drawing Archives - ReveDreams.com

Ten lessons down, twenty to go

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.

introduction "pretest" — The book’s “pretest”: spending two minutes on each, draw a house, a plane, and a bagel.

lesson 1: the sphere, plus bonus challenge — 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 — 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 bonus challenge — 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 6: Stacking Tables.

bonus challenge to lesson 7: advanced-level cubes — 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 bonus challenge to lesson 7: advanced-level cubes — 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 — 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 — 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.

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.