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Why am I such a crap artist? (Or, fun with art pad).
The Duke of Tacos
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Here's a little guy I doodled in artpad, I might use him in a comic or something. Critique it if you will. Aslo, any advice on how not to suck? I wish I were as good as you guys in these forums.
Also I'm new here as you can see from my join date.:|
Also I'm new here as you can see from my join date.:|
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC] Parlez-vous Freezepop?
The Duke of Tacos on
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There's your problem, and its exactly what I've been doing for the past four or five years. You wish you can instantly become awesome as if you're trying to trick your mind into thinking there is a way to become Picasso overnight. Just draw from life everyday no matter how much of a bitch it is and how much you suck. I still suck but I'm doing something about it.
It's the name of a song by Freezepop.
.....................
Let us not use riddles for those who are new shall we cake? I shall squish Cake Mikz's words of wisdom to the most simplistic reasoning as possible.
In order to begin your little fiasco of artwork you must first understand the fact that everything involves shapes. The three basic shapes are what make an drawing, the circle, the square, and the triangle. Of course you may not understand how <| + O = Head yet. or ect. But you will in due time. Once you can see through your physical sight, and see into mental sight of the very foundation of shapes you will understand.
This requires much practice of drawing and you WILL know when you get there, you cannot fool yourself by pretending you see it, you must understand the shape itself with little to no thought which would mean you cannot acknowledge it but your drawing will acknowledge it for you.
Useee. The force to see!
Edit: And one good tip. A good drawing involves alot of erasing in general.
Sir, I have no idea what you are getting at.
Anyways, now that I've made my dumb joke:
Although Cake and Loom's advice is on the money I get the feeling without further explainations you're just going to scratching your head going, "Wha? Symbols? Triangles? What the hell are they on about?"
So! Rather than trying to summarize an entire book into a paragraph, I'd reccomend you just go to the library and read the book if you haven't already.
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain
Actually, wait. You should read the book, but for some reason I am going to break my own word and summarize because I just can't help myself. I hope this doesn't just come off a sales pitch, but whatever.
The basic idea is that the brain- in its normal, everyday state- as a means of not overloading ones brain with meaningless clutter, reduces objects it percieves into its most relevant everyday traits- what something basically looks like, what it basically does, if it's going to eat you or not, etc. This is the brain's way of making sure it's not dicking around examining the patterns of tree bark in the forest, if you are currently being chased through the forest by a bear. In day to day practice, that's a good thing.
Similarly, your brain knows, for instance, what a face basically looks like, and you have a basic conception of what a face does; because it is important to be able to read the expression of a face, you know about those thing that create expression- the eyes, the brows, the mouth, the nose. And this is what happens when you tell a beginning artist to draw a face- an oval with eyes, brows, mouth, and nose, floating somewhere in the center.
What you don't get is an indication of all those things that are important to the shape of a face, but the brain generally takes for granted- the skeletal structure, the proportions between the features, the indication of three-dimensional form. What the beginning artist draws is not an eye, but the sum total of those things their brain thought relevant to the basic idea of an eye- a basic, football-like shape, with 2 circles in the center. In short, a symbol of an eye.
A real eye isn't a football shape, but a sphere embedded into a divot of the skull, covered on most sides by muscle and fat and tear ducts and lids- in short, a bunch of shit your brain, by default, neither knows or cares about because understanding that "That female has caused contractions in the muscles in her face, which resulted in the simulaneous lowering of her left upper eye lid and raising of her left lower eye lid, causing them to meet in the center" is less useful in day-to-day transactions than understanding that, "Hey, that cute girl just winked at me!"
Now, the point of all this is that what you think you know, simply isn't good enough to create a convincing replication of whatever you are trying to draw, as the result of this default mode of identifying and remembering things the brain has. So, the problem then becomes, how do you break out of that sort of mode, to really see all of what is there in front of you?
The trick has to do with doing whatever you can to stop yourself from reading the object as anything but a series of forms, of basic shapes, of areas of light and shade- things that are equally relevant to any object.
Let me give you an example from the book (simply because this is the one that sticks out in my mind). In one exercise, she reccomends copying from a picture, as diligently as can be managed. Next, flipping the picture over vertically, copying it as it is, upside-down. Since the brain is unused to seeing buildings, trees, people, their features, the sky, etc. in that orientation, it helps to break the spell of defaulting to what you think you know about the objects- rather, they get reevaluated as a mere series of shapes, making the process of copying what is actually there easier.
Another example would be (I don't recall if this is in the book or not) letting your eyes lose focus on the object, so all you are seeing are some rough, blurry shapes (or if you can't manage that, wear some glasses following someone else's prescription :P). Perhaps paradoxically, impairing your normal vision like this allows you to see what is really happening at a basic level- deprived of all ability to percieve detail, your focus becomes the larger, overriding shapes, and the true tonality of what you're seeing. Example, you might have a white box in the foreground and a grey wall in the background, and say, "I will shade this box white, and I will shade that wall grey" in your picture. Makes sense, or so it seems. But if you allow your eyes to lose focus, you can see clearly- perhaps that monitor is in the shade, while the wall is in direct sunlight: therefore the logical thing your brain has told you is wrong- the grey wall will be whiter than the white monitor; the white monitor will be greyer than the grey wall.
Etc., etc.
I hope some of this made some kind of sense. The point is that yes, drawing from life is essential, yet almost equally important is knowing how to do so- how to train your eyes to see what is there. Drawing from life with a solid grounding in observational skill and drawing from life without any guidance or familiarity with these ideas whatsoever can mean the difference between running into a wall, and walking through a doorway.
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