Thanqol Learns To Draw!

[Thanqol]

Day Fifteen: Goodbye, Art

Just a quick and simple one today because I'm way behind on other stuff. This was both easy and fun to draw, particularly the eyebrows. I'll go back to realism tomorrow.

The experiment here was with different type of hats and expressions. I think I learned something about curvature on at least one.

Model:

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Finished Sketch:

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Time Taken: 1 hour
Materials: 2B Pencil, 0.6 and 0.8 pen
Music: Hello, Mary Lou

[Thanqol]

Day Sixteen: Follow Through

Did some intense staring at my own left hand. I tried a bunch of sketches of it marking all the joints and bends in a bunch of different positions and angles. I did these stickman style, which works for larger hand drawings but I'm working on a shorthand method for drawing smaller hands. No big breakthroughs tonight, just a lot of hands that are gradually getting less weird.

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Time Taken: 2 hours
Materials: 2B Pencil
Music: Honey And The Moon

[SiuiS]

Hands are the one thing where style is irrelevant. You need to grok the anatomy to really draw a hand. A quick net search reveals nothing of use under "drawing hands" so try looking up hand anatomy?

Also, consider that drawing a hand requires perspective, proportions, forshortening, anatomical positioning, AND structural knowledge to get it right. Study hands constantly, look up their bones. Really look.

That meat at the base of your thumb, why is it shaped that way? Why are the bones in your palm staggered instead of straight? Do you have hitch-hiker's thumb? Where do the creases in the palm sit (they are mostly identical across every human hand - chimpanzees have different hand creases, and thus probably different structure)?

Perhaps I'm over thinking it though. It's rather late/early.

[Flickerdart]

Hands don't really have set proportions. An easy way to approximate them, though, is drawing a "house" with a square body and asymmetrical "roof" that peaks 1/3 of the way in. Then put fingers along that "roof": middle finger at the apex, index and ring fingers at the same level around it and the pinkie at the end. The fingerbones are more or less the same size from there on, and so will have the same "roof" relationship. Thumbs follow the "roof" too - the joint is level with the pinkie knuckle and the tip is level with the first joint of the pinkie.

If you need to practice anatomy, try looking at your page as little as possible so that you draw what's there as opposed to what you remember was there.

[SiuiS]

Hands don't really have set proportions. An easy way to approximate them, though, is drawing a "house" with a square body and asymmetrical "roof" that peaks 1/3 of the way in. Then put fingers along that "roof": middle finger at the apex, index and ring fingers at the same level around it and the pinkie at the end. The fingerbones are more or less the same size from there on, and so will have the same "roof" relationship. Thumbs follow the "roof" too - the joint is level with the pinkie knuckle and the tip is level with the first joint of the pinkie.

a profession-related quibble; hands do have proportions, but they are consistent to the individual, not species. Like the Cun from shiatsu

[Thanqol]

Thanks for the advice, guys, that's super helpful

Day Seventeen: Of Everything That Stands, The End

Oh wow, this one was a challenge.

I purchased a book on anatomy and some coloured pencils today. I was going to do an experiment with human proportions and something for the daily challenge. The challenge turned out to be a lot harder than I thought - So many limbs! So much rope! Went through half a dozen failed sketches! I eventually finally figured the damn thing out and produced something that makes me smile. And now I'm gonna rest my arm and try again for realistic tomorrow.

Model: None! I did this blind!

Finished Sketch

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Time Taken: 3 Hours @_@
Materials: 2B Pencil, H Pencil (for the silver colour), Watercolour Pencils, 0.4 and .8 artliner pen.
Music: The End

[Ninjaman]

You could try to draw the cage more dimensional. That way you could practise some 3d.

[Thanqol]

You could try to draw the cage more dimensional. That way you could practise some 3d.

Yeah, that' came to mind. I haven't practiced enough objects! I'm gonna start practising more objects!

[Ninjaman]

Yeah, that' came to mind. I haven't practiced enough objects! I'm gonna start practising more objects!

Try doing that next?

[Thanqol]

Try doing that next?

Doing that next!

Day Eighteen: Scroungin'

Forgot to bring my sketchbook with me to the game where I was going to practise. Urghh. Managed to scrounge a crummy pencil and some printer paper and do some sketching regardless. Did a whole bunch of inanimate objects, as promised, but it's remarkable how much worse it was when using bad materials. Still learning about curvature, shading and perspective and feel like tonight wasn't wasted artistically.

Sorry about the picture quality, but it's late, I'm too tired to go over the lines, and the game ended on a really downbeat note (my character is almost certainly going to be murdered horribly sometime next session, and it seems like my choice is 'murdered by party members' or 'murdered by NPCs'.)

Such is life.

Sketch: (About 4 double sided pages like this)

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Time taken: 2 1/2 hours of sketching done
Materials: Scavenged pencil and printer paper
Music: What It Is

[Thanqol]

Day Nineteen: Pony Night At The Inventory

I should totally have spent the day doing realistic human pictures.

But this was so much more fun.

I'll do more real people tomorrow, I promise.

Finished Sketch:

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Time taken: 1 1/2 Hours
Materials: Watercolours, 2B 6B Pencils, 0.4 0.8 pen
Music: Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me

[Thanqol]

Day Twenty: Totally Addicted

This is fun!

I'm not not-terrible yet, goodness no, I'm miles off. But I'm getting to really enjoy drawing! Tonight was productive and informative.

Finished Sketch:

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Time taken: 2+ Hours
Materials: 2B Pencil
Music: Totally Addicted To Bass

[Kaytara]

Nice, I'm seeing some progress there, personally, especially the faces. The picture of the pony in the cage, though with logical errors (I'm talking about the back bars that seem to vanish into nothing), feels a lot more... aesthetic, I guess. Balanced. By all means, keep doing "blind" work now and then. :)

This is probably going to sound like it comes out of nowhere, but I've found that a really good way to get a grip on drawing faces and their three-dimensionality is sculpting. Grab a bar of soap (the solid, half-transparent kind), a smallish knife, and keep chiselling away at it until it looks like a three-dimensional head.

Like I said, it can be very helpful for figuring out the three-dimensional shape of faces, or anything else, really.

[Thanqol]

Nice, I'm seeing some progress there, personally, especially the faces. The picture of the pony in the cage, though with logical errors (I'm talking about the back bars that seem to vanish into nothing), feels a lot more... aesthetic, I guess. Balanced. By all means, keep doing "blind" work now and then. :)

This is probably going to sound like it comes out of nowhere, but I've found that a really good way to get a grip on drawing faces and their three-dimensionality is sculpting. Grab a bar of soap (the solid, half-transparent kind), a smallish knife, and keep chiselling away at it until it looks like a three-dimensional head.

Like I said, it can be very helpful for figuring out the three-dimensional shape of faces, or anything else, really.

Huh. That's both weird and very cool. Are potatoes acceptable substitutes? I don't think we have SOAP in Australia. (Or at least, my house switched to liquid forms).

[billtodamax]

I was going to say we have solid soap in Canberra, but I realised the soap we have is from France.

You can probably find some solid soap though.

[Thanqol]

Day 21: Following Orders

Well, if you say so.

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(Did some legit sketching too, just nothing quite as comical)

Time taken: 20 mins
Materials: knife, potato
Music: Let The Bodies Hit The Floor

[SiuiS]

Potato is much more giving. Harder to carve. More likely to lose drawing thumb- undo all progress.

Make expenses for drawing, buy soap special for this purpose. Why do I type poor russian accent? Who knows.

[Trazoi]

Huh. That's both weird and very cool. Are potatoes acceptable substitutes? I don't think we have SOAP in Australia. (Or at least, my house switched to liquid forms).

Geez, I shudder to think of the state of hygiene in Canberra if they've stopped selling soap.

I've never tried soap sculpting. I've played with home-made Play-doh semi-regularly, but the process isn't the same (it's not subtractive in the scene that sculpting is). I'll put it on my mental list of things to consider.

[KingLemmiwinks]

Considering that soap is really easy to make (no, really, it was one of the many things that pioneer households would manufacture) I can't imagine that it'd be that hard to find someone selling bulk soap bars somewhere, even in Australia. Look at any "big box" store or anywhere that sells goods in bulk.

I did a quick perusal and by me it's like 7 bucks for 20 bars of soap, and it's even name-brand instead of the terrible stuff you can probably find.

Also, though I'm not an artist by any stretch of the imagination, I would second the soap idea to a great degree. It's both a great way to rough out models in three dimensions as well as figuring out the properties of a material. We use soap as "trainers" for when young kids are just learning knifework in Scouts.

Just remember that soap cannot be rushed very easily. Thin slices work wonders; if you ever feel yourself having to put decent pressure upwards on the edge of the blade, you're pulling too much on the material and are bound to make it splinter unhappily one of the times.

Oh, and remember the basics of knife safety: danger circle, carving away from yourself, and respect for the knife. It's hard to post on GitP without thumbs or other ascetically-pleasing digits!

[Thanqol]

The soap thing was a joke (though given the state of some of my friends, it might not be much of one)

Day 22: Masking Tape

Today was a challenge in expressions. It was good fun, and I reckon I'm getting a real feel for designing drawings without models. Still trying things that work and things that don't, mixing up real people drawing and real objects with stylised stuff. I like doing stylised pictures so much that attempting to shut down and focus on real-life drawing exclusively seems foolish, but I am trying to keep my practicals in both high.

Finished Sketch:

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Time Taken: 1 1/2 hours
Materials: 2B, 6B pencil, 0.8 and 0.4 Artliner Pen, Watercolour pencils.
Music: Crowd Chant

[Recaiden]

Needs more eyebrows. Other than that, I quite like them.

[Thanqol]

Needs more eyebrows. Other than that, I quite like them.

Alas, the challenge was expressions without eyebrows. And I see I forgot the one where he draws some eyebrows on with magic marker.

[Thanqol]

Day 23: By The Book

Busted out my new guidebook proper and tried drawing with these newfangled things like proportions and suchwith. Tough as hell, but I finally figured out how to draw a set of lips that didn't look like two sausages fighting for superiority. Day is justified!

Finished Sketch:

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Time Taken: 1 1/2 hours
Materials: 2B pencil
Music: The Watchmaker's Apprentice

[Fri]

Wanna advice from a real art major? I dunno if you got this advice yet, but here's an advice that we got at the first year. Dunno, this might work for everyone or not.

Anyway, my prof told me that the problem with starting artist is, the coordination between their hand and their eyes and their mind is whacked. I mean, you know what you see right? But your mind and your hand isn't coordinated and turning it into lines in your mind, and the turning of the lines in your mind into movement in your hand isn't coordinated.

So here's how you should train.

One of the training is, train yourself drawing straight lines. We spent pages in ours sketchbooks just drawing straight lines, nothing else. That's less important than the next one though.

Buy a drawing pen, and start drawing without looking at your hand and the paper (much) and without erasing it. Put your eyes in the object, not the paper. If you draw the line wrong, simply draw another line on top of it. Try to not to draw in short jerky lines, it's the worst thing you can do to your drawing. It's not only for this practice actually, this is important tip. Try to draw in longer lines when you're sketching. And then start to draw everything. Animals, your computer, tables, everything.

Draw them straightly. Don't, for example, draw a simple box first when you're drawing your computer. Draw them straight from what you see.

Of course, at first it'll look bad. But you'll see progress sooner or later. We're supposed to draw like, at least fifty items per week, but well, you might have better things to do, so draw at your convenience

edit: to show what I meant, here's some example of some plane drawing I drew in my leisure time.

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Notice how I draw lines over other lines rather than erasing them and how I draw long lines rather than short jerky ones.

[Thanqol]

Wanna advice from a real art major? I dunno if you got this advice yet, but here's an advice that we got at the first year. Dunno, this might work for everyone or not.

Thanks a lot for the advice, I'll work on that.

[Fri]

Good luck! I love when people actually tries to learn to draw rather than whines that they can't draw or how they wishes they started drawing sooner. I'm not the best artist around, so don't take everything I said without grains of salts

Oh yeah, some other tips I remember was, bigger sketchbook/paper helps, and try to not just moving your wrist when drawing, try to move your entire arm.

[Thanqol]

Good luck! I love when people actually tries to learn to draw rather than whines that they can't draw or how they wishes they started drawing sooner. I'm not the best artist around, so don't take everything I said without grains of salts

That's a malady that covers every discipline, skill or practice everywhere My philosophy is just to do stuff because even if the stuff I do is terrible, at the end of the day I'll have more stuff than if I didn't do stuff.

It makes me sound like a simpleton, but I'm a productive simpleton.

Oh yeah, some other tips I remember was, bigger sketchbook/paper helps, and try to not just moving your wrist when drawing, try to move your entire arm.

*Nod* That's been pointed out to me. I try to do it, but find myself occasionally slipping when I'm not thinking about it. Working on it!

[Kaytara]

Draw them straightly. Don't, for example, draw a simple box first when you're drawing your computer. Draw them straight from what you see.

The rest sounds pretty sound (if sometimes boring on the level of level-grinding in an MMORPG), but I really have to wonder at that. Drawing straight from what you see, without any preliminary guidelines, sounds like the recipe to not having stuff line up properly in the end. Drawing some sort of outline or general sketch of the shape of the thing sounds like it can only do good - you train your eye/hands in replicating the basic shape and then you have a frame of reference when you move on to further levels of detail. It's like you progressively break down the object into smaller segments as you work along, based on where these segments are in relation to each other and in relation to the whole. Sort of comparable to those grids you make for copying drawings, only without the actual grids.

Good luck! I love when people actually tries to learn to draw rather than whines that they can't draw or how they wishes they started drawing sooner.
arm.

Seconded like hell on this, though. :D A small pet peeve of mine (and I suppose a fairly wretched one, I mean, who the hell gets annoyed at compliments?) is when I get (or see others get) comments along the lines of "Wow, I wish I was as talented/blessed as you are!". Like "It's just luck or talent you were born with, and I wasn't, so there's nothing to be done". When you KNOW that your current level of skill is the product of literally years upon years of practice, practice and practice, it sounds almost... dismissive. Like they're dismissing everything you went through in order to make themselves feel better about not having chosen to do the same thing, for whatever reason. I don't think I've ever actually heard of someone who, at what I suppose is considered "past the prime" of trying to learn new skills, decided to just go out and learn to draw.

In short: Thanqol rocks.

[Saeyan]

Blind contour drawing (what Fri described) is fun for laughs, though frankly I've never seen the point of it other than to make you actually see what's in front of you instead of some mental picture of the object. Which you can probably achieve by studying the object carefully with your eyes alone.

Still...fun times

May I also suggest doing semi-blind contour drawing, which is looking down at set intervals (not too often of course) to make sure your pen nib is where it's supposed to be. It's closer to what normally occurs during a drawing, and I think it trains you to gauge proportions better than blind drawing.

left: semi-blind, right: blind. the semi-blind still has big proportion issues, but each unit e.g. jacket, jeans is in proportion with itself. the blind...well...

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P.S. re: Kaytara's opinion on Fri's comment, I prefer Fri's approach.

[Domochevsky]

...
P.S. re: Kaytara's opinion on Fri's comment, I prefer Fri's approach.

Let it be known that i support Kaytara on this issue.

(Breaking things up into basic shapes and then filing them down is a more productive approach in the long run, as it helps visualising things in your head. After you got the experience and eye for shapes you can leave the basic breakdown away, but it always helps if in doubt.)

That being said, the other stuff sounds solid.