The Drawing as a Hobby Thread

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Fenris-77 said:
IDK, some people have a better sense for shapes in 3D for example. Or better (finer) hand eye coordination. Or whatever. Different brains aren't equally good at the same tasks. I'm not saying those people can't draw only that they might need some additional scaffolding that other people don't. I do agree that it's a Carnegie Hall kind of affair though, for anyone.
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I think some people think in 3 dimensions more easily than two. I can deal with physical models of 3D objects much more readily than I can mentally come up with a two dimensional drawing. I've had one or two arty types (back from the days when I used to flat with fine arts students) comment that everything I did always had depth or was always 3 dimensional.

Funnily enough my mother used to teach structural geology papers which require the ability to visualise things in 3 dimensions. She commented that the distribution of marks you saw from those courses were always bimodal. You got the folks who could and the folks who couldn't. She thought that some people had the cognitive faculties to visualise stuff in 3 dimensions and some people didn't, and that tended to be the main element in whether people could really grasp the material.
 
Well I'm still at the stick men and smiling suns preschool stage of drawing, so I really am in awe of some people's ability to just bring their imagination on to a page. It was interesting to see that Tristram just essentially drew the Gnoll without prior stages, even mental ones as such.
 
Why are we even discussing this?
It's well known that people able to draw/paint stuff have sold their souls to the devil in exchange for the satanic, unnatural skill.
 
When I was younger I absolutely wanted to be a comic book artist. I had a knack for it....but mostly for static images like a cover. I lacked a lot of the fundamentals for comics like storytelling or being able to draw mundane shit like buildings and cars and so on.

I probably should have stuck with it in some way and maybe I’d have gotten better at those parts. Now I’m so out of practice I can barely doodle.
 
I got myself a clutch pencil today and a few other related bits to celebrate the fact the non-essential shops reopened today after a long lockdown spell. It's not much, but showing up at my local arts supply shop seemed like the polite thing to do.

I've not owned a clutch pencil in a very long time. I'll see how I get on with it.
 
E-Rocker said:
What is a clutch pencil?
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It's just a mechanical pencil, the kind that has grip around the lead. Sorry if I made it sound more exciting than it actually was. These days for, me the, bar for "exciting" is pretty low.

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Winterblight said:
I don't doubt that if you put enough time into something its possible to learn and possibly gain some level of competence, but my brain doesn't see things as others might. Its an 'arts' thing in general with me, maybe even a 'learning' thing.

My friend was a drummer in a local bad, he was really good. One day we were talking about things and I mentioned how I had been trying to learn the guitar for 20 years and still hadn't managed to learn an entire song. I told him I wasn't musical at all and still couldn't tune the guitar by ear and my timing was way off. He told me it was a skill anyone could learn, a few days later he told me I was correct and that I wasn't musical at all. So 35 years of playing the guitar and I know one song from start to finish - except the main solo because my guitar doesn't have enough frets - damn you Fender. I still can't tune the guitar without an app or tuner. So yeah, give me another decade and I might be able to knock out a few decent doodles :grin:
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Well when I was in grade and high school symphony everyone, including the teachers and musical judges, tuned with an app or tuner. So you are in good company. :wink: As for musicality, yes there is an element to everything that is affected by talent. But with enough effort a rudimentary skill can be built.

Unless you are in Choir, the real issue is basic timing, fingering (musical instruments), basic memory, and Paying Attention to the Conductor! If you are tone deaf however, Choir is not for you, I am sorry. Sometimes there are real limits. All the other instruments, if you can have a fellow not-tone-deaf ear to check its tune with the app or tuner, shape the sound with proper fingering.

Basic rhythm is not too hard; less mentally anticipate and more feel the rhythm helps most people. But naturally there's stupid levels of time changes in harder works that really are for bored musicians and composers to challenge themselves -- ignore those works, they are not for you. And as always practice, practice, practice.

PolarBlues said:
Other than the Draw-a-box course, the other thing I've been doing to keep practicing and for general relaxation is copying panels from old, public domain Western comics available on https://comicbookplus.com. I don't consider these sketches "my drawings"; there aren't my characters or compositions. It just something to do.

It is kind of weird how that came about. Finding things to draw can be in itself a challenge. Over the past few years I've gone through different phases, focused on different things, including area set up for mini still life arrangements. But eventually the question of what should I draw next resurfaces. When I stumbled on the idea of using comicbookplus as resource, it proved to be very convenient and fun. That helps it a lot in terms of sticking with something. And by copying a comicbook panel rather than just drawing a figure or an object, I'm also learning about drawing horses, wagons, windows and all sorts of things (albeit in a very simplified, comicbook form).

As the the Western theme, I guess in part I've running a lot of Western games, so that feeds the interest. But I would also say old western comics illustations have aged well; the way we imagine cowboys today isn't radically different from how they were drawn in the 1950s or 60s. You can't say the same for crime or science fiction comics.

Anyone else have a routine or ongoing project or is do you just draw when something needs drawing?
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I draw, color, and "make an art" as a cheap hobby. At one point I wanted faster progress so I applied really hard! Then I found learning from teachers and applied learning (repeating past lessons to reinforce future ones, e.g. repeat drawing one subject composition repeatedly weekly so as to observe personal progress) worked better than whenever inspiration struck or long hours of rediscovering the wheel. Same principle applied when I tried to learn languages or scripts on my own: eventually stop wasting time, knuckle down, and learn from teachers, apply yourself regularly and methodically.

I know a youtuber Jazza has an app that provides drawing prompts randomly (and I believe can be customized). That might be a good tool. They are word prompts however, so some drawing proficiency is expected I guess.

I like Quick Poses ( quickposes.com ) to practice gesture drawing, which helps loosen up and pare down info into dynamic strokes. Forces you out of comfort zones of fussy detailing.

Lee Hammond has been helping police depts. improve their sketching by offering training courses on realism. Her books are readily available in libraries... and she also has a book about crayons (like Crayolas!). She often demystifies drawing by asking you to "draw what you see" and "avoid sharp breaks in value... notice most things transition in value." Really helped my realism attempts and my crayon doodles (my stick figures now have hats! :hehe:). All joking aside, she's the fastest way I made progress. And she has a proven track record because she had to help several USA police depts. bring otherwise not-artistic cops up to speed in realism due to necessity.

But some of the best advice I gleaned has been a youtuber Caesar Cordova where he points out the value of Reference Images, grisailles (tonal study), color tones to desaturate chroma, and having a lighter heart to your work (willing to see it "damaged" so as to experiment and improve). His talks are in Spanish with subtitles and are conversational as he paints something I could only dream of completing (especially because he is working in oh so expensive oils).

There is info, prompts, and apps everywhere on any discipline nowadays. The bigger challenge is making time for it safe from excuses. :grin:
 
I'd assume the biggest challenge, besides time, is discouragement, especially if a person has reached late adulthood telling themselves "I can't draw".

As one of my art teachers used to say "everyone has 2000 bad hands in them they have to get out on paper before they start drawing good hands" - meaning even talented artists have to draw like shit for a long time before we get out anything good, and even then, we're never satisfied. I hate most of my art, all I can see is the flaws. I come to peace with that with the maxim "everything I draw is just practice for the next thing I draw". But then, I think if I was ever happy with my own work, that's probably the point that I'd stop growing as an artist.

I can completely understand that it's a seemingly intimidating road to start down, but my suggestion is to not treat it like learning to play the piano, treat it like a videogame. Do it only for yourself, for fun, and if you fall down a sewer or get hit by a Goomba, just throw out the paper and start again. Do it while you're watching TV, do it while sitting on the skytrain, do it to fall asleepat night - in other words, just have fun, and the skill will come after time.
 
opaopajr said:
But some of the best advice I gleaned has been a youtuber Caesar Cordova where he points out the value of Reference Images,
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Sorry to pull out just one sentence without context, but reference images is an interesting topic in its own right.

Do people use reference images, if so how, where do you source them and at what point does it start feeling a bit too much like plagerism.

My own, cartoony doddles have been mostly drawn from my imagination, but I then took some evening courses focusing on observational drawing and I learned to appreciate the value of that. The Draw-a-Box course, I mentioned above, which is heavily construction-based, takes a slightly different approach whereby the use of the reference image is to extract the structural information of the object, but what you then draw isn't necessarily exactly what was in the reference image but follows the same rules.

Also, I take back everything I said down-playing the value of the clutch pencil. My new clutch pencil is actually pretty awesome. I am pretty sure somewhere on it is inscribed "Whosoever holds this clutch pencil, be he worthy..."
 
About reference images... it depends on how you use them and what you are studying.

Even outright tracing has a value because you are efficiently skipping over an undesired step to get to the step you want to study. Granted if you want to practice proportional drawing and stop at basic tracing from a light box, then yes you defeated your own point. However if you are studying other steps and elements -- and tracing gets you to the actual practice faster -- then it is a benefit, not a harm.

(As for plagiarism, that's an issue of citation. However there are only so many poses the human form can do {in fact one of Eadweard Muybridge's big patron accounts from Stanford, after photography of a moving horse to settle a bet, was photography of naked human models doing all sorts of movements in the name of Anatomical Art References}. So at some point I am not going to rag too hard on tracing artists unless I can cite year & month of the Low Rider magazine that model was traced from. :hehe: It's all likely been recorded before, probably even before your grandma was born.)

Here, I drop in a video from Cesar Cordova that I thought was poignant. Each of the three drawings are done in sequence and work from a Reference. But each are different because it is using more and more tools readily available but often ignored by the student:
First is freehand with just looking at a visual reference.
Second is using basic building shapes and principles of anatomical proportion.
Third is adding a proportional divider (a compass-looking thingie) to measure -- a.k.a. artist stereotype of arm out holding thumb on the brush/pencil.



Measuring, principles of construction, basic shapes, and even visual references are all that -- Tools -- to get you closer to representing a 3D idea onto a 2D plane. And as a student you are allowed more chances and mistakes and tools to aid you to build up your skill. If you are not a professional competing, why make the learning process harder? :heart: Go ahead and use all the tools!

I really recommend the proportional divider (or learning to measure with your drafting tool). It changes your draftsmanship tremendously so as to prevent discouragement.

It only becomes like a "calculator on a math test" cheating when you are depriving yourself of the lessons you wanted to learn in the first place.
 
opaopajr said:
So at some point I am not going to rag too hard on tracing artists unless I can cite year & month of the Low Rider magazine that model was traced from.
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If Greg Land used Low Rider instead of porn mags for his 'photo references', his poses would at least look more naturalistic.
 
Honestly I am nothing but a beginner student in art. I am just sharing stuff I picked up in my amateurish amblings. :grin: We have several professional fine artists in this place, so let us hear more rom them!
 
I finished the Draw A Box online course today. I really wasn't sure I would see it through when I first started. It's really long, there is a lot of grind and some of the latter lessons looked impossibly hard. If I am honest, in my preoccupation with finishing the course I may have got less out of some individual lessons than if I had taken it more slowly. But that's OK. By doing the course I got a lot of practice, I've been made to think about visual issues in ways I had never done for and I was pushed out of my comfort zone time and time again.

The strongest feature of Draw A Box is the structure of the course. It doesn't try to cover everyting, but everything in it is very deliberately designed to progressively build certain techniques. I can see myself doing the course again some day, to pick up on the things I missed and keep building those fundamentals, but not for while as it's pretty grueling.
 
TristramEvans said:
To give an example, like many artists in my generation, one of my primary inspirations/teaching tools growing up was Buscema's incredible How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way, a book I still love to this day.

And as anyone whose seen it, or many other "how to draw" books, you have quite a few examples like this:

View attachment 28856

Breaking down the figure into ovals and cylinders, so you get the all the features in proportion and know where to foreshorten.

And don't get me wrong, it's a perfectly good method to follow to get your figure's proprtions and posture correct.

But that isn't how I draw. It isn't how any professional artist I know draws.

For example, here is the Gnoll I did for my Doodling D&D project. I started with this pencil sketch :

View attachment 28857

And then went in with a gel ink pen on top:

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....and that was it. Two steps, maybe about 15 minutes total. No shapes, no wire frames, no cylindars.

Now, not exactly a work of art, I won't be including that one in my portfolio, but it just illustrates that on the one hand there's drawing via a "system", and on the other there's just freehand drawing from intuition.

I think anyone can learn the first, the second is kinda like a sixth sense.
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I've always suspected that much...mostly because I've watched people who can actually draw, making a picture from start to finish (but it was long ago). Now you're confirming it as well:thumbsup:.

But, well, this is like everything else: those who have the "sixth sense" for it, don't need a system as much, or at all. Those who don't, are better off sticking to a system.
I've always wondered, can one develop the "sixth sense" if doing the "guided" thing long enough, but the jury's still out on that matter:shade:.
 
That method of consistent light pressure adding gradual cross-hatched layers to develop value is how you layer wax crayons into a simulacrum of blending colors.

Crayons are like most pastel lipid media, there are 4 prime methods to spread it out in a blend:
a) heat (encaustic, hot plate, hair drier, heat gun, fingertips),
b) pressure (burnishing, blending stumps, colorless blender, fingertips),
c) dissolve (paraffin wax is denatured by 1. ethers & alcohols (flammable), 2. petroleum -ene products (often toxic degreasers, polishes, and flammable fuels), and 3. esters (fragrant volatile oils, often found in foods too, like orange oil, sebum from fingertips, butter, etc.)
d) dilute (petroleum jelly, oils, grease, more layers of media e.g. crayon's paraffin wax, etc.)

If you've been paying attention you noticed fingertips covers 3 of that 4. :wink: That explains quite a bit of the master crayon artists' secrets, the rest being a classic artistic education aware of media materials' limits, color theory, and techniques for representational draftsmanship.

However, if you don't wanna lose that diffuse dithering that's best retained by wax crayons and graphite, then you want to "blend" by means of d) dilution through layering in cross-hatching directions (or for even better masking of hand strokes, scumbling (small scribbly circles over an area)). The lighter your pressure, the more layers you can slice the paper's capacity to hold wax before blooming. With those layers distributed you can do gradual gradients between colors that simulates a blend. :thumbsup:

My stick figures have never been more soft-focused, in Technicolor! :goof::clown: Hope that helps!
 
Very good advice opaopajr opaopajr ! Do you have favourite crayons? I like the Faber Castel ones a lot but I'm a bit new to the crayon game so maybe there are better ones.

I will add that using lipid media can be used in conjunction with waterbased media (eg watercolor, water based ink) without altering the lipid too much. It does smooth lines slightly, but allows to combine effects. So I do use lipid crayons instead of watercolour crayons to sketch for watercolour pieces, and the two layer nicely for certain effects - details such as veins, adding texture or doing weird shadow effects.

What I do is crayon sketch->waterproof manga ink linework + some of the shadows -> sometimes acrylic ink for lights -> watercolor -> white crayons for highlights
 
:heart: Welcome to Crayon Talk! :kiss: Good times, good times.

I do have preferences to crayons! :grin: And I've also discovered several things that have undermined my preconceived notions about artistic output being heavily dependent upon professional artist quality products. And further I've learned the whole process matters, from materials chosen, composition and material limits accepted, and workspace layout, so I cannot hide my drafting mistakes blaming my materials but instead blaming my lack of preparation. :grin:

Where to begin...? Crayola. :kiss: It's the beloved elephant in the room. In summary, Crayola is student grade learning crayons par excellence. There are different formulae over the years, and I would say as useful the modern formula is in "lasting 3x longer!" the trade off was more brittle and prone to breakage, so we can travel deep into its own material features over time. But remember, it is student grade. So that means it does not have pro level lightfastness & does not have strong opaqueness for really deep impasto (pasty!) layering and strong highlights atop. But at $2.50 a 24ct. box, @ $0.10 a crayon -- and on Back to School sales $0.50 a 24ct. box, @ $0.02 ea. -- just about impossible to beat as student learning supply in North America. USA made, reliable paraffin wax consistency, wholly green sustainable company, etc. -- it's just a crazy high benchmark.

For professional wax crayons it is hard to beat Swiss Caran D'Ache Neocolor 1 wax pastels. They have the highest lightfastness I've seen so far and their deep pigmentation gives excellent opacity for deep layering. The company themselves advertises the potential to use Turpentine (for hopeless fantasy romantics you can call it: Terebinthene, the Essence of Terebinthia :shade:) to dissolve the crayon and get beautiful painterly coverage, but this does stray from non-toxic usage. But it is a reminder about the core principles on how to get a similar effect with any of your crayons! You'll see countless videos about Neocolor 2s and Neocolor 1s being compared to other products, and they really are the pro products yet to be beat. That said, they are pricey at around $2.25 per crayon -- but being sold stock (singular crayons for purchase) is a huge plus when you really need just a few colors.

Here's Art Prof video, a channel that works an entire creative process in crayon, one in still life and another in self-portraiture. Extremely helpful to me over the years in understanding The Process! and one I'd love to share with other aspiring novices and amateurs. Here they start with explaining the differences in Neo 1 and Neo 2 and also the strengths of Neo 1 as a professional wax crayon tool:

Enjoy!

Speaking of which Neocolor 2 and other Aquarelles, here's a video comparing and contrasting many popular Western brands in what I feel was the best of the Artist Supply Vs video series. Colorfully Optimistic's Aquarelle Comparison Series, with a chart to methodically record product results:

Enjoy!

I myself having used Caran D'Ache cannot warrant justifying spending that sort of money on my childish scrawling drawings, so I have been scrounging the dollar stores for kids crayons to challenge Crayola. :kiss:

Playskool crayons are bad for me. Too much filler, not much pigment, very hard wax so poor movability of impasto (pasty!), and reminds me of a lot of cheap Chinese non-name brand crayons that used too many grayish tones and shades to pad their palette.

Sargent crayons, about as old as Crayola in history, and another excellent student grade wax crayon product. Also the palette is usefully mature with classic tones like ochres, olives, and ultramarines to mix with one's typically high chroma (color saturation) from Crayola. You can follow along art tutorials with their straight outta the box 24ct. box, which is great for adult learners. And at around $2.50 to $3.50 per box, or $1.25 at a dollar store when they are dumped there, they are at equivalent to great value. They do play differently than Crayola's current formula but as we're getting very lengthy here that'd be a good topic for another time. Another USA company, but this time Made in India, great pigmentation, they do bloom a dustiness on the crayon itself over time, so expect something similar if laid thick and returned to in a long time.

BIC crayons, another total surprise. These are filled with considerably more white as filler, leading to a more tinted pastel leaning palette (per 24ct. box). Normally extra filler is a drag, but here that is totally useful on toned paper and construction paper! Typically Crayola and Sargent are harder to see on cheap toned paper, like construction paper, packing paper, cardboard, paper bags, etc. To make the lighter chroma colors stand out from the toned paper it is best to put a layer of white crayon to be a backing layer. Now Crayola & Sargent white crayons are so transparent it feels... part white, part colorless blender. They are nowhere near as opaque as pro crayons like Caran D'Ache. BIC helps skip that step. BIC is a UK company IIRC, the crayons are Made in Tunisia, and are extra long and solidly made. They price I got it was $1.50, which 24 ct. and at @ $0.06 per crayon a great value. However trying to find more I find they are normally around $5+ :cry:; I don't know if that's import prices, but it does push down my desire. Maybe a fairer comparison would be to Crayola Construction Paper crayons, which are also close to $5.

Mondo Llama crayons (Target's in-house art supply brand) they displeased greatly me in the beginning -- I've grown to become bemuse by them. As another "Made in China" crayon formula they have the first of the two similar failings I've noticed repeatedly in non-name brand Chinese-made wax crayons: 1) the wax binder is just soft enough towards oil pastels to be greasy, clumpy, and crumbly, 2) the palette is padded out with cheap fillers in tints, tones, and shades (basically extra white, grey, and black pigment is used to 'cut' the other color chroma pigment. (Mondo Llama colored pencils are Made in Indonesia and they are quite good! So this does seem to be a paraffin wax formula simulation issue.)

Mondo Llama cont., I started off hating them because it treaded previous deep disappointment with off-brand Made in China crayons. Later, since in a fit of rage I swore to use up the whole box of 24ct., I've come to appreciate that #1 smeary quality in the post-wax-bloom stage. Basically once you reach the impasto stage, go further!; you can move around some of the wax as you layer on more than the paper could usually handle, creating a nigh-oil paint stage where you can bury a color while also mixing new colors on the paper. You can even scrape the wax off and start afresh like drying oils -- it's really a strange development for me. :quiet: My hate and bitterness has made a beautiful discovery, I am beside myself with confusion, and I don't know if I can replicate it in full with other crayons. :errr::happy::sad: At $1.25 a 24ct. box, or when I bought it on Back to School Sale $0.25, it is the best usable value at $0.05 to $0.01 per crayon... The palette is actually like a cross between Crayola and Sargent, so it's an infuriatingly useful mix of high chroma rainbow and artistic educational tonal palette. I hate them, I love them, :irritated: I grind them with great fury against Amazon's packing paper and lament the artistically acceptable results. :weep: Will no one rid me this meddlesome priest!

I am currently following India's exploding wax crayon market and there's a pile of new product I wish to try. The whole country is emphasizing how creativity in art helps brain development, so a whole national movement is being pushed to color and draw as if their independence depends on it. Basically they are putting the A into STEM, or back into STEAM, so as to ensure national security and children's futures... Whatever, it's lovely to see new cheap crayons! They even have plastic crayons! They are touted as cleaner, hold a sharper point, and more erasable because of the plastic media. Anyway, on the to-do list. These name brands are currently on my radar: DOMS, Camlin, Apsara, & Camel.

I am also interested in Poland's Bambino kids crayons because their formula mixes clay into the wax binder, creating a more colored pencil hardness and grit smoothness as it goes over the paper. I enjoy Conte de Paris, a clay-based professional grade crayon, but again it's pricey and I cannot justify my bad art to buy it. So to hear a kid's crayon is a halfway point between is intriguing!

It's sort of a thing for me now to keep an eye for other nation's crayons just to note their quality. My eye is on USA's Prang and their soybean oil based crayons. There's also some bourgie beeswax crayons, like Waldorf Academy, and even Japanese rice wax/oil crayons in natural dyes instead of pigments from Japan at like $20 per crayon. There is so much more to explore! :thumbsup: I have fallen into the rabbit hole of deeply useless knowledge and it is quite glorious to vomit it upon the unexpecting! :clown: I hope you enjoyed it! :grin:

We should totally do this again sometimes as there's more to share about: paper! :gooselove: It's only like the other half of the drawing process!
 
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Wow thanks a lot opaopajr opaopajr that's super in depth!

I remember having been underwhelmed by Crayola, but that was quite some time ago, and they might have improved (an I certainly have, so maybe I'd make better use of them)

Caran d'Arche are indeed excellent, I should try see if I can justify paying that much now that I know a bit more. Since the crayon is only a layer I do use them relatively slowly. And I minmax duration by sharpening via scalpel instead of pencil sharpener - which would not really make sense for a heavier use with a lot of pasting. I have noticed they do have a "school" line which is more 50c per crayon on their official website, though I have not tried them - and I am EU, so no idea how much import would yank up that price.

I found Faber castell to be very nice in that they are less costly than Caran d'Arche (less than 1 euro per pencil) yet do provide a lot of cover in a single line if that's needed and have that very agreable to work with texture to them. And from what I heard, they are pretty time/light resistant, which is a concern to me. In another category their micron-types and brush point pen are the best I tried, even above micron themselves. In general they're the best of the low end of premium for a lot of things, though they are a german brand, so there again import to US or elsewhere will affect price.

I will try to put my hand on some of those cheaper crayons though, see what I can do with them.

And speaking of BIC, BIC ballpoint pens are a really amazing cheap option for ink drawing. They are easy to transport, cost nothing, and still do the job, and they even have some unique qualities compared to say micron-type pens. Very good for texture and fluid movement, deep color and that reflexivity can be leveraged too. They do drool more than micron-types, and I prefer those for precision work as well as criss-crossing based shadow work. But they drool way less than a traditional ink pen (and those steel pen head are not cheap) or cheap fountain pens (which I've never really made work).

As for paper, I found the crayon work to be more textured and interesting on grainy paper, but since paper choice is dictated by the use of watecolor. So I can say I do prefer grainy water color paper to flatter water colour paper for crayonning textures, but I haven't explored all options.
 
You sound like a pro artist! :thumbsup: For your serious work you should totally stay with your pro grade Faber Castell and other pro products like Caran D'Ache, Lyra, Mungyo, etc. It'd probably avoid much frustration and would last for posterity. :heart: However you are welcome to come play around with my rinky-dinky-doo student grade crayons! :goof: :music:

My suggestion if you wanna tinker is get some cheap paper (packing paper is great! it's tough, it's free, it's toned!), wet it and block set it (like you would a knit sweater when it needs to dry; stretched out with bricks on each corner), let it dry or do wet-on-wet watercolor block in of values for the "lean" bottom layer. After that dries you can go to town with abandon. :shade: The paper's stretched to lessen wrinkling, the values are placed so that the paper's tone doesn't show through in such sharp contrast to the layers atop, and you have more wax layers to play with atop! :angel::sun:

And then you don't have to worry if it is not up to your usual standards! :grin: The materials are super cheap and are assured to disintegrate over the centuries, what with the cheap paper acidity and the non-lightfastness of most children's crayons! It's like artistic license to make bad art and experiment! :kiss: You only lost some garbage paper and pocket change! :money:

I :gooselove: making my bad art. :gooseshades:::honkhonk:
 
I used to draw. I grew up drawing airplanes and other things I thought were cool, like robots and dinosaurs. I trained to draw superheroic figures from action figures and comic books.

However, I haven't drawn anything in years. I have neuropathy in my right hand and it is slowly claiming my ability to draw and write freehand. But I put some of my work up on Deviant Art many moons ago.
 
Malckuss said:
I used to draw. I grew up drawing airplanes and other things I thought were cool, like robots and dinosaurs. I trained to draw superheroic figures from action figures and comic books.

However, I haven't drawn anything in years. I have neuropathy in my right hand and it is slowly claiming my ability to draw and write freehand. But I put some of my work up on Deviant Art many moons ago.
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Sorry to hear that. Those are good drawings.

I don't know if that would help in your case but in case it's useful to someone here :

It's often advised to go vertical (or semi-vertical) set up if you want to draw but have bad hands/wrist (lots of artists get pretty bad carpal tunnel). While a good ateal can cost a bit, it's possible to just tape paper to a piece of cardboard/wall/whatever, so long as the angle allows to use the shoulder & elbow for the movement, so the hand just holds the tool. It's a bit weird coming from a wrist/finger based drawing technique, but it's probably easier than training the other hand.


You can hammer grip, esp on bigger pieces of paper (larger than standard). The hammer grip works well with big lead pencils (from a mechanical pencil or just held), charcoal & marker pens can also render well - since it's a bit less precise and slower to cover area.

There are also various sorts of ergonomic grip aids for holding pencils easier. They're typically meant for kids to learn to write but can be useful if the problem is holding the pencil.
 
Urdlen's best boy said:
Sorry to hear that. Those are good drawings.

I don't know if that would help in your case but in case it's useful to someone here :

It's often advised to go vertical (or semi-vertical) set up if you want to draw but have bad hands/wrist (lots of artists get pretty bad carpal tunnel). While a good ateal can cost a bit, it's possible to just tape paper to a piece of cardboard/wall/whatever, so long as the angle allows to use the shoulder & elbow for the movement, so the hand just holds the tool. It's a bit weird coming from a wrist/finger based drawing technique, but it's probably easier than training the other hand.


You can hammer grip, esp on bigger pieces of paper (larger than standard). The hammer grip works well with big lead pencils (from a mechanical pencil or just held), charcoal & marker pens can also render well - since it's a bit less precise and slower to cover area.

There are also various sorts of ergonomic grip aids for holding pencils easier. They're typically meant for kids to learn to write but can be useful if the problem is holding the pencil.
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Drawing from the shoulder is something a lot of drawing instructors recommend. I think it's meant to give you a better range of motion resulting in straigher, smoother lines. However I think it also goes hand in hand with larger scale drawing, possibly done with charcoal while standing up and using an easel.
 
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PolarBlues said:
Drawing from the shoulder is something a lot of drawing instructors recommend. I think it's meant to give you a better range of motion resulting in straigher, smoother lines. However I think it also goes hand in hand woth larger scale drawing, possibly done with charcoal while standing up and using an easel.
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Yes, this is all true. It has mechanical advantages so in general it's good to know. The easel is useful because you can adjust the angle, height etc, exactly how you want but really any cardboard and some tape can do the trick so long as you can angle it somehow. You can shoulder draw from a sitting position, but it's true that standing does give greater mobility.

Charcoal, markers, wide lead pencils all work well that way - & paint.
 
PolarBlues said:
Drawing from the shoulder is something a lot of drawing instructors recommend. I think it's meant to give you a better range of motion resulting in straigher, smoother lines. However I think it also goes hand in hand with larger scale drawing, possibly done with charcoal while standing up and using an easel.
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Yes, basically you are adding the elbow hinge joint and shoulder ball joint to your complex wrist and finger joints -- you are compounding your range of complex fluid motions and selecting the appropriate scope for the task at hand. Had a Japanese Living National Treasure #40-something (IIRC, and #7 in Calligraphy National Treasure. FYI they use ordinal numbers to hierarchy everything, so cultural difference, don't read too much into it) teach us in Calligraphy class. Each scope size had its own term, so from finger (tightest and smallest) writing to stiff arm full-body writing (used for gigantic flags and posters when characters have to be human-sized or larger). Sadly we never had a chance to do calligraphy with a mop, but he did make us go through all the other sizes from shoulder-writing and full page character writing down to tiny finger-writing (but not to smaller where you can write on a rice grain, sadly).

It was a memorable class! :grin:

Urdlen's best boy said:
Yes, this is all true. It has mechanical advantages so in general it's good to know. The easel is useful because you can adjust the angle, height etc, exactly how you want but really any cardboard and some tape can do the trick so long as you can angle it somehow. You can shoulder draw from a sitting position, but it's true that standing does give greater mobility.

Charcoal, markers, wide lead pencils all work well that way - & paint.
Click to expand...

Easels, and in relation selecting perspective angle, is so important in planning perspective. I've made the horrible discovery that my art made on a flat table -- which looked fantastic from my sitting position when making it -- end up stretched-out elongated like 1970s movie endings when faced directly like on a wall. It's because my perspective is looking at a paper from a 90-ish degree tilt. So now I write on the back an arrow and "Up" to indicate direction, AND angle tilt, so that posterity knows which way to face my crap and whether it should be plastered on the refrigerator or coffee table. :hehe:

So the sooner you can keep your aspect ratio and perspective tilt correlated to how you want the piece to be observed the less frustration you'll have in creation as well. If it is to be a scroll or book piece to be enjoyed from a lap, ok, sitting up at flat tables work for you. But if you want it to be framed and upright on a desk or larger and displayed on a wall, it really matters to pay attention to that in the creation process too. If you want to make a big wall picture, go ahead and start big with that yard by yard canvas/paper taped up on a wall (with protective materials in between preventing permanent wall damage of course). :music:
 
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