Getting started drawing

[Corn Dog]

Couldn't help ya. In highschool I used to draw o.k. But it bothered me that I couldn't come up with original works, I always had to look at another drawing and recreate it.

I was sitting in art class with an %80 working on an original painting when my teacher came up and said... "No your doing it wrong it's like this..." he proceeded to take the paint brush from my hand and paint on my work. I just looked at him, got up and walked out of the class and never went back. :) Final mark %50.

Down side is I never drew another drawing and have lost most of what skill I did have.

Now I can't draw worth diddly. I'm hoping playing with LW will respark what creative spirit I have.


Point of the story... don't have one :)
Just sympethising I guess.

[jeroentje]

http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=19859

[[msf]]

just emulate the work you like

thats how all of us started at one point or another. Copying our favorite artists. It takes years and years to get good at it.

[cleptocat]

Just draw. Keep at it. If you draw something and even if it doesnt turn out like you had envisioned thats ok. Just dont stop. Treat your pencil like an eyeball...its something you always want to have with you....

Other than keeping at it some people suggest picking out an artist or two that you really enjoy and try to mimic them. Some thing I really missed out on was drawing from life. If you're sitting watching TV is also a chance to draw whats around you(Since most everybody else will be vegged out watching the TV they will be sitting still:p )

Most of all dont limit yourself to conart....draw everything and conart will be just an option.

[Merlin]

Draw. Draw. Draw. Draw. Draw. and then draw some more.

Learning to draw from life is essential to doing good work. Chances are if you learn from drawing other people's work, you pick up their flaws and setbacks as well. Drawing from comic books is a good example of that (it's what I did way back when, had to relearn a lot of things because of that).

Get a reem of computer paper and a sharpie marker. Pick up a couple of sports illustrated's or other magazines with a gazillion picks of action and do gesture drawings. This helps with establishing weight, do about 30 different getsture drawings trying to get the correct placement of arms, legs, torso, etc.

Then pick a picture and begin to draw it. Use reference marks, for example, study the face and see that the inner corner of your eye is directly in line with your nostril, that the pupil is in line with the corner of your mouth, etc.

Negative space is also something to look at and helps with proportions. Negative space, if you don't already know, is the "air" in a drawing. For example, if I drew a fish on a page, the space that is the fish is positive, the space around the fish is negative. Look at negative space in life, draw a stool. The space the stool takes up is postive, the space between each leg is negative. Now try just drawing the outline of the negative space, and your proportions should be better.

Draw anything that's a cylinder over and over and over again for about a week or more. Try and get the elipse at the top in the correct perspective.

%90 of art is seeing, the rest is translating what you see to your hand. If you set aside an hour each day to just draw, you will get better. It's also relaxing, so that's a plus. and as your drawing skills improve, I can guarantee your modeling skills will improve as well. Good luck!

My two cents,

Neal

[GeneralChaos]

Well I guess my verdict is to just keep drawing. I've been trying to, my only problem I can see is motivation, like I tried to draw this simple looking mushroom from a book today, I thought I could do it, didnt look complicated....but I was wrong, looked nothing like it! lol at least it gave me a laugh.

Im going to go with merlins approach because i agree with him about how you will pick up a artists flaws, and I dont want that.

But I got a question to ya merlin. You sure about a sharpie? seems like a pencil would be more appropriate, but I am a drawing noob so if you could explain the advantage of it i'll gladly try that instead.

Anyway, thanks for all the replies.

[Merlin]

The good thing about a sharpie is it forces you to make a decision and go with it. Keeps your work from becoming chicken scratch-ish with a lot of tiny start and start over lines forming the entire image. Some people like that, and if you're doing it on purpose that's different. It was a habit I had that was very hard to break. And if that's your style, forget about doing cartoon-ish work or comic work, those are all about clean, concise and determined lines.

In the end, work with what you're most comfortable with. A pencil is certainly not a bad choice. Try just doing basic shapes for the form of the body. Start with a circle for the head. Draw a line that follows the spine of the figure from the head to the pelvis, now draw a sort of boxy sphere for the upper torso, the bottom of this sphere should be around your rib cage. Cylinders for the limbs and another sphere for the pelvis. Voila, you have your roughed figure. You can go much rougher if you like opting for stick figures, the important thing you need to look at in gesture drawings is proportion, placement and weight. Look at the figure and try and see which foot the majority of their weight is on, now make sure your drawing reflects that.


Good luck,

Neal

[Brain_Donor]

i would say draw with a biro.... ball point pen.... i do it all the time now when im sketching.... the problem i had with pencils was i would be rubbing things out half the time ... and any twit can erase pencil marks... with a biro i tend to go with the mistakes i make.. even if it turns out to be something completely different to what i started of drawing... some of my favourite drawings have been due to mistakes.... just start drawing basic shapes lines curves... and you will start to see forms appearing.. just go with the flow... its fun and in the end unique....

[Nicool]

One rules : "Draw what you see and try to don't fall in the manga style before you've study anatomy"

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