Every once in a while you come across a tutorial that is truly different from the herd and makes you think “What an interesting idea!” Such was my reaction when I came across a post on Mel’s Own Place about making rubber stamps with puffy paint and plastic bottlecaps. Amazing! I’d been wanting some custom stamps but didn’t think cutting them out of erasers with X-Acto knives was going to go well.
The stamps I wanted were planner stamps: a recycle symbol to mark recycling pick-up days, and an envelope back to make occasions for which I want to send cards. That way they could be large and visible without really taking up space, because I could write over them easily. I indentured my husband to play with paint with me.
I had two kinds of 3D paint in my stash: Tulip dimensional fabric paint and Scribbles 3-dimensional paint. The taller bottle of the Tulip was easier to control (more in squeezing than aiming), but the Scribbles seemed to keep its shape better while drying – Tulip flattened out a bit. We found we needed 3 rounds to get truly good images. The papers in the picture below show the images after 2 rounds (rectangular) and 3 rounds (hexagonal) of painting – the third round was really just local touch-ups.
As you can see from the Oh You stamp on the hexagonal paper, you still have to be careful and press on all areas of the cap to get a good impression. If you catch the paint at the right moment you may be able to flatten it down a bit while it’s dry enough not to stick but still soft in the middle; I was able to do that to some extent with the recycling symbol.
All in all, though, it’s a great idea – quick, easy to correct errors (more than just heightening low spots: you can see the giant smear of paint in the first image, and there were others on different sheets of newspaper), and fun.
I’ve gotten through the first ten lessons of You Can Draw In 30 Days, so I thought I’d show some highlights. Unfortunately my computer refuses to talk to my scanner (or perhaps vice-versa) so I have photographs, which are really not the optimal way to present drawings. Also WP apparently doesn’t allow captioned photos to share a line, so it’s going to be a tall post.
The book’s “pretest”: spending two minutes on each, draw a house, a plane, and a bagel.Lesson 1: The Sphere. Spheres with shading, and a bonus challenge to draw a high-contrast, black and white photograph of an apple.Bonus challenge to Lesson 3: Advanced-Level Spheres. Illegible notes say “sunken sphere?” on the left and “too close. needed more position difference” on the right.Lesson 5: Hollow Cubes, plus its bonus challenge to draw a treasure chest. Word out in space is “undershadows.”
Midstream materials report: I’ve been using drawing pencils I’d purchased some time ago, Staedtler Mars Lumographs. The images above (from lessons 1-5) were drawn with a 4B and those below (6-10) with a 2B. I like the variety of shades of the 4B but prefer how much longer the 2B keeps its point, so I plan to try out a 3B to see if it’s a good compromise.
I started out with a Paper Mate White Pearl eraser, which worked okay (it’s perfect on the rougher/cheaper paper of Games Magazine, by the way), but bought some others at the art store to try, along with some blending stumps, though I haven’t used those much. The Faber-Castell PVC-Free eraser was okay, but kind of plasticky. I’ve been very happy with the Staedtler Mars Plastic, though. It erases really well. Of course it’s probably designed to work well with my Staedtler pencils. I also have a Prismacolor Kneaded Rubber eraser, but I haven’t used it yet. I’ll probably try to preserve it for fine erasing and use the Staedtler for anything that doesn’t require precision.
Bonus challenge to Lesson 6: Stacking Tables.Bonus challenge to Lesson 7: Advanced-Level Cubes.I asked my sister what I should draw for her birthday. Her answer was “anthropomorphic vegetables.”Another go at the bonus challenge to Lesson 7. I never actually drew it in, but this was a place I was able to take advantage of my husband’s drawing ability, by asking him how he would do the shadow of the elevated box on the ramps and ground.
The vegetables were drawn with plain old Crayola Twistables colored pencils, which are terrific to get some variety of color without so much it that becomes paralyzing. This set has red, red-orange, orange, yellow, yellow-green, green, sky blue, blue, violet, light brown, brown, and black. I have a book called “Draw Cute Animals in Colored Pencil” coming soon, so they will get more use.
When I made my felted pencil bag I thought it was probably overkill size-wise, but with 16 pencils, 2 erasers, 2 stumps and a stump cleaning paddle, it’s pretty well full.
Warmup to Lesson 8: Cool Koalas, practicing texture and using texture to shade. Chicken scratch says “unfocused my eyes & just dashed or scribbled – not focusing allowed seeing the darkness more than the individual pencil strokes.”Lesson 8: Cool Koalas. Writing: on right, “1. not half bad.” On left, “2. worked inside-out. looks like he’s wearing a sweater. :-)”
I spent a total of 22 drawing sessions on those ten lessons (including one for the “pretest”), plus 5 sidetracks in the midst of them (and 9 sessions prior to starting the book). At the present rate it’ll be 30 weeks rather than 30 days; that’s fine, I’m learning patience in addition to drawing. Originally I thought a year of drawing might be adequate to get me where I wanted to be, but now I’ll be pleased if it’s merely two years. I’m certainly much more confident than I was, and (I think) also much better – or at least my quality is more reliable. My approach is different and in particular more measured. However, a year just isn’t a long time when it comes to learning a new skill of any depth (duh). After I finish this book I’ll have a lot of work left to learn shading, which is addressed but not at all thoroughly, and facial expressions, which certainly aren’t part of the curriculum. Shading in particular could easily take another 30 weeks to feel confident about.
I think Lesson 7’s bonus challenge (crazy geometric buildings) and the warmup to Lesson 8 (fuzzy, spiky, and wooly balls) were my favorite parts of 1-10, the former because it felt like I was successfully drawing something “real,” and the latter because I thought they turned out really well.
I’ve improved enough that I don’t have to force myself to continue. I regularly have trouble fitting drawing into my day, but it’s rewarding even at the frequency with which I do it. One realization I had at about lesson 8, seeing my husband drawing with friends, is that my lack of drawing skills was a hindrance to me enjoying the activity (in contrast to, say, my lack of bowling skills), and I certainly don’t have to be Rembrandt to get past that problem. I don’t know that I’m quite there yet – I’m still pretty self-conscious about the act of drawing – but it shouldn’t be long.
It’s early in my drawing adventures, but I have two initial book reviews.
Book 1: For Rank Beginners
My loving sister, after conversing one night with a very frustrated me, ordered me a copy of You Can Draw In 30 Days, whose author, Mark Kistler, had (has?) a long-running PBS drawing show. After two lessons I was confident enough to draw my father’s birthday card, the first drawn greeting card of my adult life. Shading is where this book has been outstanding so far. Though I need a lot of practice with them, I already knew the principles that higher, smaller shapes overlapped by others look further away. His simple approach to “nook and cranny” shadows and the shadow that seats the image on the “ground,” on the other hand, was a revelation. I’m going slowly through the book; I’ve done four sessions with it, but finishing Lesson 3 and its bonus challenge may take up to 3 more.
My New Year’s resolution was to draw three times a week. After a disappointing start with an online course that was bald-facedly lying when it said it was for all levels, I dropped off for two weeks or so. I’m getting back on track by doing four drawings a week (which should have me caught up with where I would have been had I kept up 3/week around the end of March), but I wouldn’t be surprised if this book takes me over three months to finish. Especially if I take more breaks to draw non-lessons.
Anyway, there’s not guarantee you’ll like this book as much as I do, but if you find yourself feeling like drawing lessons are telling you what to do without telling you how to do it, try it out.
Book 2: Drawing Animals
I ordered a drawing book published by Dover because it was incredibly inexpensive and gets great reviews on Amazon. It’s called The Art of Animal Drawing, and it’s a 1950 book by Disney animator Ken Hultgren. The subtitle is “Construction, Action Analysis, Caricature,” which also caught my eye.
I’m nowhere near ready to use it, but he goes through some general principles and then talks more specifically about different kinds of animals. Nothing too exotic, and come to think of it no birds or sea creatures (maybe that’s not what he means by “animal”), but he covers all the standard non-bird farm animals, dogs, cats, rabbits, and significant wild animals: big cats, bears, camels, hippos, foxes, kangaroos, elephants, a few others.
There are two particularly neat things about the book. One is the caricature aspect: for each kind of animal, he discusses what traits to exaggerate for caricature and gives some examples. The other is that he shows his preliminary sketches, which are often just as beautiful as – though much more abstract than – the finished drawings. They remind me of Franz Marc, in fact, and since I aspire to be able to draw some Franz-Marc-esque pieces, that’s exciting. They’re almost architectural. You can see how he draws long smooth arcs connecting body parts that aren’t connected in the finished drawing, but the line gives cohesion to the motion of the body or the composition of the drawing. There was one drawing of two cats, the front one with its head toward the ground, the back one with one leg forward, and the arc of the back one’s back to leg was nearly parallel to the arc of the front one’s back to head, though both arcs were interrupted in the final drawing (by head and shoulder blades, respectively). I expect that once I can somewhat draw animals, this book will really help me improve.
