erosennin

10/4/2009
Wow, time really flies when you're working at a break neck pace! Time to dispense and condense a little of what I've learned over the past year. First and foremost, do not be precious about your artwork. A piece is not good solely because you made it, and you should be able to handle it if someone points out to you what is wrong with it. You should be able to take constructive criticism without getting depressed or angry. In short, you need to get over yourself before you can get better.

Draw every day, and challenge yourself. If you have trouble drawing something, that is what you should focus on. USE REFERENCE. If you have a hard time drawings hands, but you never look at hands and draw them from observation, you are going to continue drawing messed up hands. This applies to drawing anime and manga characters as well! Good drawing skills transcend style.

Study anatomy, even if all you want to do is draw in one style. Anatomical accuracy will give your characters that extra oomph, and I may just do a few sketches to illustrate that point...

Perhaps most of all, keep a sketchbook with you at all times. Try to get in at least four or so drawings a day. Draw people around you, do gestures, or imaginary figures, it doesn't matter so long as you remember to draw.

Have fun! I'll be around

08/24/2008

I've just enrolled at Digipen and found out about The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. I've always seen it on the shelf and passed it up. Forget about reading the rest of this tutorial and go get this book. There is also a companion workbook that's worth getting. Both are comparatively cheap.

I regret not working on this little project more, because I really want to help people draw, but it's unlikely that I'll have time at any point in the next four years. What's more, the above book explains far better than I ever could the drawing process, how to improve, and most importantly how to see.

While they aren't free (about $17 USD each), they are relatively cheap as compared to other books on drawing, and so long as you read along and do the exercises you will improve.

I'm sad to say that this is it for this tutorial, and I really am sad. I had hoped to do something good here, but I let you guys down. From the bottom of my heart, I'm sorry. I'm not sure if this post will remain stickied, but if it does I may come back from time to time to let you in on things I've learned. As far as a real, comprehensive tutorial on drawing goes, however, this thread is unfortunately done.

I'd still like to hear from you guys if you have any questions, though I'm not sure how much time I'll have to help. You can hit me up with a PM here, or over one my DA page cynicalcoffee on deviantART

08/24/2008



In lieu of actually having time to rework this entire tutorial, I'd like to point you to a couple cool tutorials by Niklas Jansson. These will NOT necessarily teach you how to draw, but may introduce you to some cool concepts and different ways to work.

PSG Art tutorial

http://www.itchstudios.com/psg/tuts/process.jpg

You can find out more about the artist here. PSG 7


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?

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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

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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

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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.