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Bear Cavalry's Drawing-A-Day Thread
Bear Cavalry
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hey Artist's Corner, my forum name is Bear Cavalry.
I enjoy painting 40k minis, playing BattleField 2142, and listening to music.
I am 15, just got my driver's ed permit(and drove a car today in fact!)and I am taking a "foundations of art" class in my sophomore year of High school. I've never been a fantastic artist, however since I have to take one fine arts class I figure I may as well get a head start on it. Also drawing is something I enjoy doing.
The point of this thread is for me to do one drawing a day through out the summer, and to keep at it when school begins as well. So without further adieu I will post my drawing from today! Which is a cabinet in my abode.
Critique Away!
I enjoy painting 40k minis, playing BattleField 2142, and listening to music.
I am 15, just got my driver's ed permit(and drove a car today in fact!)and I am taking a "foundations of art" class in my sophomore year of High school. I've never been a fantastic artist, however since I have to take one fine arts class I figure I may as well get a head start on it. Also drawing is something I enjoy doing.
The point of this thread is for me to do one drawing a day through out the summer, and to keep at it when school begins as well. So without further adieu I will post my drawing from today! Which is a cabinet in my abode.
Critique Away!
Bear Cavalry on
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Your picture lacks detail, and looks very shaky... but thats what practice is for. Keep it up!
I will definitely use it(I just did a pic before I read that, so I'm going to do 2 now :P )
Agree'd with Toaster on your lines. Also - try making your straight lines straighter, and pay close attention to what you're drawing. It looks like you just whipped this thing up without much of a thought. Get yourself an eraser, too, and use it if you make mistakes (and you will). Really look at the object you'r trying to draw, and compare it to the one that's on the paper. You should be looking at what you're trying to draw much more than you should be looking at your paper. It's all about studying what's in front of you - not trying to draw what you imagine it should look like. Good luck.
Thanks for the advice NightDragon, I got myself some of those kneaded ball erasers, a tri-corner eraser, and a set of pencils at a place called Carson's Arts.
They are the best erasers I have ever had. They're not expensive, either - I think one of them lasts me a few years or so (I don't draw all that much anymore though, but hey! They last awhile regardless...and I usually lose them before I finish them, haha)...and they're usually a dollar or less.
Also, for your pencils - for now, I personally would suggest working on getting proportions and linework down correctly before moving on to shading. Others would disagree, perhaps, but that's what I would suggest. When you DO decide you want to start working on shading, use something like an HB lead - it's kinda the "middle-ground", all-purpose lead. It's just the right hardness/softness to give you a decently dark mark, while still allowing you to make lighter marks as well. (I'm assuming here that your "set" of pencils have varying lead types?) Softer leads, like B leads, will give you darker marks, and they're hard to make a light mark with. The opposite is true for the harder leads, or H leads, that will give you lighter marks.
It's usually a good idea to start out using a single lead, like HB, to figure out values and such (you make a gradient from Dark to Light, using only that pencil...pressing down hard and then slowly moving to a lighter stroke.)...and once you've got that down, and understand tha values you can achieve with just a single lead, you can introduce the other leads to help you out. I haven't ever found other leads to be necessary, but that's really just a matter of personal preference, I suppose.
Blah blah blah I'm getting ahead of myself. Lookin' forward to the next piece.
Ha ha I think I have one of those erasers!
Well I did shade in the drawing I just decided to do, It's kind of a wip, but I'll post it now to further critique.
(Well I won't post it right now since my printer is being a bitch, and thank you for the indepth post)
And about the drawing itself... Well, you're headed in the right direction but I'm not sure if it's such a good idea to start off defining what you see with line (and I know this completely contradicts ND's opinion). Reason being, I think that gets you thinking about form in the wrong way. Form isn't defined by line in nature, it's defined by value (lighting and shadows) and this is an important thing to understand when you're just beginning to draw because it teaches you to "see." It's really good practice to force yourself to stop thinking about edges and borders as line because then you look at the object more critically and the resulting drawing is more close in likeness to the actual object. And I know a lot of the people who post here will argue against that because they learned through line, but this is coming from someone who mainly does technical (architectural) renderings and drafting where line is everything. It's taught me how to see better, anyway. But if you're set on drawing with line, at least vary the thickness of the lines so as to define highlights and shadows (thicker lines for the edges that are in shadow, and thinner ones where the light hits).
Also, I'd like to point out that you should probably stop trying to draw the labeling because it's not very important, and the way you're drawing it, it just looks like it's done in your handwriting rather than what you're seeing. What's far more important is the form of these objects, not petty detail like what's written on it.
I get your point bread, I'll definitely focus more on the form!
I agree that kneaded erasers are :^: for charcoal - it's really the only eraser I use when I'm working with that medium. I've never found a pink eraser that I've liked, though...maybe it's the feel of them, or how they work, or something, but eh...guess that's just personal preference. :P
Don't listen to him! They are the devil! They will eat your family. : o
Haters. :x
And...very rarely an electric eraser for taking out something I really had not planned to.
Also, the white erasers are really easy to get that same angle on a pink eraser with...just use a razor blade to cut them in half diagonaly.
Totally agree here. I've used kneaded, gum, pink, and every other kind there is, and pink always gives me the best results. It simply annihalates the line, and you can make sharp edges on it as well as you can any other eraser. Not only that, you can get like eight thousand erasers for $0.07 at Office Max. (Well, more like 15 for $2, but you get the idea.) It's all about the quality of eraser you buy. It's not even the price. I've bought expensive pinks that would crumble and fall apart, then cheap ones that make clean, smooth erasures.
Anyway, we should get back on subject. This kid needs some real guidance if he's gonna get good at all. There's three things to remember if you want to get good at drawing.
1) Draw every day
2) Draw what you see, not what you think you see. (draw the shadows, not the outline. Nothing real has outlines.)
3) Draw every day.
I did this piece before I saw rfilyaw's post, so I'll "draw the shadows, not the outline" in the next post. ;-)
ALSO, it's a drawing of a piece by ashley wood!!!!
Edit: After seeing it on the forums my mistakes seem so much more obvious.
Yea, I'm worried about taking the class which is what made me start this. The only things I draw are bar graphs. Anyway, I did two more.
The pics are a little big.
On the second one the whatever it is doens't have any shadowing at all, and if it's casting a shadow like that (which is also out of perspective), then there should be shadowing on the side, since it's not receiving direct light.
I appreciate you taking my input. Even though most of us use outlines in all our first drafts, outlines are just a form of hard shadow, so if you learn to draw shadows first, lines will come much easier.
You might feel discouraged by the advice here, because most people will point out that drawing from someone else's drawing is going to severely gimp your progress. They will say (and rightly so) that you should first learn what you'd like to draw, then go for it. If you wanna draw everything, then do like your first post and draw cabinets and cants and desks and boxes sitting around your house. If you wanna draw people, I highly suggest downloading Loomis books and going from there.
I'd very much like to see everything you do in the future, and I want you to stay super optimistic about it. None of us started drawing like Stan Lee or Michael Whelan our first time out, so take criticism lightly but seriously. You'll never go wrong.
Thank you a lot for the help rfilyaw! I plan on drawing some vegetables and fruit that come with the groceries. Also I have "Drawing on the Right Side of The Brain" although I can't find it.
Also thanks to Virum, I will pay more attention to that!
Although some of the concepts there might be a bit ahead of where you are right now (he goes into colors and whatnot), there are still a number of great tips in there for things like shadows and gradients and such, many of which I think you may find helpful. Read it, too! There's not much text (compared to a lot of tutorials/drawing books out there) but the text can be just as valuable as the visual aspects.
Also, I found a shading tutorial that may help your shading become a little smoother/nicer.
Thank you for the links! I will definitely try to incorporate those into my drawing. In fact, I'm going to go draw right now.
I uploaded some Loomis books for you (Adobe PDF format) to my site that I got from Grifter's. They're by Andrew Loomis, and I suggest starting with "Successful Drawing". They're kinda big, so may be a bit difficult to download if you're on dial-up.
Here's the addy: http://www.3hamegos.com/?page_id=13
(Thanks to Grifter)
You inspire me though. I'm 16 myself and well I might just get back into drawing. I'd never have thought of asking here for critique because sheesh I've seen some stuff that looked pretty damn good to me get absolutely crushed into nothingness by the words of some of the fine folk on this here board.
Notice that feature isn't defined by a generic pencil stroke with the same thickness throughout. Rather, at the two ends of the banana it's thicker and kind of tapers out into an implied line in the middle, with a very light stroke of color that's only a pinch darker than the rest of the object.
Also, the way you drew that shadow isn't very convincing. A shadow isn't simply a "reflection" of an object, but darker. And I'd like to see you shade the whole object rather than just give them shadows. These fruits aren't transparent, you know. They have all sorts of tone to them that you're missing.
Give it a shot, I found that drawing is very enjoyable! I've found that drawing is like anything else, you got to do it a lot. When I look at really good stuff on these forums, I read some more posts by them and find that they've been drawing a lot (or using whatever medium). What kind of inspired me to do this was a post on conceptart.org where a guy drew one drawing a day for several years and became an amazing artist.
One tip tho, if you get criticism by a pa person pay attention to what they're saying, I made a list in word processor of all the stuff I get told and I save the links in a folder. A couple of people on these forums have gotten into flaming matches at the drop of a hat over criticism, so just stay optimistic on what you're doing and don't get discouraged.
In my next update I'll; pay more attention to form, to tone, and shade the whole object and I'm going to draw that banana again. I see what you're saying about the transparent fruits :P
I'm heading to Barnes and Noble(nobel?) and I'm going to get some books on drawing.
What would you guys recommend me?
(The Natural Way to Draw by Kimon Nicolaides)
I'm going to get that for sure.
As usual, I agree with BoW here. He said exactly what I wanted to, but I wasn't sure how. Definitely need to shade inside the banana/orange too.
As for books to get, just avoid "How to draw Anime" kinds of books (or anything that's like "How to draw dogs" or "How to draw caricatures). As simple as those books are to follow, they'll lead you down a path of half-assed stylizing before you have the basics that can only come from life experience. Anything that makes you draw a shaded sphere or cube in the first couple of chapters is probably pretty good.
Don't worry I won't get any of the " How I darw manga " books
Haha, good.
Also, your method for accepting critiques and documenting them is...pretty unheard-of on these boards, ha. Keep up the good work! I was going to say something earlier, about how you're doing the shadows, but bread of wonder mentioned it already.
I did two exercises from "How To Draw What You See"
The first is an exercise in squares and viewpoints.
Now I'm going to put up some images of the books I got and the materials I use.
Pencils,Erasers,and Sketchbook.
Kudos for the animal book, as part of my art studies (long done, but still remembered ;-) ) we had to do some historical research. Look up George Stubbs, he's one of my favorites, but there are many who have done inspirational work.
Keep it up!