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Early comments on drawing books

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.

FF: Learning to Draw

I’ve declared 2015 to be the year I learn to draw adequately. The plan is to make three drawings a week all year, and devise a sort of curriculum for myself. The beginning is a Lynda.com class called 21-Day Drawing Challenge, which is intended to be a daily activity but will fill out January and most of February just fine; I think it’s best if I spend the remaining part of February, and any later last-bits-of-months, attempting to draw items directly relevant to my life. After that I have choices: Foundations of Drawing on Lynda, other online material, or a book from my shelf: Architectural Graphics by Frank Ching (the Amazon link is a much more recent edition, and he’s been elevated to “Francis”), Graphics for Architecture by Kevin Forseth, How to Draw Animals by Jack Hamm, and Creating Characters with Personality by Tom Bancroft. You can see my now-obsolete desire to be better at drawing graphs of equations on chalkboards in those first two, but they should still be applicable to pattern illustration and website sketching.

Back to that “other online material,” though – I haven’t forgotten that First Friday is supposed to be where I curate the web for you!

The best free drawing instruction I’ve found online is at Learn to Draw.com, by a professional illustrator. He talks about drawing specifically and logically, and gives exercises. Here are a few highlights of the long series: materials, including a useful-looking picture frame, an upside-down drawing exercise, hand tracing for understanding foreshortening, and perspective. Drawing basics leads into a whole series on shading, and then additional series on drawing people and drawing caricatures.

A brief high-level lesson can be found at Diane Kraus’ site, where she covers the steps of drawing (but not how to draw). If you’re interested in drafting, Bob Borson has tips for architectural graphics.

Other specific kinds of drawing: fashion sketching is briefly covered at College Fashion and Fashion Club. For additional unrealistic people, you’ll find a good number of caricature tutorials at Tom Richmond’s blog (an illustrator for MAD magazine). Realistic anatomy for drawing can be taken from Anatomy for Sculptors.

Diane Wright has a quite nice series of nature drawing tutorials; note that most if not all of these have 2 parts, but the link doesn’t stand out so look for it. You’ll find brief but decent still life tutorials at Artyfactory and Art Academy (scroll down; actually, scroll down on both). The first is the traditional fruit and vases, and the second is a shoe.

If you’d like to find more specific tutorials and don’t mind sifting, I have a few last links for you. The John Muir Laws website has a lot of individual tutorials on nature and animal drawing. More animals, realistic or cartoonish, are covered at Drago Art in short and simple tutorials. Finally, there’s a large collection of drawing tutorials from various DeviantArt users you can sort through.

Happy drawing! You won’t see everything I draw this year (that’s a relief, I’m sure), but expect periodic updates with a few favorites and whatever lessons I feel I’ve learned.

Baby shower gifts

I went to a baby shower this weekend for a dear friend and tried to give her something cute and something practical, but also cute.

The first was a crinkle square. I don’t actually have a photo. I ruined the one that I made for the occasion, and had to draw on a backup. I do have an innovation to share, though: crinkle squares shouldn’t be a suffocation hazard to begin with, considering their small size and the fabric layer preventing a seal from forming, but for an additional point of reassurance you can hole-punch the plastic.

I tried something new for the rest of the gift: burp cloths made by backing cloth diapers with flannel. The diapers are quite absorbent and the flannel clings to your clothes, preventing the burp cloth from slithering down off your shoulder mid-spit-up. This was not my idea originally but apparently I did not bookmark the site I found it on (which was also not the origin of the idea, so I don’t feel too guilty). I got a package of 10 diapers by Gerber and washed them all twice (the first time their edges were quite crumply and I thought that might indicate they were mid-shrink – sure enough a second wash smoothed them out a bit). They seemed rather thin so I doubled them up.

The first three burp cloths were large: fabric cut 16″x18″, sewn face down to a pair of diapers at 3/8″ (i.e., presser foot at the edge of the fabric but needle ticked over to the left) with an opening for turning, then diapers trimmed around the edge and the whole thing turned right-side-out. After a good press I topstitched around the edge and did a little quilting to keep the diapers from sagging on the flannel. For the mushroomy one and the elephants I outlined parts of the design, and for the fruit I made some jagged lines. I had a lot of trouble with catching strands of the diaper cloth and shoving them down into the bobbin housing instead of piercing them, even with a brand new fine needle. Fortunately nothing was ruined.

After I made those three I put one on my shoulder and found it was rather large for its use (though the parents to be are both taller than I am and might not find them quite as overlarge), so with the remaining four diapers I made smaller cloths. Two of them had shrunk enough in the wash that they didn’t have a 16″x18″ flat region anyway, so theirs would have had to be reduced. I ended up making two with fabric that was 9.5″x16″ (out of the two diapers that hadn’t shrunk as much) and one with 15″x15″ fabric (out of the smaller pair). Their quilting was simple: for the checkerboard one, a sort of zigzag the long way, outlining the boxes, for the zebras wavy diagonal lines, and for the monkeys a single continuous stitch line from top to bottom that looped around the monkeys nearest its path.

I tried one other new thing as well: making my own card. I have a Cricut die-cutting machine that mostly sits on a shelf, and it was time to start really using it. The card took an unreasonable length of time given its simplicity (three die cuts on a purchased blank card with a colored border), but most of it was set-up. I’m pretty happy with how it came out.