Thread: So, I want to draw

Good rule of thumb; arms are longer than you think. You could always practice, I suppose.. I think that if you practice you'll develop you're own style.

If you can get your hands on it, by purchase or borrow, look for Betty Edwards' "Drawing On the Right Side Of The Brain".

The hardest thing in learning to draw is getting away from the symbols you have learned to represent the things you see. Getting away from those and drawing what you SEE rather than what you think you see is challenging - and the results are downright stunning. Working though this book will encourage you tremendously.

There's a lot more to it, of course... but if you want to jump-start your drawing education, I can't recommend this highly enough.

http://www.drawright.com/

Originally Posted by pj

If you can get your hands on it, by purchase or borrow, look for Betty Edwards' "Drawing On the Right Side Of The Brain".

The hardest thing in learning to draw is getting away from the symbols you have learned to represent the things you see. Getting away from those and drawing what you SEE rather than what you think you see is challenging - and the results are downright stunning. Working though this book will encourage you tremendously.

There's a lot more to it, of course... but if you want to jump-start your drawing education, I can't recommend this highly enough.

http://www.drawright.com/

Thanks! Seems like a good book, I'll look into it

If you're interested in drawing people, it would be good to learn how Fibonacci sequences apply to the human body, especially when you are drawing hands.

The only thing that I don't like about the book (drawing on the right side of the brain) is that essentially everything it teaches you can be accomplished with one simple drawing exercise. Simply take a picture of a fairly complicated but recognizable object, or a person would work well for this, and turn the picture upside down and try to draw it. This accomplishes exactly what beef jerky was talking about. Since you are seeing this recognizable shape from a completely different perspective, you have no preconditioned beliefs of how it should look and so it is much easier to draw it how it actually looks.

Other than that, the best I can suggest when it comes to drawing people is just to look up some basic anatomy and proportion. The general rule is that a human should be roughly 8 heads high (that is, their head should be 1/8th the height of their whole body). When practicing to draw arms start out with someone hanging their arms by their side and just stand up and hang your arms to see how far down your legs they go (fingers should reach about half way down the thigh)

Most of the humanoid figures I draw are somewhat cartoon-styled, and come from picking and choosing different aspects of cartoons that I like (mostly anime). Other than that, when I draw real people, I will draw from photographs. (Drawing things that are already fully drawn/photographed/etc, and paying attention to the proportions, is a good way to get familiar with the human form.) Simply look up male/female models in Google and draw whatever catches your eye. Work on shading. Look closely at how light sources create shadow, etc.
After becoming familiar with the photographed human form and other ways that artists represent them, it will be easier to develop your own style.

http://www.fineart.sk WARNING NUDITY don't click if you are not and adult.

This website has reference images so you can draw from them. Also there are 4 or 5 Andrew Loomis drawing books that you can click on the thumnails of each page and download them to your computer.

These books are really old, 1940's, but please don't think that the drawing teaching stuff is not good. Loomis still has fans now and his books are highly prized. The drawings are of 1940's ladies and men so that is sort of wierd but the knowledge of proportion, perspective, and such are timeless.

Human Anatomy Made Amazingly Easy by Christopher Hart is another good book. It is more modern and the drawings have a sort of manga sort of real look. I did not use the book because I did not want to draw that way and my drawings would look like that if I stared at the book long enough, you know? But the data on proportion and skeleton and such is cool.

These are some of the pages just for making you want the books :-)

Sorry if this is somehow wrong to post this in your thread. Only wanting to show you the value of these books.









So much good stuff.