but the next set is where it will get interesting, as it goes back into traditional drawing instruction–using pen, pencil and paper. I have all three, so I am ready to start scrawling. I never practiced much in school because my attention was split among a bunch of stuff (as I mentioned in a previous post), so I may get somewhat better results this time. Or at least know sooner when to give up and go back to writing haikus.
I plan to start the next lessons tonight, so another update should arrive soon™.
One of the things I didn’t expect to happen in the past year (other than things like, uh, a global pandemic) was my rekindled interest in drawing. I took drawing and painting classes through junior high and highs school (five years total) and my only regret is that I never really got better–I simply didn’t practice enough, partly because my attention was split among a bunch of things–drawing. writing, acting, an interesting and bizarre turn at doing hurdles, along with all the usual distractions of youth–riding my bike, playing games (video and board), hanging with friends, figuring out my sexuality, stuff like that.
But last October I pledged to do Inktober and, to my own surprise, I completed all 31 prompts, nine of which brought back the Gum Gum People, to the delight of myself as well as others. After Inktober I let the drawing fall aside again, but the urge renewed itself on my vacation and I started digging into online resources.
I’ve settled on a few sites and their respective lessons and one of the key parts of each is that they emphasize and even require that you ground yourself in traditional drawing first–pencil and paper, not tablet and stylus. I like this because it goes against my first impulse, which is to just blunder about on my iPad, and “fixing as I go” without learning the proper lessons because when you go digital, you can skip a lot of proper technique in favor of brute forcing things.
Anyway, I’m starting the lessons now and will occasionally post my thoughts and perhaps a few sketches over the next little while. If this all ends in terrible failure, I will report on that, too.
In my quest to draw more, I asked for a subject and was told to draw a dinosaur. As a kid, I drew approximately five million dinosaurs–and this was almost two decades before Jurassic Park.
Here’s an example of one I found in an old sketchbook. Is Godzilla officially considered a dinosaur? I’m not sure. But you know what they say, great artists steal. This is one of four drawings I did detailing my take on the Godzilla story, inspired by watching every Godzilla movie from the 1950s on KSTW’s Science Fiction Theater, noon every Sunday. Those movies were terrible, and wonderful.
I don’t know why I had Godzilla frozen in a glacier, but it seemed like a cool idea (ho ho). I considerately recorded the year he emerged, which means I was 14 when I sketched this particular masterpiece of terror.
My Godzilla still has small arms, but they are like bodybuilder arms, so he obviously worked out before getting trapped in the glacier.
Disco was at its peak in 1978, but I would argue we’ve had stranger years since.
Here in the strange (and undeniably more horrible) world of 2020, I drew this quick sketch of some generic dinosaur in Procreate, using the technical pencil brush. The only fixing I did was to erase some of the extraneous lines. It’s not bad for a quick sketch. But no glaciers. Or background of any kind. Sad dinosaur walking a barren landscape.
This book does a good job in covering all the basics when it comes to learning how to sketch. Author Liron Yanconsky brings an amiable style to the subject as he introduces everything a new artist will need to know and need to have. Starting with the correct mindset, he covers some core concerns and requirements, such as accepting and embracing imperfection (you’re learning to sketch, after all), and the essential quality of being curious and seeking variety in what you sketch. He moves on to suggested materials, some basic techniques on how to use your eyes and even how to hold a pencil.
From there, he covers more specific aspects of sketching, including:
Perspective
Light and shadow
Tones and Textures
The final part of the book consists of working from included photos to produce full sketches of people, landscapes and more.
I suspect that at least some may become discouraged as they try to replicate the excellent results Yanconsky shows for each exercise. At times the sophistication required to accurately capture the scenes feels a bit like those old “Learn to Draw” ads that went from a few scrawled lines in the first panel to lavishly illustrated drawings in the fourth panel. Yanconsky addresses this in a way, urging the new artist to focus on sections, to build a sketch piece by piece when there is a lot to draw. His enthusiasm for the topic certainly helps.
As someone who can draw but not really draw well, I found the first half of the book, with its straightforward lessons on the aspects of sketching, to be quite helpful. While I may never been a sketching whiz, this book has helped me in ways that my own bumbling around wouldn’t have.
I’ve created a gallery with all 31 of my Inktober 2019 prompts. You can view it right here or by selecting it under the somewhat inaccurately named Photo Galleries at the top of the page.
