Big B

Hey all. I'm Bryan and this is my introductory post.

Like many others, I'm a Software Developer by trade. I've also recently been told that I'm the I.T. Manager, Webmaster, and part time cleaning lady (its a small company).

I was an OK artist growing up and in high school, but not good enough to consider a lifetime or art. I took all the drafting and industrial design classes I could in high school, but there wasn't much of a freehand component to those. The most recent artwork I've done has been in Brain Age, so I don't have any previous art to show.

Basically I'd like to draw better (and who wouldn't) and the only way to do that is practice.

Heres my first crack at this. For my two objects I choose my watch and a battery recharger.

Reference



Drawing



Go easy on me.

You clearly didn't draw from the picture, but rather from a slightly higher vantage point. Your drawing isn't bad, though in some places you had your knowledge of the nature of the objects interfere (a very common error).

Try this: take this picture and draw from it, but turn it upside down before you start to draw. Just give it a shot and let's see how that turns out.

Well, I redrew the watch and charger, using the old drawing as the reference. Drawing it upside down was pretty easy since I just drew on the opposite side of the sketch book. I think the lines are a lot cleaner in this one, and I didn't add anything that wasn't in the original sketch.



The faint lines in the background of the charger are from one of my wife's sketches. You can also see where I restarted the watch.

Heres my 50s cover sketch. The source is from a Canadian True Crime Cases magazine. It was the tamest one I could find. It looks like the 50s were much more sexualized than what is typically portrayed about the era. Every other cover seemed to play to the women-getting-clothes-ripped-off fetish.

Source



Sketch



I don't think I'd want to revisit this until we go over faces and shading. Without shading its hard to convey a lot of the detail, and without trying to sound too self-deprecating, I suck at faces.

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Original post by Big B Heres my 50s cover sketch. The source is from a Canadian True Crime Cases magazine. It was the tamest one I could find. It looks like the 50s were much more sexualized than what is typically portrayed about the era. Every other cover seemed to play to the women-getting-clothes-ripped-off fetish.

Indeed.

Quote:

...without trying to sound too self-deprecating, I suck at faces.

Everyone does, actually. The human face is pretty challenging to draw with a high degree of realism without using a reference, though the more you learn about natural proportions and anatomical shapes the easier it is. Also, I think you might be quite interested when we talk about childhood drawing and our internal symbol systems.

I'm not even sure if faces are harder than most things to draw, or if it's just our brains that seem better trained at noticing nuances on them, and as such variations that wouldn't be noticeable elsewhere are very visible in faces.

In any case, the end result is the same - everyone sucks at faces :)

There are a few curious things about the way our brains process faces. First, we apparently reduce faces to the absolute minimum amount of information necessary (a good sketch artist or caricaturist can evoke a face so precisely with just a few lines). Second, we fill in missing details, which is why we see faces in clouds and in the moon and in wood grain.

Drawing general-purpose faces isn't too hard. Drawing specific faces to a degree of fidelity and consistency, now that's hard.

Your Doctor's face isn't bad at all. Drawing wrinkly old faces is actually alot easier than drawing nubile young women, I think.

Heres my alternate assignment #2. Its a statue of a tourist in Shanghai, China that I found in a big list of strange statues here (Warning: contains statue nudity)

Source:



Drawing:



I took about an hour to do, and I'm pretty happy with the results.

The last one is looking better. My only advice for you would be this:

It looks like you're using your left brain a bit on your drawings. This has always been my (and it seems, a lot of people's) problem learning to draw. What I mean by this is that it looks like you're drawing things, vs replicating lines and color. For example, it looks like you'll draw a face as a pair of eyes, a nose and a mouth, as opposed to simply looking at the face not as a face, but as lines and color as your eye sees it before the brain analyzes it and tells you what (in human terms) you're looking at.

Its odd that you'd say that since I'm left handed, and supposedly right brained. Although I'm not creative, athletic, and throw with my right hand. So really I think I just picked up a pencil with my left hand first.

The left/right brain thing is an unprofitable distraction, even though my recommended text is Edwards' The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. The truth is that learning to draw - realistically or otherwise - is learning to see. Our brains, our total brains, quickly abstract most of the visual information we are impressed with because otherwise we would be overloaded. The majority of learning to draw well is learning how to tap into that information that is normally discarded. The rest is learning how to recreate it recognizably.

Here's my vase/faces drawing. Better late than never.



I didn't experience any of the confusion over the L/R-mode switch. It might be because I read ahead a bit, but it seemed pretty natural to just copy the other side of the drawing.

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Original post by Samith It looks like you're using your left brain a bit on your drawings. ... What I mean by this is that it looks like you're drawing things, vs replicating lines and color...

I was going to say the exact opposite. My impression is that Big B is trying to copy details without regard to their importance. In the drawing of the statue, the cart and building behind it dominate, though they would be considered negative space in the picture. It is a picture of a statue, so even if you drew just the statue and nothing else, it would be a reasonably accurate depiction.

On the other hand, just copying pictures seems like a good way to train. When kids learn to write, they draw the letters of the alphabet over and over until they can draw them without copying them. In the same way, you might copy pictures until you can draw forms and textures without a reference.

Anyway, that's my opinion and I am not an expert, so take it with a grain of salt.

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Original post by JohnBolton I was going to say the exact opposite. My impression is that Big B is trying to copy details without regard to their importance. In the drawing of the statue, the cart and building behind it dominate, though they would be considered negative space in the picture. It is a picture of a statue, so even if you drew just the statue and nothing else, it would be a reasonably accurate depiction.

The cart and building dominate because they occupy more space in the drawing. Crop the drawing without changing anything else and the relationship is altered:

Behold one of the greatest minds of the last century!



I also did the Picasso drawing. The only problem with it is that I cut the top of his head off. Otherwise I quite like it.

Not a bad pair of drawings. The proportions on the Picasso are slightly off - the shoulders are too narrow, for example, and it's quite possible that in the back of your mind you were very aware of the fact that you were drawing a guy in a chair. I know that I was when I did mine.

Try the photograph I posted to the assignment thread. I'll be posting another drawing assignment today.

I used Gimp to find the edges and started off that. Drawing Einstein was a bit tricky since the only well defined lines were on his forehead, everything else blended in a bit. I then switched to the original photo after finishing with the edged version since it left off your eyebrows (I thought something looked weird). There was some flipping between the two before I was happy with the results.