erosennin

There is a common and understandable tendency for we who want to learn how to draw to go out and buy a book on how to draw in the manga style. I used to do this myself, and there are a great many of these books that are very good, as a matter of fact. There is an inherent problem with this practice, however. The ‘masters’ did not learn how to draw from these books. When we first delve seriously into drawing, we should try to learn as our favorite artists learned, and not blindly try to emulate their art. That is not to say the books are useless, far from it. Rather, look at the books as supplements, and not as a magic formulas to drawing.

It is important to remember that we are all essentially self taught. No matter what we read, no matter what instruction we take in, none of it will do us any good unless we pick up a pencil, charcoal, or brush and do.

Just keep in mind, art is a journey, which takes us to many different methods and mediums, and there are always multiple roads to the same place.


In actuality, there is no versus between observation and imagination. Learning to draw from observation is a tool to help you cement shapes, proportions, and perspective into your mind. It is a first step to drawing what we imagine to an accurate degree. Drawing from observation is hard and time consuming to learn. Once you have it down, though, it knocks the doors wide open to anything else you want to do. Manga characters? No problem. Painting? Doesn’t help you with color, but it will help you with everything else. One of the best perks of learning to draw from observation is being able to effectively use references when you get stuck.

All that being said, I have no idea when I will actually get around to updating this tutorial with more comprehensive advice and pictures. I’ve had a lot on my plate for a long time now, but rest assured it’s been on my mind the entire time. I’ll get to it when I can, so please bear with me. 2/26/2008


Blowing up a drawing with a grid.

You will need: a pencil, a ruler that is at least 12" (preferably 24"), an eraser, and a (preferably) 18"x24" sheet of paper. Along with that huuuuge piece of paper, it's going to help you a lot to have a drawing board (just a big hard board to clip your paper to) so that the entire sheet is on a hard surface.

In this exercise, you will translate a 8.5"x11" drawing to a giant, poster size 18"x24" piece of paper. If you're wondering, you can go down to a craft store and buy a pad of paper called 'newsprint' for six or seven bucks. The paper's not great, but it's cheap.

Now you want to find a fairly linear drawing. Japanese woodblock prints typically work fairly well. Simply do a google image search for Hiroshige and you will come up with a ton. When finding an image, you want to make sure it is fairly good quality, since you will be blowing it up to fit an 8.5"x11" piece of paper for printing. Blurry, indistinct lines in your original are going to make it hard for you to translate. Stay away from modern images, and over complex or complicated images, or images that rely on shading to convey shape. Why make it too hard on yourself the first time, huh? (note that if you get good at this you could make your own posters of any drawing you want! *gasp*)

Save the drawing you find to your computer and resize it if necessary so that it will nearly fit a normal size piece of paper without distortion. It's not crucial that it fits the entire page, but it should take up most of the page. Once you are satisfied, print the image.

Now take your ruler, and make a grid of 1" squares across the entire paper the drawing is printed on. Be very, very precise and careful. A little mistake on the grid will turn into a big problem later. To make the grid, make 1" marks on each edge of the paper, and use your ruler to make straight lines across and down.

Now take your 18"x24" paper and put a grid of 2" squares on it using the same process with a 12" ruler this is going to be hard. I'd use a yardstick if you have one. If you don't have a yard stick, just be very, very careful. Once you are done you're going to notice that you've got an extra line of squares at the bottom of your 18"x24" paper. You can either ignore it, or cut the bottom off .

Now you can start drawing. Very, very carefully copy the lines of each square of the drawing on the small copy onto its corresponding square on the big sheet of paper. It helps to number and letter the squares on both so you don't lose track of which square you're working on. It also helps to jump around the page.

Do one square on the bottom, then jump up and do one square on top. The reason you do it that way is because errors compound themselves. This means that if you make a mistake in one square and then continue onto the next square based on it, you will mess up both sections and not catch it. This way, mistakes make themselves more obvious when things do not match up as they should.

This exercise is long and tedious, and will probably take you two hours or more. At the end of it, though, you will have a huuuuuge drawing that is in perfect proportion to the original. Have fun! I'll see if I can post some examples in the next day or two .

Eichiro

wow thats a whole lot of stuff just to start drawing

HolderOfTheDarkChalice

how long did it take to get the details
you want from it? i have seen several that
were very amazing it was almost alive with every
little detail right down to the crevasse on the ear
because i have had problems with detailing for ever
is there a method to make the details as real as you want?

__________________

thanks mellow your sig is top notch http://www.animeonline.net/links/

erosennin

When I did this it took me a little over four hours to finish to my satisfaction. You don't have to put every little detail in. As a matter of fact, for this exercise, you probably want to simply leave out any type of shading and just focus on the lines.

And it is a lot to start drawing, but a little known fact about any type of art is that doing it well is going to take a lot of hard work. So, with that in mind, let me tell you a little about what this exercise is supposed to do for you. So I've blown up a drawing... am I getting closer to drawing what I want? Getting closer .

The Perceptual Grid. It's hard, but you can learn to see the world kind of like your original, gridded off drawing. What you see is your original, and what you're drawing is the one you're blowing up. Nifty, huh? Now, you're never going to get to the point where you literally will yourself to see lines when you're looking at something, but this exercise helps you become spatially aware; getting things in the right place and the right size on your paper. More on this a bit later

HolderOfTheDarkChalice

ah ok i can do that no problem this is going to be intresting
to see what i can draw suing your tips and ideas here

__________________

thanks mellow your sig is top notch http://www.animeonline.net/links/

erosennin

Hehe, depends on what you're going for. If you're doing this exercise, and the drawing you're translating is a simple linear drawing, then it's just down to being precise and getting all the lines down where they're supposed to be. This exercise becomes significantly harder if you try to translate a drawing that has realism in mind, because there's more shading and fewer lines (if any lines O.o).

I've got a couple more exercises that I've done in art 120 that I want to go over first with you guys, but there is some stuff on shading that I intend to get to. I'm not quite sure how I'm going to explain it, since it deals with still lives, but I've got a while to think about it .

HolderOfTheDarkChalice

cool i can work on this then while i wait for your next tips

__________________

thanks mellow your sig is top notch http://www.animeonline.net/links/

ZeRoGravity

...Or you can go to a photocopying center blow it up to the size you want then bold in the lines (6B), flip the paper over, tape the edges with non stick tape, press down (shade) using a pencil where ever you can see the lines. After that you will see a ghostly image of your transfered line art. 15 mins or less. If you don't want it to look "backwards" do the step vice versa.

Shading the your drawings comes after. I suggest you cover your drawing with transparent paper and test out the shading before actually doing it on your art. Helps a lot.

erosennin

Yup! You could certainly do this, and it would be very time efficient to get a cool copy down fast. Very much the way you want to go if you just want to make a copy. In fact, I'd go a step further and use a light board. The point of the exercise is to get you in the habit of putting things in proportion yourself, though. So, for this one, I wouldn't recommend it. It is definitely a good thing to keep in mind, though.

Second exercise, Proportion and Perspective

Gotta be up front about this one. This is an exercise our prof gave us in the second week to weed people out of the class. It's long, and it's tough, but it really changed the way I look at things. But before I get to that here's a couple terms and techniques for ya.

Mondrian Tool A mondrian tool can be just about any straight object. You ever see a portrait or picture of an artist holding their pencil or paint brush straight out at arm's length, one eye closed? They're using it as a mondrian tool to measure objects in front of them. For us, our mondrian tool is going to be our ruler so we can precisely measure the objects we want to draw. Hold your ruler vertically or horizontally in front of you, at arm's length, and close one eye. Slide your thumb or your index finger up and down the ruler to mark the end of the object or space. Don't worry about the numbers on the ruler, just the mark you're at. Always close the same eye when measuring, and don't try to measure diagonals, only verticals and horizontals. There is one other important aspect to using a mondrian tool, and that is a-

Vanishing Point A vanishing point is exactly that. It is a point on your horizon line that everything appears to be going toward or into. Imagine you are standing on a railroad track. At a certain point, the tracks seem to meet. That is your vanishing point. The vanishing point also serves as the point from which you will measure every distance in this exercise, both vertical and horizontal. More details on that in a little bit.

Horizon Line Your eye level. Your vanishing point will be somewhere on your horizon line. Things below the horizon line appear to travel up toward your horizon line and vanishing point, while things above it seem to travel down.

Techniques for drawing from observation: Don't draw with your wrist! Keep your hand relaxed, you don't have to have a death grip on your pencil. Try and draw from your shoulder and by swiveling your hips, your lines will magically become more straight. If at all possible, you want to secure an easel for this project.

When you are drawing from observation, ideally you want to stand as if you are going to shake hands with your paper, your elbow ever so slightly bent, and your hand falling roughly in the middle of the page. Whether you are standing or sitting, you don't want to set up in such a way that you tend to slouch or have to twist around to see what you're drawing, since this will make your back and neck hurt after less than an hour.

There is an easy way to do this project that takes much less time, but at the moment we're not so interested in easy as we are in getting the big picture down, so we're going to do this the hard way first. Once you've got this down, though, you'll be able to draw man made environments no problem, real or no.

What you will need A pencil, an eraser, a ruler that is at least 12" (preferably 24"), a piece of masking tape, a drawing board, a sheet of paper that is 18"x24", and a long hallway, like at a school. A hallway at home will work too, but it'll probably be less interesting. As a matter of interest, spiral staircases are hard to draw in this style. This exercise does not lend itself well to curves.

Once you've found your hallway, mark your eye level with your masking tape at the end opposite from where you will be drawing, somewhere near the middle. If you will be sitting down for this exercise, drag your seat up, sit down, and mark your eye level. Now set up a fair deal away, but make sure you can still see your piece of masking tape. Your masking tape now marks exactly where your vanishing point for the drawing is in the real world. Exciting!

Now take your ruler, and make a straight line horizontally across the middle of the page. Doesn't have to be exact, just close to the middle. If you are sitting down, you may want to make the line a wee bit lower.

Now look at what side of the hall you are standing or sitting on. If you are standing to the left, use your ruler to draw a straight vertical line slightly to the left, if your in the middle, down the middle, and if you're on the right, on the right side of the page. Draw faintly, but dark enough that you can easily see your marks.

The point at which your horizontal and vertical lines meet on the page is your vanishing point for your drawing. Now we need to start measuring. I mentioned earlier that you will be measuring everything from your vanishing point. Here's how: For measuring things above or to the left of your vanishing point, keep your thumb on the vanishing point and slide the ruler through your hand until the top of the ruler is at the end of the distance you want to measure. If it is below or to the right of the vanishing point, keep the top of the ruler aligned with the vanishing point, and use your thumb to measure the distance. That's for righties. If you're left handed, switch the right and left directions around. Top and bottom stay the same.

Check and recheck to make sure your measurement is correct. Shifts in posture, even a single step from where you had been standing, and an unsteady hand can all screw up your measurements. Once you are sure, make a mark on your page according to your vanishing point that you've drawn. Once you have a couple marks down, you can connect the dots with your ruler.

Do not attempt to measure diagonal lines with your ruler. It just doesn't work that well. Instead, for diagonal lines, simply use your ruler to draw the diagonal line from two known points that you've already put down. So long as the two known points are correct, your diagonal line will also be correct.

Here's one final tip. Like a railroad track converging on the vanishing point, most diagonal lines in the drawing are not, in reality, diagonal at all. Like in the case of the edges of walls, the ceiling, and floor, they are parallel and at ninety degree angles to their neighbors. Nevertheless, like railroad tracks, they will all go toward the vanishing point. If you are drawing a diagonal line, check to see that if you continued the line, it would go directly into the vanishing point. If it doesn't, you may have made a mistake.

I realize that many parts of this may be rather confusing. If you need anything clarified, don't be afraid to ask .

I've added a picture of a real quick hallway I drew in the easier method here

KuwiRules145

OH WOW!!!!! Thats a lot of things just to start drawing for a beginner!!!!! But I will try it! Thanks for the advice I guess! It's just very helpful!!! So thank you!

__________________
♡♥♡♥A Flower Blooms by being loved and care for.......If I was that flower who would do that for me?♥♡♥♡

♡♥Anime Life♥♡

Sazuka

I just draw from my imagination and make up my own style. In my opinion, that's the way to do it.

__________________