Hi All,
Long time lurker mostly, and figured I would start fresh with from life drawings rather then trying to brake the rules before knowing them. I was inspired by the daily drawing thread and the link to another similar thread, and both were very inspiring. So without any chit chat, here are my daily drawings, crits and comments are welcomed and the more the better!:)
the first 3 I did on monday, the second two I did today.
believe it or not, that was suppose to be Gandalf with only brown colors
That was suppose to be boromir I am ashamed to say, things went really wrong.
Crit away! And I mean everything, I want to improve!:o
Edit: Sorry about the first post with the oversized images, and also I'll work on soon scanning in my works.
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As one so aptly put it, we almost have to teach you how to *see* how to draw at this point, and that is a daunting task.
But since you do have the propencity for wanting to learn, I recommend picking up some books that discuss how to train your eye to draw what you see in life and build from there.
Keep drawing!
Thanks for the encouragement, and I should have the book in a couple days, getting it off of eBay.
Didn't get much done today, I am pretty tired, though comments and crits are welcome for sure.
5/30/07
Yeah I did notice that, it felt wrong.
Heres todays drawings, not much, I am a little under the weather, so it's hard to do much of anythings.
Two hands, one fleshed out a little, the other basic, trying to be drawing in only a couple of shapes. and a apple moving box to practice a little perspective.
As for your hands, try finding some images on Google or in an anatomy book and study the positions and such. I heartily recommend you start with some basic shapes before going into detail. Speaking of an anatomy book, I can't stress enough how important anatomy is. Pick one up and study it, and draw as much as you can.
You're brain is tricking you; it's telling you that the shape of the front of the box is square so you've drawn a square; the reality is that when looked at from that angle the front of the bos is more of a diamond shape. You would need to bring the top right and bottom left corners a little bit closer together while the top left and bottom right should be a bit farther apart.
This may sound crazy but the thing that helped me the most when learning was an art class in which we drew nothing but boxes for the first 3 months. This was a class full of talented artists (I was one of the less talented; but anyway...) and at first they thought it was a complete waste of time; by the end everyone felt it had actually been quite helpful.
wii Number 0648 2052 0203 3154
DRAWING EXERCISES:
Supplies:
-Paper
-Pencil Pen or Really Thin Marker!
Exercise #1
The straight Line:
-Draw a 2 inch line that lines up with the paper going left to right or right to left.
-Go over that line 8 times! Don't mess up or go outside that line!
-Do it again, this time with a line half way across the page! DO NOT STOP MIDLINE
-Do it again, this time all the way across!
Exercise #2
Parallel lines:
-Draw one line 2 inches across.
-Draw another one below that one, about a quarter inch down. They have to be completely parallel!
-Do a total of 8 lines this way. Evenly spaced! The same space in between!
Exercise #3
Circles:
-Use the lines you made in number 2. Draw a perfect circle between the first two lines.
-Draw another identical circle next to it.
-Fill all the rows.
Exercise #4
Big Circles:
-Make a perfect square using 4 lines the size of your palm.
-Divide the box into four even sections.
- Attempt to draw a perfect circle inside the larger box. The circle will touch all four sides of the box at the middle of each line.
-Trace over that circle 8 times!
Now your daily warm up is done!
Do this every day.
You also need: better reference!
www.characterdesign.com has tons of photo reference for you. lots of pretty naked people with single light sources.
You also need: Basic art knowledge!
-Anatomy
-Value
-Hue
-Form
-Gesture
if you don't know what those words mean in art context I suggest you study up!
artistjeffc.tumblr.com http://www.etsy.com/shop/artistjeffc
i didnt know about this website. awesome. :^:
oh my god oh my god oh my god.
Draw it again and try to define and tone everything you see.
With the hands, look at your own hand and try to draw every curve and bump you see.
Do not be afraid to use the eraser, infact, when i draw something, only around 5-10% of the picture is the first line i put down there.
Keep trying until you get it just the way you want it.
You just made my year, PROX.
Tomarrow I intend to really start, I have somethings I want to practice in mind, and believe this time I won't stop drawing! I hope lol. For today, I have a old drawing I did a little over a month ago during finals week at college, I was sitting in the car and figured why not draw my hand while it's hold the pad.
Must..... Start......... Drawing..........
A side note, I really am better at shading than this picture lets on lol, the shading in this is pretty crummy.
Never concentrate on drawing the hand as a whole.
Each finger and you palm should be in different stages.
It's good, just keep trying.
Thanks for the encourgement!:o
It's funny, When I tried to draw my hand like books suggest, by seeing the shape, they don't come out well, but when I just draw my hand the way I see it, it turns out better. It could have to do with my last art class. I had to do 45 drawings in my sketch pad, and well over half was my hand in different positions. I think I draw better when I don't feel like I have something else to do, or something that is easier to do. So odd.:|
Drawing works best when you allow your memory (your knowledge of how things look and are), and your hands, which you've trained to be able to reproduce these things - if you let those two parts of you work and remove your conscious mind from the equation. Yeah, that sounds hippy and art-college and bullshit, I know it! I'll try and explain...
It's your mind interferring with judgement calls that is going to screw up your work most at this stage, your brain saying things to you like "that's wrong" or "you're not good enough" or "you can't do this, it's too hard"... ignore it. Learn to shut it out. Once you've spent enough time looking and drawing, you know this stuff, and having your brain interfere is just... gonna cause trouble. Don't let it make you hesitate, don't make judgement calls on what you're doing, just draw and don't think about it.
I discovered this little gem while on an art college trip in barcelona - we spent an evening inventing cocktails and drinking them, and by the end of the night everyone but me and a close friend of mine had passed out. So me and this friend went around drawing all the passed out people! Of course, we were too drunk to concentrate on what we were doing - we just drew a line and then didn't even look at it, moved on to the next one. But that false confidence and lack of concentration you get when you're drunk worked very well - we produced some of the best, smoothest and most confident drawings we'd ever done, at a time when we were both very hesitant and new to drawing, and our lines were always tentative, and our proportions rubbish.
Not that I'm suggesting you get drunk and draw (though if you're old enough to drink, it's worth a shot) - rather that this is a good example of telling your brain to shut up. Don't make judgement calls on the lines you've drawn, and don't draw them a hundred times - draw them once, confidentally, and then ignore them and move. Confidence will show, and your drawing will improve as that confidence builds. Drawing is about two things - practice (training your eye and your hand), and confidence (knowing that you've done the training and you know this stuff!).
I hope that was passingly helpful and not just a big pile of arty, hippy nonsense! XD Look forward to seeing more drawings out of you, man!
This way you can make an image and tone or shade or whatever without the intereference of "Well the able isnt shaded like that, this is crappy."
Free your mind
Second, along with what everyone else said. Draw what you see instead of what you think you should see. Get used to seeing the negative space and using it as a guide. Take a photo of something, then turn it upside down and backward so you can't really tell what's going on when you look at it. then draw it. this forces you to look at the relationship between different angles and shapes instead of just letting your memory take over.
That makes quite a bit of sense to me, believe it or not
Thanks to all your comments are very helpful and I will use it to the best of my ability for sure.
Sadly no drawings to day, I had a very fully day, though that is just an excuseO_o
Tomarrow I get to see pirates 3, after that, MUST DRAW!
Thanks again for the helpful comments!
I went to see shrek 3 today and the cinema was too packed to even walk in to buy my tickets.
AND the bank was closed so i couldnt withdraw money...
So now I'm stuck drawing technicle design roughs for an assignment.
My god i am so overloaded with time consuming assignments.
Alright, here we go, I'm going to try this again.
First pic is my attempt at a lesson that was added recently on drawspace.com, some of those lessons are pretty cool. The hand on the left and the body with really bad feet are practice suggested by drawspace lessons and the 3rd is just a quick sketch (Not good really) of my hand. Right now I am trying different ways of doing quick rough drafts, because I have trouble doing that and then flesing out what I'm drawing and it still looking good. I will keep practicing though.
second pic is another figure practiced from drawspace and my hand done really quickly and the thrid one are some goofing off with micron pens, I really enjoy doing the black outline and brown for shading, I enjoy using only 2 colors, and a little perspetive (Mostly bad) practice. The right on the third I was thinking of that youtube video that Jim Lee says if you can draw certian shapes in perspective, then you can draw a face in perspective. Anyways, enough talk, comments and crits are most welcome!!!
The bodys I was trying to draw slightly outside of the lighter quick sketch because that is what the drawspace lesson said, but it didn't work out that well.
Also the shading on those shaps is wrong :P
each face of a squar or triangle should be one colour and only one, they arent shaded like circles :P
eg.
I don't have much today, one page of hard to see head studies mostly. I either need to take closer up pictures of parts of the page or get a scanner lol. One of these day.
As always I look forward to comments and crits.
You're very right about the drunk thing. I've experienced the same. When you know how to do something, being drunk 'inhibits your inhibitions', so you can really get the essence. (Just like the master chef in Futurama said to Bender, "Since you have no sense of taste, you can touch the zen of pure flavor.")
I'm totally gonna get hammered every time I draw, now.