If you want to move on to the next step of drawing whatever the hell you want to out of your head, in any angle, I strongly recommend you go to http://johnkcurriculum.blogspot.com/2009/12/preston-blair-le..., get the Preston Blair book, and start doing these exercises. You will get a lot better, a lot faster.
You can build on the simple cartoon characters in these lessons and do super realistic stuff, or you can keep on being a cartoonist. Whatever works for you.
I strongly disagree with the suggestion of starting with cartoons first. Start with real anatomy first.
Books that show step-by-step guides to drawing a comic character are only good for one thing: Learning how to draw that comic character, in that position, in that style, in that medium. I hate them. One may look at these books and think that's how all cartoonists (or other artists) learned to draw, and they'd be wrong.
To be a good cartoonist, in my view, you need a foundational understanding, not just technique (which is what these books teach, in a very limited way). Once you understand anatomy, how bodies move, forms, perspective, composition, visual weight, ... Then turning your ideas into a cartoon (or any other form) becomes simply a matter of technique. (And even at that point, learning techniques from step-by-step instruction books is a lousy method.)
I'm recommending not just the Preston Blair book (which is a classic in the field), but a specific series of exercises by master animator John K that use it for visual reference.
These lessons are aimed at getting someone up and running with a solid knowledge of constructing a figure in three dimensions as quickly as possible. You can quite easily stack anatomy on top of this foundation and draw in more complicated styles than "1940s cartoon character"; it's useful to learn construction with those kinds of characters because they're basically little but their construction.
I do not by any means discount the value of anatomy lessons and text, life drawing, sitting out in public doing quick observational sketches, frame-by-frame analysis of video, going to the zoo to draw, or any of the other myriad activities that make up part of a serious art education. I did that, and so did everyone else I knew during my time in animation, no matter how stylized most of their final work was.
But I think these lessons are a great hand up over the huge gap between "I can copy what I see onto paper OK" and "I can draw any damn thing I please in any pose I like, with no reference beyond a few design drawings".
(tangential edit: I'm surprised to find another cartoonist here on HN and curious to see your work, but your website doesn't mention that at all, and Google turns up nothing. Any links? My website[1] is full of my stuff.)
Ah yes, so far I've kept my consulting and cartooning work apart, so the link isn't obvious. You can see my work here: http://www.gagcartoons.com/cartoons/?artist=grigoriy-kogan (Warning: Long page. Lazy loading jQuery is coming soon.)
They're magazine cartoons, published in Harvard Business Review, WSJ, Reader's Digest, Barron's, and other places. Some day very soon I will blog about this side business and its progress.
As an amateur doodler, I agree. I've done the "work through books of anatomy" thing, but at the end of it I still had deformed figures which mixed detailed, textbook-correct anatomy with gross problems in proportioning and alignment - e.g. my upper torso would look okay by itself, but it would float a bit disconnected from the hips as soon as I tried to assume a more difficult pose. I had to use references for all poses to avoid this broken look.
My breakthroughs in representation were in large part based on following cartooning material. After that I was able to develop specific construction techniques using primitive shapes in new ways(different shape configurations, mixtures of 2D and 3D conception, inversions that make one shape the framework of another, etc.) that gave the resulting figures a more balanced, focused look. Since then my style has developed primarily around cartooning since it lets me play so fluidly with ideas.
As a professional illustrator, I disagree with you. Have you read the Preston Blair books? They start with general lessons on how to think about and construct any shape in 3d, and I haven't seen a book with better examples of using lines of action (if you know of any, then please tell me).
I think it's a good idea for people to learn to construct simple 3d shapes before they tackle the complexities of human anatomy; it creates a framework for thinking about the drawing. I'd agree that there are better ways to learn drawing than from books, but still, a good book is much better than nothing.
> I think it's a good idea for people to learn to construct simple 3d shapes before they tackle the complexities of human anatomy; it creates a framework for thinking about the drawing.
Yep, I absolutely agree. That's what I meant by saying that a foundational understanding is needed first.
I've seen parts of the book but have not read the entire thing. If he does have chapters on these foundational elements, then that's good and it's probably a better book than many others.
It's not a perfect book, but there's definitely much more to it than just "Follow these three steps to draw exactly this cartoon animal in this exact pose". The very first exercise is to take an actual egg, draw construction lines and a face on it, and then to study it and draw it from every angle.
I received a formal art education, so my answer may be very biased, but I'd recommend starting with a fundamental drawing class. If you're in NY or SF, there's no shortage of them. If you're anywhere else, you may be able to find one at a library, college, school, or artist organization.
But keep on doodling! Even mindless doodling improves your skills.
I had the weird experience that fundamentals classes seemed to assume that I had much, much more experience than I actually had as a beginner. Is there some distinction between different "fundamentals" classes that people should be looking for?
Artists love creating other artists. We all mostly remember the hundreds of a-ha moments that changed our view of the world again. It's sad how eager most of us are to share the knowledge. :)
Depending on where you are, you may do well to find a tiny studio with good reviews on yelp or, if you're near a school, look for tutors.
In the mean time, definitely keep doodling but occasionally try to doodle something you can see. Then laugh at it and shade a sphere or a cone. :)
This is one area where everyone has potential. You just need to develop it with some basic tools, most of which involve ways of seeing.
Not that I'm aware of. I've seen classes labeled as "Fundamentals 1," "Fundamentals 2," etc. I guess just like any other class or course, a lot depends on the instructor. Don't let a bad experience keep you from looking for other courses, just inquire in advance what the course will be covering.
Also, check out all videos and books by Bruce Blitz
For example - http://www.amazon.com/dp/0762402490/
Watch his videos on youtube first, to get an idea of his teaching style
Disclaimer: I'm not an artist, just someone who has interest in this topic.
First, watch this webinar or get Mike's book. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJ7WHuvdsjI It's a powerful combination of principles and elements of design that should leave you feeling ready to head off in more specific directions.
omg I got that book when I was a kid! :D my dad got it for me and my brother (all three love drawing and cartoons).
Reading the description and comments ITT, I was a bit confused and kept thinking, "but I had this other book, and it was mainly about cartooning, not anatomy, and it explained things really well". Then someone here mentioned "lines of action" and I thought "wait a minute ..", clicked the link and it was that book :) :)
Well, I am glad that I had the opportunity to learn from such a classic when I was young. I have to agree, a lot of the ideas, techniques and really fundamentals stuck with me and shaped my cartooning style over the years.
See, anatomy is IMO not the end-all of cartooning. When I hear the word, I think about super realistic sketches of human figures where you can see all the muscles, figuring out how the clothes would wrap and fold around the body, etc. This is important if you want to draw the Silver Surfer or US super hero style comics, but that's never really been my thing.
The importance of "anatomy" in cartooning, for me, is limited to the way human body parts are connected to eachother, how they can move w/respect to eachother, and their relative sizes. As opposed to the almost biological/physiological detail I have in mind when I hear "anatomy" with respect to illustrations ...
For instance, and this is something that is treated in the Preston Blair book very well, which for me immediately sprang to mind as an example why "anatomy" really is not the end-all of cartooning: facial expressions.
Facial expressions in cartoons are nothing like how a human face actually moves. They are caricatured far beyond physical possibility (but not "beyond recognition", as I shall explain). They are NOT based on careful observation of what a human face actually looks like when it experiences a particular emotion. Look at a real crying face, a real hysterical-laughter face, that's not how cartoon characters emote at all[0]. And you can't learn how to do cartoon-emotions by studying actual human faces. Instead, they are based on the biological concept of the "supernormal stimulus"[1]. These don't exist in real life (except where someone else has already drawn/modelled them, advertisements are a good source). You have to figure them out by experimentation, not observation, because you can't know which attributes can be exaggerated for the psychological/biological supernormal stimulus effect (which can be weird and unexpected). Instead, you just draw hundreds or thousands of quick-sketch cartoon faces, with the eyes and the mouth and the ears and whatnot, just-so, randomly trying out weird configurations, anything, and figure out how it affects the perceived mood/emotion of these faces. Or body language. The other option is to copy and try out styles or ideas you like, or happen to notice (same as when learning typography, you start getting an eye for it). Or perhaps like Robert Crumb, do supernormal stimuli by just drawing whatever's your fetish.
The Preston Blair book only half-covers this, btw (if I remember correctly, it's been 10-15 years or so...), they talk about baby and toddler like configurations of the face and body proportions. Maybe also the sexual "Jessica Rabbit" type of supernormal stimuli, I forget. These are powerful, but not the only ones that exist. In particular for facial expressions, like chords and scales in music, some very powerful and useful tricks are very weird and unorthodox (or maybe I've just not figured out the reason behind the quirky sequency that is the minor Blues scale, which works so well no matter what you play with it).
Either way, my point is these exaggerations are not based on real-life observable phenomena, but on how the human psychology reacts to superstimuli (which you need to create before you can observe the reaction--which, fortunately, is quite easy to do).
Also the lines of action. are these based on anatomy? The Preston Blair book has that beautiful example of an animated character throwing a baseball, frame by frame[2]. That's not at all how a human moves IRL :) It is, however, an exaggeration/caricature of what our brains expect of rubbery bouncy physics. You can't observe that in real-life, because it never really happens like that.
Another example is the famous Pixar desk-lamp animation. It's not even got anatomy. But it moves according to some weird exaggerated physics model, and it has emotions, what, how? Because it plays to our minds, not real-life.
Another note, I'm not a native English speaker, I must have had only a very basic understanding of English when I was 11 or 12. Still, the Preston-Blair book was quite easy to follow, because most of it was explained as illustrations. Just a hint, if any non-English HNer is considering a present for their kids (they have to love drawing first, though) :)
There is one "step by step" part of that book which I didn't really like very much, and felt to me (then) it was imposing a certain style too much. This is the bit where it explains how to build a character made from spheres/ellipsoids and cylinders. I never liked first sketching shapes that you were going to draw over and erase later on anyhow. But then, this is probably exactly a type of technique that you'd learn if you'd start with anatomy as well :) I probably learned from that as well, but at the time it felt a bit restricting.
[0] which is brilliantly subverted by Ren & Stimpy, with their hyper realistic cut-scenes and close-ups, going one step beyond the fictional cartoon world into the surreal, for dramatic emphasis.
John K's blog [1] is full of great insight on drawing and cartoons. Especially the early posts. This is the John K who gave us Ren and Stimpy
1. http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com
I do believe that anyone can draw with enough time. In 2009 I took 8 days holiday, one per week and dedicated it to drawing. I could see the improvement vastly:
I didn't dedicate enough time to each sketch so only got a handful of good drawings. I've fallen out of it again so would have to get right back to basics, but it shouldn't take too long before you start to feel fluid again.
Also, yes, Drawing from the Right Side of the Brain is a great book. I would also recommend The Structure of Man (http://www.alienthink.com/) if you want to draw people from memory - but it will take a _lot_ of dedication.
Nice progress! I do note that you are under 30, which means you can still make progress. There is a famous forum post of someone starting some very basic drawings and progressing onto higher skill level a few years later. He started at 23 or 24.
What I am hoping to see is someone starting at a later age.
Yes, you can still learn when you're older. Especially if you have an inquisitive mind like most hackers. The brain doesn't "solidify" completely as you age, it just solidifies the knowledge you already have. People have learned languages past 30, just by immersion, which is a very complex task.
Oh dear, just goes to show how ageing my digital footprint is. I was 26/27 in 2009, so that means I'm now over the 30 threshold. Haha!
Personally, I don't believe age slows you down but maturity does. I rarely have the time to focus on non-essential tasks and priorities change. It might take me longer to learn something than if I was younger, but I'm okay with that. The thing to watch out for is jumping ahead because you think you know something and never really learn what's going on.
I really don't like how much that book (and other books of the same author) is promoted. I am into drawing for quite a long time already (and I also think it helps me as a programmer etc.) and I've heard about that book like thousand times, so I've finally read it. I understand why it's impressive: because author delivers the material like "so, there are some techniques to use your right side of the brain instead of the left one and woah… you see, you draw much better now! It's magic! By the way, I have million students who couldn't draw, but they took my courses and now they are master-artists and own their own design saloons." And you probably actually will draw better than you expect (especially when you don't expect you can draw) after some simple guidance and a few tries.
What I'm saying it's very populistic, but explains many thing the wrong way, which may cause some problems if you'll want to improve your techniques later. If you are learning to draw I'd better recommend you start with Andrew Loomis: "Fun with a Pencil" or even Vilppu Studio tutorials if you have serious mindset.
I had the same reaction, I just hated it... but it turns out that the people who really like the book ignore the fake-science explanations and just do the exercises (which are quite good), and the people who hate the book delve into the text hoping that they'll get some understanding that's more important than just doing the work, and -of course- there is no such understanding to be found.
When I started to read this post I knew that someone would make this comment here. If they had used just about any other book that tries to teach drawing, then no one would say anything about the book they used.
Who cares what book they used. If it gets them interested in drawing, then that's all that matters. It's like bitching because someone got interested in music when they listened to the latest <insert top pop album of the time> and it sparked creativity in them.
Agreed. I find that Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain has too much pseudo-science in it and that the results you get, while they may be impressive to a complete beginner, are only superficially impressive. Getting good at drawing takes time.
So many of the critiques of the book are that getting good at drawing takes time. Where did this idea that the book says otherwise? It is a start, the book tells you outright that you will need to work at it.
Those impressive benefits to a complete beginner are what a complete beginner needs. That they can see there actually has been progress is what will allow them to move on and continue to improve via the needed work.
Those improvements are not superficial to someone who has been told or convinced themselves that they can not draw.
Superficially-impressive is better than not-impressive-at-all for keeping someone motivated.
I'm getting the impression that by analogy, DotRSB lets you play music that someone else has written; but to be good at drawing, you need to be able to play music that you've written yourself. And that's a valid criticism, but playing someone else's music is still fun, while writing music isn't going to be much fun if I can't play it well. So it seems reasonable to quickly get good at playing, and then later I can learn to write.
I think it's a good analogy. I also think its why everyone who wants to be an artist but not put in the right-brain work wants to be a photographer now. It's like creating without being required to do the actual work part. I guess being certain types of "DJ" is a similar metaphor.
One can't fault a simple pencil and pad of paper, but I think if technologists become interested in drawing (which seems both likely and desirable), over time there will be more ways to do this with a tablet and stencil, with all the advantages. For me personally, notorious for moving lines around in my drawings, that would be very nice -- one would be able to delete lines that didn't work out.
I've always envied people who are actually gifted draftspeople -- people who lay down the exact right line on the first try, and whose drawings are paragons of minimalism. R. Crumb, for example -- there's a video showing him drawing with a pen and never laying down a bad line. Whenever I watch that video, I have an envy meltdown.
My point? With a tablet and stencil, by being able to delete things, I could pretend to have actual drawing talent. :)
> They don't make mistakes, they make happy accidents.
heh. partially that. but there's also:
- tricks how to cover up an accident
- recognizing an accident early so it's less to cover up
- and finally of course, can't deny skill and control
The last one is why I never liked doing pencil sketches and then inking my cartoons. I always used a marker or ballpoint pen right away purposefully because I wanted to learn the skill and control to get the lines right, the first time.
While I probably did learn skill and control that way, I also very much learned about "happy accidents", cover-ups and recognizing an accident early or before it happens :)
Mind you, this was me as a stubborn teen, drawing during boring school classes. Maybe learning techniques for adults are different.
I disagree that there's a trick to it. Laying down a line with precision and exactly in the way that you planned is a skill. When you watch an architect or draftsman draw a line, they've drawn that same line thousands of times before.
Being a good draftsman is like being a good painter; it's all in the prep. There's a lot of work that goes into getting things setup and guides in place before the first real line hits the paper.
If you watch someone that's really good with a CAD program you'll see they do more work with things that don't end up on the final drawing than they do on the actually drawing.
I really like Leonardo Da Vinci's more minimalistic sketches for this. He has that ability of laying down the exact right line on the first try. I love Da Vinci's anatomy sketches, where you can tell they were done for study and he did them without a lot of editing or touch-ups, and they show his intense curiosity for how things work.
That drawing is realistic yet creepy. I like it. The shading is perfect, yet incomplete. Sort of an uncanny valley type thing, gives you a sense of unease.
That's probably because at that time (more than 30 years ago) I was trying for photorealism, and I perhaps shouldn't have been -- I didn't have the skill. As a result, my drawings from that time all have that somewhat spooky aura.
I'd love to become good at drawing because I believe it can help presenting your ideas in a very visual and straightforward way.
Moreover it is an activity that stimulates the creative and imaginative part of the brain. My main issue, aside dedication, is that I "suffer" from a natural tremor in my hands which I have been unable to shake off, even after seeing a doctors years ago and undergoing a battery of tests which showed nothing conclusive nor serious (I also took some pills which showed no results).
So my main questions would be:
- Can I still be good at drawing despite my trembling?
- How do I cure my trembling?
As a practicing artist, most of my drawing is really done with the muscles in my arm, not with my fingers and hand. My hand is fairly relaxed, with just enough tension to keep the pencil/stylus/pen/brush making contact with the paper/tablet/canvas. You can force yourself to learn this by holding a common wooden pencil such that the side of the tip draws a big broad light line on the paper, rather than the point drawing a thin, dark line.
I don't know the full cause of your tremor, but I know that if you have a death grip on a drawing tool it will be a lot less steady in your hand. A light grip may or may not help.
Also of course learning to whip out lines quickly can help. If you tremble about once a second on average, and get enough control to whip out roughly the line you want in .5s, I can imagine easily finding a rhythm that avoids a lot of the tremors.
Alternatively you could just embrace the trembling and groove on a lot of Edward Koren.
I have exactly the opposite :) Ever since I suffered a burnout, I have a tremor in my hands, it's gotten a bit less over the years, but it's still there.
I can still draw. But I do it explicitly with my wrist+hand, not with my arm. I never have. Always rest my hand on the paper and draw with my fingers. Then I don't tremble, I only tremble when I gotta keep my hand still in free space. But on paper my hand's 100% relaxed and only moves as I want it to. Maybe it's because I've drawn things all my life and there's a trust in my hand that allows it to relax in that way.
There's two consequences to this drawing style: I draw best when it's really small, because of the range of motion of my hand and wrist (although there's a few ways I can use a marker and draw nice curves and cartoon faces on larger paper as well). I can't paint :) Because if you rest your hand on the paper you'll smear out all the paint :) This was already a problem in highschool, before I burnt out, it's just not how I want to interact with the medium. It's gotta be up close and personal.
Either way if my movements had to come out of my arm, my fingers would tremble, and it would suck.
BTW I have a similar fear for starting to learn electronics, I really doubt if I can handle a soldering iron and those tiny elements accurately enough to make things without it becoming a hugely frustrating exercise in "accepting one's limitations".
To the GP I say, try it, and really, try to relax about it (if relaxing helps with the tremors--it doesn't for me, 100%, which is why I also need to calmly rest my hand on a surface. but then it's pretty steady).
Is it really that bad? Because if it is it will naturally cause some problems and then it's really about medical support. But if you mean that your hand isn't that steady then it's not a problem at all, because it doesn't have to be and with a lot of practice (just like trying to draw straight line, triangle, circle, etc. again and again thousands times) it will improve anyway.
So, well, not to discourage you from medical help if you actually need some, but you shouldn't wait for getting better to start. Just find some tutorial (as I said already, I don't recommend Edwards, better start with Dodson or Loomis or anything else somewhat serious) and do something. Even if you'll be disturbed by your illness your practice lets you sublime anyway, which is good by itself.
As it's been said: nothing's impossible for a willing mind.
I'm not a great drawer myself, but I'd guess it depends on the intensity of your trembling. Most sketches don't rely too much on individual stroke precision, specially if you don't have very good coordination. In math terms, you can think of repeating your strokes successively so that the noise averages out; the eraser is your friend in this process also.
What you say here is correct, but let me point something out: that repeated stroking isn't very good thing if you can avoid it. It's like a habit for many people and you often see that good artists do that, but it's good to try being "minimalistic" as you learn. Just advising. You'll notice improvement pretty soon after you'll stop fixing every line by repeated stroking and will just try doing it right.
I think you'd be amazed at what you could accomplish if you focused on composition and color. You might a hard time making really polished drawings, but you still have the potential to create things people will recognize and delight in. You might want to check out the art of John Cuneo. (Charles Shultz also famously suffered from a tremor later in life.)
Long time lurker here. I am also a programmer who started to learn how to draw. I even put a blog documenting the process.
http://louislearnstodraw.blogspot.ch/
So here is my 2 cent.
Drawing is definitely more than being able to reproduce a 3d object on a 2d surface, it's about understanding how things are constructed and work. For example if you want to draw a steam locomotive, you have to understand what are the parts of a steam engine, how power is generated and transferred to the wheels, how it is built, why the parts have this shape, ... . If you don't have this understanding, there is no way you can draw a steam locomotive from imagination. Of course you can do a nice copy with beautiful rendering that will look nice, but drawing something that is realistic will be very difficult.
Since I started learning to draw, I learned a lot of things on a variety of subjects: entomology, anatomy, marine biology, history, technology,... When I visit a new city the first thing I look up are the museums, where I then go to draw.
I could elaborate more on that subject but I have to run. Let me know if there is any interest.
From what I can tell, Drawing from the Right Side of the Brain teaches you to draw things you already see, which is nice, and can help you impress your mom if you practise a bit, but as far as drawing ability goes, being a human copy machine is an extremely basic skill.
Don't get me wrong, basic skills are valuable, but reading the book and practising for a couple of months will not make you a skilled artist any more than learning to touch-type and adding an existing Javascript menu to a web page will make you an expert programmer. It can be a first step, but if you want to be really good at drawing, you probably want to to spend years practising composition, perspective, anatomy, the emotional effects of lines and shapes, color theory, storytelling, creating variation/contrast/depth/movement, etc. There's much, much more to drawing than just being able to copy what you see in front of you.
(I'm not writing this to discourage anyone, I just want to put the book into perspective.)
The most obvious thing seems to be, those who can ALREADY draw a bit find the book to be not helpful, very basic, and somewhat misleading...
People who cannot draw at all seem to get a lot out of the book however...
I think it comes down to a being a human photocopier is an immensely important part of drawing, but its also a phase that you pass out of on your way to becoming a good artist. I remember me and my friends used to spend hours doing line for line copies of comic book drawings when we were 10-12 years old, its a natural part of the process i think...
> me and my friends used to spend hours doing line for line copies of comic book drawings when we were 10-12 years old, its a natural part of the process i think...
Dunno. I strongly believe it really depends. I never did that, for exactly the reasons other people lay out in this thread, "but what if I want to draw something else?" (actually "but I want to draw something else, this drawing already exists anyway, why copy it").
Some of my friends did like to copy drawings. A lot of them never progressed past that, and some did. It really depends.
The book taught me that the things that we "see" in our minds are really very incomplete. You think you can imagine an elephant vividly in your imagination, but what is the ratio of their ears to their head, or their trunk to their head. Where are their eyes? How does their mouth open?
When you draw from what you see, or draw from what you imagine, it's easy to think you know exactly what you're going to draw, but unless you really pay attention you are probably glossing over it in your mind.
To draw things that you imagine well you need the same skill as you need to draw things that you see. You just need practice to memorize a form, or components of a form, or the principles behind a form before you can compose them into your own idea.
If you think that the book is just about copying what you see in front of you, you either haven't read it or really didn't pay attention to it. On the other hand, if you can't reproduce something you see right in front of you, you're going to have an impossible task in reproducing something that is vaguely held in your mind.
I'm not seeing much disagreement here. Yes, it's typical for a beginner to draw from their (deficient) internal model of whatever they're drawing — a beginner drawing a face will typically put the eyes at the top of the head and not in the middle, they'll draw eyes as symmetrical lemon shapes, etc. The book teaches people to go beyond that and actually look at whatever they're drawing, which is an important skill for any visual artist. But it's still a very basic skill.
Right now I'm trying to finish an illustration where I've already sketched out everything in detail; the composition is good, the perspective is correct, one of the elements in the drawing is a running person, drawn from imagination, with a good likeness, anatomy, and sense of motion. Still, I struggle A LOT with choosing and simplifying the color scheme and rendering the final drawing in lines that feel spontaneous and alive.
I've been drawing since I was a kid and I had a good handle on the things DotRSotB teaches when I was twelve years old. But there's so much more to learn. A good step after DotRSotB might be learning about shape design, gesture drawing and movement from cartoonists, e.g.:
Funny though that comment of yours is precisely one of these things I don't like about this book. That "incompleteness" of picture in your mind is something everybody notices as he starts drawing anyway, but the thing that book "taught" you as you say is the wrong one.
You see, there is some maxima repeatedly imposed by that book, like "draw what you see" or something like that — you could formulate it by yourself just fine as you've read it I guess. That is an important thing that you should hear once, that's right, because relying too much on technical methods (like perspective) is often impractical and you must learn to draw not relying on it too much. The problem is, that it's just one thing you need to hear after you'll learn perspective and other basic techniques just once, but not a lesson itself.
Because, you see, there are infinite forms in the universe and our imaginary worlds as well, and drawing an elephant isn't about memorizing it, it's about understanding. If you want to understand what I'm talking about, I'd recommend you to read Gottfried Bammes "The Artist's Guide to Animal Anatomy".
Actually, if you'll go to the art school or similar place you'll be strongly discouraged from that "line tracing" thing (however, as I said, remembering that you can draw like that as well is important), which can seem surprising at first (because, really, it's so easy and so natural to just trace it!), but you'll understand why really soon.
By the way, if you are interested, maybe you should check some sketches for famous pictures of famous artists (like Dali) who were professionally drawing for years. That actually impressed me when I first saw that, that really, really good artists who I might have thought would just draw anything from the top of their heads actually do sketches with all these support lines and stuff. Then you understand that drawing isn't just line tracing after all.
So in the end of the day drawing tons of cubes and spheres is way more useful and important than line-tracing your face. Really.
Well, "years" might be a little bit of exaggeration. I mean, there always is something more to learn even after 10 years of experience, but it shouldn't sound as terrifying as you make it sound. To be somewhat good you need only few basic skills (which that book doesn't teach you, as I already said in another post, but there are other books and courses anyway), not very long period of pretty intense practice and yes, here your life-long journey begins, but you already can be quite confident about your drawings.
It's like, you know, that sushi-making stuff in Japan (as well as many other things): it's considered very difficult and you need many years to learn how to make sushi and there are some 86 years old master that'll tell you how he even now dreams about sushi and improves his skills and whatever. Yet you can take 3-hours long lesson somewhere in Europe or USA and start making pretty decent sushi for yourself.
Or programming, or everything else. Anyway, making some real work of art is more about your personal qualities like imagination than about "life-long learning". But there's always something more to learn nevertheless.
Seconded. Really thoughtful documentary about the crafting of sushi that is really about the art of crafting rather than the art sushi-making. The dude abides in Jiro.
It's not necessary to be a "skilled artist" to make beautiful drawings. Technical limitations force you to be creative. That's true in art as well as in programming.
Don't discourage people. Enthusiasm is what brings them to interesting places. Who knows what a "skilled artist" is anyway?
I agree. I went through that book and then noticed that I can't draw the things I see vividly in my mind, only copy what's in front of me. Then I realized that to sketch from imagination, I need to understand the 3D structure of things, not just how they look from one side. So here's some exercises I'm doing now:
- Drawing a lot of boxes, spheres cut in half, cones, other simple 3D objects in various views
- 30-second poses using Posemaniacs, and quick poses from imagination
- Head structure from imagination, like in Loomis "Drawing the head and hands" (available online for free)
The next problem is going to be color, I can already tell that I'm OK with structure but will need a new set of exercises for color and value, no idea yet what they will be. Can anyone who's further along help me out?
If you are pretty good at drawing already I'd suggest to practice at color drawing for some short time using your intuition and your eyes, and then move on to the serious stuff. I mean color theory. You might find useful Gnomon Workshop tutorials on color theory and Johannes Itten's "The Art of Color". Also, here you inevitably will need guidance in proper usage of your instruments, so find yourself a manual for the technique you use (some book and I find youtube videos on topic pretty useful ofttimes).
I don't know how I learned colour. I worked in black and white for a long, long time, and only started using colour when I started using the computer/scanner.
(If you like maths and physics, check this out: http://www.scratchapixel.com/lessons/3d-basic-lessons/lesson... esp. lessons 1 and 2 it won't help you one bit about choosing the "right" colours for artistic purposes, but it's super interesting and useful for knowing about how colours are made in print and on the screen)
That might be easy for you to say, but for me (I'm another programmer with zero drawing ability), even being able to copy a simple line drawing (like a cartoon) would be quite satisfying.
I'm not saying it's not! Learning to copy line drawings accurately can be fun and being able to do so is an important foundational skill. I'm just saying there's more to drawing than copying things you see.
Aside from the mental stimulation or distraction drawing provides, it's an incredible tool for solving or communicating problems... Especially to non-programmers.
What other tool or method allows you to explain a development challenge or solution (at a basic level) to a non-developer, in a matter of minutes? Being able to stand up in a meeting, walk to the whiteboard, and sketch out basic concepts for everyone in the room to understand makes you a goddamn hero. You'll go from being just a developer to the developer who can communicate with the biz guys, the sales guys, the designer guys, etc. That's valuable.
To me, the important question in this article, is whether drawing (or music, dancing, acting, yoga, sports), actually helps you solving problems? Not sure, what helps solving problems is talking about them, discussing them, etc. and this can be done with social networks (or writing, tweeting, etc.) too.
I recommend Fast Sketching Techniques by David Rankin. Of course, nothing beats practice and the book will help you focus your practice in a very rewarding way. I have been drawing my whole life, and still always keep an open notebook and pencil right next to my keyboard when I program.
I also heartily recommend the book that the author of this piece recommends. I'm currently about half-way through it, and the reaction to my drawings from my family has been: "Wow! I had no idea you could draw so well."
I found this book a bit shallow. What I liked a lot were the before-after self-portraits shown in the book. They are really nice. However, "drawing with the right side of your brain" means simply: Don't think about the concepts you have of objects (tree, glass, house), but really LOOK at something:"What angle is this line compared to that line?" and just draw them.
While this can be a revelation for some and improve drawing skills a bit, it is simply the first step. There is absolutely no way around learning how to draw but putting many hours into it. And drawing can be very exhausting. At first, you won't have the patience to sit through a drawing for more than an hour or so. It gets better though.
The drawing of the OP is okay, but not particularly good, but then he never claimed that it was good but just a way to relax a little bit. I will try this. Drawing as a mental break from coding. But you could probably achieve the same result with music, taking a walk, doing some physical activity, meditation etc.
I tried to squish a warning like "You won't become a good artist after reading only one book, you still need 10000 hours of practice" into the post, but couldn't find an appropriate place for it.
I tie flies, for fly fishing when I'm working from home and it has the same effect. It's a different way of using my brain that helps me refocus. It's also really nice to physically produce something. Plus then I have a better selection for fishing. Doesn't work so well when in an office setting though.
This article does make me want to draw again, I used be an amateur comics book artist/cartoonist but I haven't drawn seriously in years.
I bought this book and did find it amazing, the first exercises are very good in showing how you Can draw, specially the inverted picture exercise. However, I struggled to find the material with which to do some of the later exercises and ended up putting it aside.
I used to keep paper taped on my desk under the keyboard. whenever I was working something out mentally or just taking a break I'd push the keyboard to the side and add to an ever growing elaborate abstract drawing.
I didn't get the bit about the video (the kings speech). I've never seen the movie. Seemed like a random throw in. Wish there would have been at least one sentence to tie it in.
if you like drawing living things (and you care about proportion, realistic renditions) studying the underlying musculoskeletal structure helps.
i just try to capture something fleeting. i identify the most salient element and try to communicate that in my drawing. the most useful exercise in that book imo was the technique of trying to draw something once, then turning it upside down and trying again. ("disorienting" the object trains your mind to better identify spatial relationships.)
Programming is "computer art". We have simple succeeded in making this discipline a science. All by deciding to call the discipline "computer science".
we have a tiny blog with a friend (programmer too) where we put up our drawings, both learning to draw from various books and sources on the internet. I started 4 years ago at 28, don't know about my friend. I'm all for messy and sketchy, he likes the clean things :)
:( I get what you mean (about the "flair") ... and I'm not really sure what to say.
Except that I hope you do try. A few stick figures. Take a look at xkcd's earliest stick figures: https://xkcd.com/6/ and compare them to the way he manages to put actual emotion into those few lines with his current cartoons.
Okay yes his other drawings of that time are actually pretty good, but my point is, even when drawing stick figures, you can get better at it with practice :) But not if you get disheartened.
Programmers aren't all the same person. People have different hobbies, lifestyles, interests. Just because someone's interested in programming, or their job is a programmer, doesn't mean they should enjoy non-visual things like music, languages etc. Some may enjoy running, skateboarding, dancing, stamp collecting. I think what I'm trying to say is, programming is just another part of someone's character, not their whole character.
Visual activities where you change focus, like drawing and photography, do not strain your eyes and might be good for your vision. One of the problems with staring at a screen is that your eyes maintain the same focus distance.
All this left/right brain stuff is a myth[1]. I don't doubt doing something other than programming when you are stuck helps. My best ideas come in the shower, for example.
Yes, those terms fail to correlate to brain activity. But that doesn't mean that there's not a real, subjective quality to different kinds of productive mental activity. Working with your hands (and with shapes or sounds or patterns) is a great way to take a break from doing heavy semantic/problem-solving thinking, and it has the crazy side effect of gradually giving you skills you probably wished you had.
I've been playing the ukulele at home during times when normally I would be refreshing Hacker News. It definitely fills that need to take a break from deductive thought, and after only a couple months suddenly I have a skill that I never had before. I recommend it.
I'm a beginner programmer who is attracted to aesthetic aspects of creativity ('art' is a dirty word for me because of people associated with it). I tried to learn playing a recorder, because I like the way it sounds, and I adore music in general. I couldn't stand it, and I learned something about myself in the process. I'm dreadfully bored by repetitive tasks. For me it leads to routine, and routine leads to terrible errors. I intend to try this book and drawing in general.
Drawing has the potential to suck me in just like playing an instrument failed. I think drawing is to playing an instrument like solving nonograms to solving sudoku. Sudoku is inherently repetitive to solve, you need to check for all numbers in a square, one by one, then all numbers in a line, line by line... In contrast, nonograms usually have non-linear solutions - there is no single way to get to the final result. This makes the process of solving a nonogram vastly more enjoyable for me.
I have no illusion that learning to draw won't require days, months, years of practice. But you can - should - try new things, and you improve in the process. No endless repetition of one piece until you can play it perfectly.
Sounds a lot like Starcraft, doesn't it ? :> I think Starcraft players who like to invoke comparisons to Chess have an inferiority complex and can't enjoy Starcraft for what it is. And it is a lot more like playing guitar than Chess. It's just that Chess much more accumulated prestige.
One of things putting me off Starcraft is that learning to play it violates the DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) principle. A few years from now you may be vastly better at Starcraft, and I'll be able to draw many /different/ things.
I think it's a wider problem with most games. I know very few that really reward creative thinking rather than memorization of strategies and their counters, and practicing to execute them perfectly. Board games have it easier, in absence of computers they can afford to be less strict about rules, and the focus in boardgame industry is still on developing interesting mechanics rather than building on a few established genres.
> 'art' is a dirty word for me because of people associated with it
lol, once more I see that nobody escapes the tentacles of post-modernism :)
I totally get the DRY principle regarding music btw. Every time I try to play an instrument (especially percussion), and I get it right, I find myself wishing for a "repeat" button.
Somehow with drawing this is very different for me. I love zoning out on penning tiny details, cross-hatchings, or on the computer, handpixeling sprites.
I think this is also what the article is really about, learning to access this other "mode" of your brain thinking.
I'm all for DRY, but it's great to be able to stretch the other brainmuscle and just DRRRRRRRRRRRaw :)
Also there are no terrible errors in drawing. Especially not if you do it because you love doing it.
If you want to move on to the next step of drawing whatever the hell you want to out of your head, in any angle, I strongly recommend you go to http://johnkcurriculum.blogspot.com/2009/12/preston-blair-le..., get the Preston Blair book, and start doing these exercises. You will get a lot better, a lot faster.
You can build on the simple cartoon characters in these lessons and do super realistic stuff, or you can keep on being a cartoonist. Whatever works for you.