The Drawing as a Hobby Thread

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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.
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.
 
What is a clutch pencil?
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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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:

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.

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?

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.
 
But some of the best advice I gleaned has been a youtuber Caesar Cordova where he points out the value of Reference Images,

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.
 
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.
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.
 
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:

View attachment 28858

....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.
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:.
 
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