It's evolved that one of the things I'm coming to greatly enjoy as age presents itself to me is the idea of antique and vintage art instuctionals. There have been people who want to make a living teaching the average you'n'me how to make drawing a hobby for at leastas long as there's was a Bill Alexander and even longer.
The art publication in the last missive was printed, as near as I can determine, in the mid 1960s. If that seems and antique, how about one from the Great Depression?
Pencilgraphing is the title of this slim, black hardback book I found at Powell's for a song on Saturday. It was published in 1936, by Pencilgraphing, Inc. of none other than little ol' Wenatchee, Washington, and the tagline is Makes sketching as easy as writing.
The title shows three pencils askew of each other and a chisel-shaped eraser similar to a Pink Pearl.
The title pages is handsomely laid out on the verso with an asymmetrical illustration from the author's own hand, presumably the calibre of the work one might eventually produce with diligent practice of the technique.
Like many artistic techniques, George Elgo's teaches you to reduce things you want to draw into the simple forms. In his specialized lingo, the basic shapes are measuring units. Every method maker wants thier own rubrics, and Elgo was apparently no exception.
The tools are simply enumerated: four erasers, three pencils, and a sheet of 00 sandpaper. The pencils are B, 3B, and 6B. Three of the four erasers are those wedge-shaped cap erasers that we all put on the ends of our pencils in grade school when we wore the standard erasers down, and the fourth is the larger, Pink Pearl-style erasers, which are important for their chisel-shaped ends. The drawing ground was simply specified as typing paper. So, the tools are at least accessible.
After a dead-serious couple of lessons introducing the aspiring Pencilgrapher to the basic thin strokes and how to make shading and modeling (massy) strokes, the catalyst is introduced in the use of the erasers.
The author introducing the proper use of the wedge-shaped cap eraser
The erasers are mostly used in this method as a stump or tortillion is used in graphite and pencil art - for blending graphite and modelling shade. Think of the way Bob Ross uses his palette knife to lay in the shading on the side of mountains and you'll have the basics of the idea. In the case of the large chisel eraser, this is used to 'cut' lines, produce highlights, and for blending out or removing large areas of shade as needed.
The author demonstrates use of the large chisel eraser
The sandpaper comes in when you want to do 'modeling': the 6B is scratched against it to leave graphite which can be picked up from it with the wedge-shaped eraser, which is then used to stroke graphite on the paper in the manner of a paint brush. The sandpaper also cleans off the eraser's surface and keeps the edges of the erasers keen as well as shaping the pencil point.
The combination of specialized, simplified strokes with the intentional use of the eraser as a drawing tool and the consolidation of all activity on the pencil brings everything into one functional concentrated place where you're using the pencil like a combination of pencil and blending tool and this is where the author evidently felt that sketching would be as simple as handwriting.
It has some merit. I can see some aspects of it that can be used in any drawing practice, and the dependence on the eraser as an all-purpose blending tool isn't wholly innovative but was a fresh approach to the aspiring artist coming from a layman's perspective.
I, very recently, under the aegis of Powell's, acquired Bridgman's Complete Guide to Drawing From Life to bolster an already-groaning shelf loaded with books on drawing practice and technique.
As an older work, it attracts. George Bridgman was an artist and illustrator who lived from 1865-1943. He was trained at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and made the practical part of his fame teaching anatomy at the legendary Art Students' League of New York; he's said to have taught thousands of art students the subject, and amongst his more famous students were Will Eisner and Norman Rockwell.
He taught a method of anatomy that involved grouping the large masses into blocks and connecting them with gestural curves and 'wedges' to simplify drawing the human form.
The book itself has remained popular over the years, remaining in print in many editions. It's a meaty book, weighing in at 300 pages and generously laid-out with a legion of simple yet communicative drawings and patiently-worded text.
I've not been all the way through this yet, but it appears to be a worthy reference book for any artist's shelf.
Earlier tonight, at Powell's during Book Church, I stumbled on a couple of books by a man whose work was instrumental in giving us Disney via the public library.
Edwin George Lutz was a commercial artist and illustrator who authored several books on art and how to draw between 1913 and 1933. In 1913, the first of his books, What To Draw And How To Draw It, taught common-sense ways to render birds, houses, animals, people, and expressions in simple, cartoonish style. His 1921 work, Drawing Made Easy, showed the learner how to draw more realistic images of people and animals.
Latterly, facsimile editions of those books were produced by (respectively) LomArt and North Light Books and look like this:
The illustrations are charming, whimsical and very straightforward, clearly showing how, by breaking down natural shapes into shapes the beginner could draw, more complex forms could be built. This is a common concept that the beginning artist is introduced to; the genius of Lutz was his warm, accessable style.
The connection to Disney comes from a book published in 1920, Animated Cartoons: How They Are Made, Their Origin and Development. This particular volume passed into the hands of one Walt Disney, who was at the time making his living in the commercial art trade in Kansas City during the 1920s, under the aegis of the Kansas City Public Library. Legend has it that Disney learned his animation technique from this very book.
The result is a lesson in two things: that the chancest exposure to literature can lead to absolute wonder (what if Walt hadn't seen the book?), and the importance a public library can have in self-education at large (what if KC had an inadequate (or no) public library).
If you love Disney, thank the E.G. Lutz ... and the public library.
One of the glories of Andrew Loomis's drawing books is they have cute little caricature heads that you can just sit down and draw in a few minutes, which is ideal if you want to just draw something today and don't have either the time, patience, or discipline to do it (or some proportional combination of the three factors).
I've demonstrated this in another post. But in order to actually just open a sketchbook and make marks, which is the habit I'm trying to instil right now, I'm choosing a little sketchy cartoon head and drawing it down.
The above is the second one I did. Below is the first. Drawings in graphite on shattered and deferred dreams.
I have a little bit of drawing aptitude, but, seriously, Loomis asks the aspiring artist to draw a rough circle, smoosh some lumps on it, embolden the lines that matter, et voila!, you really do have a cartoon head.
Right now, it's just old bald white guys with mustaches and smoking cigars and pipes, but I'm looking to expand from there.
But it's really not difficult. If you have no experience or developed aptitude, it just takes me a little shorter than it'd take you. The one thing one really has to get over is the feeling that if you aren't following exact instructions, it's not valid, also, the misguided idea that you have to finish with an accomplished drawing. Those aren't finished, polished, or particularly accomplished, but the are drawings and they do communicate. And they're in my sketchbook, which is where I get to make mistakes.
My wife already knows this lesson. She's working on developing a little character for single-panel gags she'd like to do. She's got sheets covered with this little guy and the more she does, the more she does more. And she's having kick-ass fun with it, and, of the two of us, I'm the one who's acknowledged as the aspiring artist. She just kicks out the jams and does it.
If there's not a lesson to be had in there, I don't know where us dithering artists-in-process can find one that's worth anything.
I have drawn with a model. I, in my modest experience, have drawn in a life-drawing class.
Presumably my interlocutor knows what that is, but if there's any doubt, you know those drawing classes where everyone is arranged in a diverse semicircle around a raised platform where a real live nude model comes out and poses a lot and you have this easel with this big pad of newsprint and then everyone takes out a piece of charcoal or a stick of graphite or a light saber and starts furiously making marks with the whole of your arm over this pad and you're drawing something which looks vaguely like a naked person but could actually be mistaken for a frog, and the light saber pokes through the paper and singes the back of the head of the person in front of you and there's EMS and a trip to the emergency room for someone?
Well, I'm telling a bit of a fib there. Nobody ever called EMS. We were artists, dammit, we were tough. And light sabers are copyrighted anyway. And they don't actually exist. As far as you know.
Anywhoozle, to be serious again, it was quite an experience. You want to draw and if you're unfamiliar being in a room with a totally naked stranger, it's amazing how quick you get over this. Anyone who's ever been in the zone drawing knows this. The ecstasy of making those marks and experiencing the flow really overtake any nervousness you might have. I'm glad I did it.
After you get out of school, though, life-drawing class experiences come few and far between. Classes cost money, yo, and asking strangers on the street for volunteers leads to enquiries from the police. No bueno. It's a goal, then, to learn the human body well enough to be able to draw figures from those that may only pose in your minds eye.
Seriously (again), this is a goal of mine. It's something I nearly achieved in the past and an acme I really want to work toward. Drawing credible figures at the drop of a hat, literally if needs be, seems to me to be serious playing at art on an elevated level. And it's not that drawing with a model is a bad thing either; some of the best classic comic artists did it. But this is a powerful tool, and if you had the chance at a power tool, well, who wouldn't?
Currently I'm studying two books that deliver an artist's knowledge of anatomy in a way that you can adapt it to just about any situation. They really are good books, and I recommend them.
In The Classic Style
The two books take a similar yet divergent approach to the idea of drawing figures directly from imagination. They are Draw From Your Head, by Doug Jamieson, and Freehand Figure Drawing For Illustrators, by David H. Ross. The former comes from what I consider a 'classical' approach, the second, from a more 'modern' point of view.
Draw From Your Head is by Doug Jamieson and was released in 1991. It's a distillation of the system he taught at the New York School of Visual arts. As described, the essential difference between it and other system of anatomy visualization is that it starts with the skeleton, renders it down to a grammar of basic lines and shapes in accordance with the classic 8-head canon, then progressively drapes that simplified skeleton with simplified masses representing muscles, rather than starting with the muscled figure and working back to the basic. The student is encouraged to draw each at each stage and at the end of each stage, a new group is explored and added to the student's growing repertoire.
This sequence, near the back of the book, illustrates very well the progression from simplified skeleton, to dressing it with the muscular masses, to the ending fully-fleshed figure.
Along the way, the student is encouraged to get to know the muscle groups so there is awareness to back the practice of abstract shapes. The figures are most detailed.
In The Modern, Action Style
The second book, Freehand Figure Drawing for Illustrators, is very much geared toward the modern illustrator who wishes to draw from their head and illustrate for the modern comic book and graphic novel.
The author is David H. Ross, whose bio includes credits from Marvel, DC, and Dark Horse, as well as storyboards for movies and consultation for television; this book is for the hot, fashionable constituencies and serves them with depth and erudition.
Ross' central trick is what he calls the glass mannequin, something illustrated on the book cover in good detail, which is his way of viewing the human body as a series of abstracted shapes which, once familiar, can be positioned in any number of ways, just like the wood mannequins adorning my own desk. Tellingly, though, we don't go there straight away, we start in on the one subject every decent art instruction book should contain: perspective. Given that this is a book aimed toward the comic and graphic novel artist, it's a good place to start; you get a skeleton of a world to place your action figures in. After a thumbnail of the freehanding process, we are introduced to the mannequin, then, once we get to know him/her, we go into the anatomy informing the mannequin, the details, the differences between male and female bodies, and how to put them all in motion and action.
We call him Manny.
So, two routes to the draw-from-your-head-mountaintop, two different ways to reach similar goals. The appealing thing about the idea of drawing model-less is that you are ready, at any time, to close your eyes, imagine something, and bring it out.
That's real User power, as Flynn might say. Totally worthwhile, it's a power tool for artists in the best way, and the prize of any artist's tool box.
For a strong modern artist's auto-didacting, I can think of few things better to have on your shelf than these two books.
As the aspiring artist in any style knows, if you're on your own in learning the craft of art, you really have just one alternative if you have neither the time nor the money nor the connections to learn, at least to get started: the how-to-draw book.
In these days we are faced with an embarrassment of riches of all levels of quality and price. Go to your nearest Barnes & Noble, and you'll see what I mean. The number of art instruction manuals and how-to-do-it guides march up into the realm of the innumerable. Manga? No problem. Cartooning? What style do you prefer? Super-hero? Comic-strip? You wanna do 'em in pencil? Ink? Pastel? Crayola™ crayon?
You can even learn sumi-e (and finally put to use that imported Chinese brush and ink set that you got as a gift several years ago).
As you shop, you will run into a scad of books under the brand/author name Christopher Hart. This is not a chances-are sort of thing; it is a certainty, a destiny, a verity. YOU WILL MEET CHRISTOPHER HART SOMEWHERE ALONG YOUR AUTODIDACTING PATH. And it's not hard to see why: on his bookstore page at his site (http://christopherhartbooks.com/drawing-bookstore/) I count no less than thirty books with his byline (which has moved from a simple Christopher Hart or Chris Hart to the more brand-centric Drawing with Christopher Hart). Fully a third of that concerns instruction in manga styles, specialized into kawaii, chibi, shoujo, shonen, manga fashion, and a few more.
I think it's a fair question to ask ones' self, when deciding how to spend ones time self-learning art (and the attendant outlay of money to acquire the codexes of knowledge), does the method have any validity? Is it valid? Will it not only get me started but also get me going in the direction I want to go in. The size of Hart's oeuvre, which seems to be all over the place (but in a good way), to me, not only begs the question, it fairly well demands it. I own a few of the Chris Hart line, and have had the opportunity through browsing at Powell's City of Books and the Multnomah County Library to see others. and, bearing firmly in mind that I am neither here to bury Hart's books nor praise them but to be respectfully honest about them, I can tell you how I found them.
I have beside me two of his how-to-cartoon books, Figure It Out!, The Beginner's Guide To Drawing People, and Drawing Cutting Edge Comics. The constituencies of both books are obvious by the titles, and once you get a little way into Figure It Out!, you realize pretty quickly that the absolute beginner, likely to be intimidated by the idea of mastering figure-drawing by learning about muscle groups and skeletal structure, will hardly be intimidated by this. It's easy, quick to pick-up, enlivened by illustrations that are incredibly clear and self explanatory; the head is explained as an egg shape, and while the lines for positioning features are placed upon they are not explained as to why they're there; the clear illustrations make explaining that to the beginner rather unnecessary. If you're sufficiently movtivated, after about an hour with this book, you will be drawing the beginnings of a credible realistic-cartoon head. Figure It Out! moves on to the rest of the body by teaching general manikin princples, where the bits of the body are rendered into simple shapes and you draw the poses by arranging them just-so. There is also basic figure diagrams to give the idea of running and how to stand.
The other book, Drawing Cutting Edge Comics, also works very hard to deliver the knowledge in its title. The book follows a logical progression from basics (the head, again … another thing you'll find in aspiring artist-instruction-books, at least as far as my experience goes, that they usually start with the head and world their way down), with plenty of illustrations for you to follow along and try out in a step-by-step way. Hart prefers to lead by example, and the illustrations here, as in the previous volume mentioned, are great examples for the visual learner. Everything makes sense based on the way it's visually presented, and there are innumerable examples for the learner to practice on. This is a book on creating comics for the artist who wants to get started right now, and that's how quickly you'll get the upshot on these visual techniques.
Drawing Cutting Edge Comics takes it further in the second half of the book by exploring how the learner might create their own personal style, first by sharing some thoughts of some working artists from Top Cow Productions then delving deeper into the technical aspects of perspective, inking for an edgy look, foreshortening and page design, and a few other design aspects, and goes out with an interview with an agent (Studio 3's Doug Miers) and a very quick overview of the industry at the time of the book's publication (2001) with Chaos! Comics' supremo Brian Pulido.
Its 144 pages promise to pack a ton of information for the budding artist.
So, are they any good? Are they worth laying down your money on? My impression, after looking the books over is, that they certainly are a good place to start. Hart performs an authentic service to hopeful artists by making everything extremely accessible. His style is light, yet informative, and the thing that's always beguiled me about his books is that you look at the way he lays it all out and he does it in a way that, after a few minutes, you're saying to yourself that's something I can do, and after a few more minutes you're looking for pencil and paper to try it, and as I can tell you, just gettng over yourself and getting started are about 98% of the battle. The techniques are clear, do-able almost no-matter what level of artistic skill you think you have, and friendly.
How friendly? Well, as it happens, Chris Hart has a YouTube channel where he posts how-to-draw demos for instruction and inspiration. I was quite impressed with his aplomb and his obvious confidence with his materials. He every bit the pro, and it shows:
Et voila, a pretty girl character in under two minutes. The man knows his stuff. It's obvious he loves drawing, and enthusiastic artists make the best teachers.
Thing about being a mile wide, though, is that sometimes it feels an inch deep. This is palpable at times in the manga titles, to me; when I did a few faces out of The Master Guide To Drawing Anime (which wears the rubric a bit awkwardly as it's about creating characters from standard archetypes for anime and not actually animating anything) I found it, again, easy, accessable and fun and I got good results, but I felt as though it didn't go deep enough for me; at one point it mentions to use the 'standard eye template' but that template was not defined.
This light coverage gets under the skin of independent online creators who, I'm sorry to say, have not been terribly kind to him. Participants on this threadat ConceptArt.org get quite blunt at times, and this essay by a Deviant Art member can perhaps be summarized best in two words, those words being run and away. And this tumblr blogger actually invokes the name of Rob Liefeld at one place to make his point. I think the opprobrium is rather unfair, though somewhat illuminative. But then, the world of manga is a complex thing: you don't simply learn to draw 'manga style' because as we all know, manga art is a style first, then a state of mind, then a culture unto itself. Teaching tool-kit techniques in order to begin to master this world-beating style must seem more than a little like a local culture enduring a documentarist intoning they are a simple people yet with a culture all their own. In my experience, anyone commenting or touring manga culture and wanting to produce a respectful and respected critique had better be ready to go deep as well as wide.
So, you wanna learn cartooning. Grand. You got yourself a Chris Hart book or two and you're going to learn it. Absolutely. And if you manage to continue drawing and get the hang of it, more power to you; Hart's style will open the door and get the pencil in your hand. And, if you're drawing for pleasure, he'll introduce you to a whole new world you never knew existed and you'll be wowing yourself and your friends with drawings you never knew you could do.
But you'll need to remember; go in with your eyes open. Beginner's techniques get you drawing but they also sometimes teach the habits that will not sustain you. You'll know when you feel it; you'll be wondering is there more? Is this all there is? What new things can I grasp with the talent I've developed now? Then it'll be time to move on, grateful to Hart for the start he gave you, into a big wide world of artistic self-expression. Naturally, the best artist never stop learning and when the student is ready, the new teacher will appear.
If you reached the end of this article, I'm thrilled. I would be sincerely interested in finding out what others, triers and doers, have to say about Hart's instruction. Did you find it interesting? Did it open you up or limit you? PLEASE COMMENT!
In this video, comic deity Donna Barr shows you how to draw a horse the right way, in 15 minutes, assisted by another comic deity, Roberta Gregory ...
The video was done last year at the Clallam Bay Comiccon, and if you didn't know that Donna created the series Stinz, then you should get acquainted with that.
(posted with some abashedness that I waited so long to do so. Personal reasons)
It took me a shockingly long time to decipher, for myself, that I love the poster art of Alphonse Mucha. I come to certain realizations rather late. I've recognized that this is my way and I've made a sort of peace with it; I'm not down with it, no, but it is what it is. We ship the information and move ahead.
Once I realized that this was one of my visual loves I've read about as much as I possibly could. I've assimilated the central legend of the man, how a chance meeting with Sarah Barnhardt would catapult the man to the sort of overnight success that you so frequently hear about, that artist who worked patiently on his art until the lightning bolt struck and when it did, he so happened to be ready to catch it.
His posters are, of course, justifiably gorgeous and give the eye back all the love it offers. Gismonda is memorable, La Samaritaine gorgeously intriguing. One wonders what sort of career La Barnhardt would have inscribed with today's supernovaesque media behind her. For my emotional money, though, the girl in the Cycles Perfecta ad has my heart, the way she beckons with her eyes and her open expression from the page.
In the book I checked out from the Multnomah County Library, I found a photo of the rough sketch for Cycles Perfecta and, reduced to its opening pencil marks, it looked like something I could do … or at least, something I should attempt. I haven't drawn anything for a very long time.
It was worth a try.
Cycle girl courtesy Mucha and Multnomah County Library. GraphiteCourtesy Cretacolor; Bristol ATCs courtesy Strathmore; Ink courtesy
Stabilo (and Copic (not shown)); all courtesy my hard-earned bux.
When you neglect your artistic jones for a long long time, you enter a sort of strange stasis. You start to feel as though you're keeping it in a box for just the right time. Then you open it and it feels awkward, stiff, but you use it anyway, because you've told yourself you've been away too long, and some people you love, who know you're shorting yourself until you do this thing, have never, oddly, given up on you even though you have, in a way given up on yourself.
So, the drawing itself feels stiff and awkward. It's quite rewarding, actually, even though you don't get it done the way you want to get it done. Of course, it'll be work. You knew this already. Same thing as happens with someone whose let themselves get out of physical shape after being in great condition. You're lugging this weight.
So, false-start here, bad line there. No matter. Do it anyway. And the result isn't great, but what did you expect? Mucha worked for years and did it every day. the result, seen below, does not satisfy me, but … but … I am happy for it. I did this thing. And the eyes are too wide and crabby; the curve of the face, comically-tragically asymmetrical. The mouth doesn't look anything like the mouth of the original.
She looks like a rank beginner, which is what I'm back to being. I have only myself to blame. You use it or you lose it; but if I didn't have it to begin with at some time or another, it wouldn't have got me this far.
Stumbled on at FRCH's Creative Fuel blog, we find one thing we might do when we're stuck or just need to take our brain out for a spin or don't know what to create but want to create something.
Here, the Blob isn't something to beware, it's something to encourage.
That's the whole thing right there. Delightfully simple, probably has been out there all along in front of you, and Ben Williams just crystallized it for you right here.
This is an experience I've had in my own life. The maps I sometimes create I draw out of interesting natural or manufactured shapes I stumble on. A big city I created once sprang from the way a concrete walkway branched; it became two one-way streets merging to create a boulevard. Another map, a make-believe island nation, sprang from the pattern of crack-like markings in a linoleum floor.
It's not hard to imagine drawing shapes solely from nature. A leaf can become an island in a river. One of my favorites come from the land of pareidolia; the North Portland 'peninsula', an inland peninsula surrounded by water on three sides (south and west, the Willamette River, and the Columbia on the north) bears an uncanny resemblance to a human thumb, as seen from the palm side of the hand.
Look at it sometime; you'll see. Of course, you won't be able to unsee it, but you run this risk when looking at the world that way.
So, blob if ya gotta; imagine patterns in the sky as things to base silly, but intensely creative drawings on.
2957.The current issue of Drawing magazine seems to suggest a trend.
Originality is to be striven for. No matter what one does as an artist, I think we all, accomplished as well as tyro or aspiring, reach for a unique expression of what is our own voice, no matter how we do it.
But in the beginning, as one of the keynote articles say, you can learn a lot from a master, and since you have no access to the master, you can at least draw what they have drawn and, in so doing, grasp eye-hand coordination and get a taste of how they understood form and shape.
Dan Gheno's article demonstrates how to draw from multiple sources - from as 'mundane' as comic books and film images and as rarefied as sculpture and the great masterpieces - to learn basic lessons of art and composition. You can gain facility on drawing certain body parts (I know few artists who don't approach hands, for instance, with some trepidation … even the wonderful artists at OryCon we saw, some of them mentioned this). The idealized and refined ideas of classical sculpture can impart a unique challenge of anatomy lessons to the hand and the eye. Sketching the old masters can teach ineffable lessons about composition.
And, as always, draw, draw, draw.
One may not have access to a live teacher. Fortunately, teachers live all around us. We just have to learn how to look, which is another artists' sine qua non.
Everybody goes through that. For you to go through it—if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase, or if you’re just starting off and you’re entering into that phase—you’ve got to know that’s totally normal. The most important possible thing you could do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline, so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story. Whatever it’s going to be…
All of us who aspire to the title of artist know this intuitively. Some of us follow it better than others. The logic that just workingmakes such fundamental sense, though. The logic is sound. You know your tools by using them. You know your capabilities by using them, too; you evolve your capabilities by practice.
As the old joke goes, "How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, Practice, Practice!" There's a truth there.
I can draw. I am afraid of messing up. I, like many aspiring artists, won't be happy if I can't come out with what I want to have on the first go. It's a tough obstacle to get round.
2250.Doug TenNapel gave you Earthworm Jim and GEAR, and now he gives you about ten minutes or so of his time to show you how he does what he does and talk about storytelling:
What is interesting about TenNapel is, with just about everybody (up to and including Scott McCloud and Scott Adams) using graphics tablets to get the job done, TenNapel kicks it old-school – at the drawing board, inking in pencilled panels on Bristol board using Sumi-e ink.
His remarks about using a Cintiq (for which I would kill everyone's grandparents to own) versus drawing to complete a story were insightful and revealing. He draws for the same reason a lot of us draw. Drawing is, amongst other things, sensual as well as sensuous. The adjectives he use approach carnal; the feeling of laying down graphite and ink on paper is indeed seductive. While telling the story is part of what feeds his head, unless he's actually drawing the drawings and filling them in with brush and ink, it's kind of empty. There's a decided lack of kinesthesia there; and while computers can make comic artists mad efficient and productive, there's a decided feeling of separation from one's work.
In the excellent Making Comics, Scott McCloud mentions a moment when he went out, bought a two-dollar (plus tax – the man lives in California, I do believe) roller ball pen, a Pilot Precise (the only pen worth owning) V7 (I prefer V5, but that's just me) and dashes off a sketch with it, making the point that if you really want to draw comics, computers may be the bomb and heaven for you, but you can do it with a scrap of paper and a pen off the shelf.
2246.Might be a little NSFW, unless your boss understands that a drawing of a nude female figure is not necessarily pr0n. Teaches you proportions and where the general stuff's suppose to go:
… and here's a quick-sketch, time-lapse of an artist doing a female figure: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMhnb09YjQI. Same edge-of-NSFW warning applies. Tell your boss that artistically-inclined workers make better problem solvers.
2238.This is, prima facie, an article about the best how-to-draw book ever made. There is a bittersweet note to it, though, which see at the end.
The Book: Artist Bill Martin, famous for incredibly detailed landscapes with a touch of whimsy and a touch of surrealism, produced a book first published in 1993, called The Joy Of Drawing. A slender book, it is nonetheless packed with great first steps. Martin's a great artist, and has a skill in communicating that is manifest here; through drawings and amazingly well-chosen words, within the first fifty pages you have a solid idea of how to draw what you see and how to look at what you see, which is skill number one for any artist.
Within those first fifty pages you also learn value, perspective, angles, proportion, how to indicate volume with blends, basic shapes which you can combine to draw basically anything. Bill Martin Jr's succinct writing style and apt illustration style ties it all together in a way that drives the point home more or less instantly. He even, in later sections of the book, show you what to look for in order to draw transparent and liquid-filled glass, two-point perspective, how to show contours using surface textures …
If I had enough money, I'd buy up every copy of this book that I could so I could give it out for free to anyone who wants to draw and doesn't think they can. This can help you out even if you just want to draw for fun, because doodling and scribbling about is fun enough, but making art works is quite liberating.
The Book is that good.
The Artist: Bill Martin, Jr, made a name for himself painting works that had great visual depth and wit, a feeling of realism and a feeling of surrealism – there is an airiness to his works that makes the paintings (many of which were painted on cirular canvases) feel at once like an Earthly landscape and also one might find on a distant planet just discovered by an Earthly explorer light-years from home. The landscapes run from the real to the fantastic. His work was known the world over and seeing what he knew about creating amazing landscapes suggest that he knew even more at understanding the real.
The Bittersweet Part: When I first discovered Bob Ross, the wet-on-wet painter to the masses, I found him ironically interesting like most people do when I started watching him in about 1998 or 1999. Little did I know, as I accidentally found out, that Bob died in 1995 at a very untimely age of lymphoma.
One can imagine how I felt when I heard that Bill Martin, Jr, died back in 2008, in his early sixties, of lymphoma. What a sad loss!
If I ever do hit the big time, you can believe that I will buy up as many copies of The Joy of Drawing as I can and give them free of charge, to anyone who asks. I'd even have another printing done.
The book is that good.
The ISBN is 0-8230-2370-2. It was publshed by Watson-Guptill back in 1993 originally.
If you find a copy, buy it and give it to someone you love who's aching to learn how to draw. You won't regret that.
I find a lot of people who aspire to draw and are disappointed at the result become disappointed because they are not drawing what they see, but what they think they see.
Here's an example. Say you want to draw an eye (go ahead, say it. I'll wait … okay. Back.). You might want to try it now. How did you do it? Did you think of eyes you have seen, remember what you saw, or did you put down an up-curve, a down-curve, and a couple of circles in the middle?
If you did, you did what I think of as iconic drawing. I have a theory, based on my own experience in drawing, that what we do when we draw things from life like faces and rocks and trees and such is we all have this visual library of icons that we "draw" on when we want to draw something. Before we learn how to see things as an artist does, though, that visual library overrides whatever skill we have, and we either cough up the icon or some odd hybrid of the icon and what we see.
This is not a sin. As a matter of fact, as creatures who have to survive on a visual level, I think it's a pure survival skill. But it's something that will sabotage you as an artist, because if you have to try and try and try to override your visual librarian, you'll get discouraged. That librarian is very good at its job, and it doesn't lay down placidly and take a break. Maybe it heard there's a recession on, who knows.
This is why drawing from life is something everyone who aspires to art should attempt. It's painful at first. I remember the first few times, how it felt to force myself to make the motions (life drawing is a physical thing) and how it felt to disconnect from that visual librarian (in the end it was a necessity; the librarian wasn't writing my grade for the course, the instructor was, so the instructor had veto power). Also, for a lot of people, it's awkward standing in a room of strangers, looking at this nekkid stranger come up and then learning to draw what you see, learning the kinesthetic motions. But then you get in the zone and it's pure, and you realize you're learning the same thing that artists over a thousand years do, and it's liberating.
I told you all that to tell you this: Manga-ka Mark Crilley has a great short video I wanted to share (via here) that combines the two. It stars from observations from life and puts the visual librarian at their service, instead of the other way around, but even though it uses the icon library for bits, the whole thing is based on life drawing observations and experience (as the artist himself makes plain at the front of the thing). If anyone should know about drawing eyes, it's a Manga-ka, but the life drawing referent makes sure it all stays true and realistic:
There you have it. Realism and knowing short-cuts. You probably learned a quick skill or two if you followed him.
The Book: