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The thing I have discovered about learning to draw is this....everything you ever needed to know about drawing you already knew and were already doing when you were a little kid. For a lot of us, when we can't instinctively translate what we were doing right (and we were) to the next step of representation we absorb the message that we 'can't draw' or 'have no talent' and should give up our scribbles and stick figures. Return to childhood and embrace your stick figures. You had the most important steps of learning to draw mastered when you were four years old. No, really, you did. What you do with it is what makes art, not the how. I have no clue if I have that talent yet, the what not the how. I suppose I'll find out. But the how will never stop me from trying again, 'cause every child you know is already halfway there and so are you. Really. REALLY. Lemme break this down
1. You learn to draw by drawing. No one has to tell little kids to pick up a crayon or a pencil and just draw. They do it constantly, scribbling here, there, and on your walls and favorite book. A good portion of the battle is won in learning what your pencil does and how it feels when it does it. You can't do that if you don't pick up a pencil and, well, draw. What kind of line does it make if I hold it like this? How does it feel in the shoulder when the line curves? What does it look like if I press hard or light? Every single thing you draw, no matter how 'badly' it turns out teaches you something new about what your pencil does and teaches your muscles new memories. The other day I discovered I could make passable stubble by lightly bouncing the tip of the pencil on the paper. I never would have figured that out if I wasn't playing around and bouncing the pencil in the first place (and I was mostly doing it because I was half paying attention to the tv and tapping the pencil as a nervous tick and then went...hey...that kinda looks like...what if I...). How do you draw? You draw. When you stop thinking about the finished product and just scribble, you learn.
2. The most simple representations are the best way to start pretty much any drawing. Little kids represent things using stick figures and basic shapes (circles, squares, triangles). They are doing it right. When trying to determine the relative proportion, relationship, distance, and angles in the things you are trying to draw, the specific details will *confuse your brain*. This is because your brain likes to emphasize or minimize things in relation to the symbolic value it assigns them. You really like the way that curve looks? It must be bigger than the line next to it. The eyes are the window to the soul? They must proportionally dominate the face. Your brain is lying to you. Work out the size and relationship of things to each other with detailess shapes first, and it becomes a million times easier (and you CAN use a ruler or other measuring device to do this if your symbolic brain refuses to cooperate, ever seen an artist hold up a pencil and mark off a distance with their thumb, or turn it at an angle? guess what they are doing). Your brain will still try to make that circle bigger than that square even when it's not, but you'll catch it faster and easier without detail distracting you and the more practice you get the easier it will become to get the sizes, shapes, and angles right (see step 1). A stick figure is actually one of the best ways to work out the relative size and relationship of the limbs on the human body. No really. The next time you catch yourself saying "I can only draw stick figures" think about that. Your stick figures are actually fucking awesome.
3. Connect the dots! Remember doing those in your activity books? Good. Now that you have basic shapes in the right size representing your thing, are you having trouble getting a line to go where you want it to go or curve where you want it to curve to create the actual contour of the thing around them? Place a small, light dot on either end of where the angle/curve/line begins and ends and connect them (and you can do this now because your basic shapes are the right size and in the right place so you have appropriate landmarks now for the length and placement of your lines/curves/angles). Now put a dot where the next angle/curve/line connects to that and do it again. Keep going. Holy shit, you just drew a passable outline that you can now fiddle with and refine and add details to with more control than you ever dreamed of (again, see step 1 for how you figure out the fiddling), how did that happen! It happened because you were doing that shit in pre-school. The artist in you can now choose the level of detail (what's a detail? MOAR SHAPES) to add or, if it wishes, to stylize your line drawing, based on the symbolic emphasis your brain wanted to assign earlier because you now know where everything should go, so making it bigger or smaller or further apart or closer or using darker lines on this and lighter ones on that, starts from the actual relationship that exists.
4. You have a line drawing now. You know what else is a line drawing? Coloring books. You give form and texture to your thing that you are drawing by shading. Shading is filling in your coloring book. With degrees of value (dark and light) when using a pencil. Shadows and light also make basic shapes you can identify by really looking at your thing, similar to step 2. Go back to that using your line drawing as reference points (the shadow next to the nose on this face is a triangle that sits about this far from the edge, and next to it is a circular area that is lighter than it, and that rectangularish shape next to it has no shading at all and is a highlight). I haven't started working with actual color yet, so I can't tell you how this will apply to that, but I am less scared of the day I pick up colored pencils or throw a line drawing into photoshop for coloring than I was when I started, I'll tell you that.
That's it. You literally have all the skills you need to draw anything you want and you have since you were a child. The technical bits can all be related to one of those steps. Perspective is all about learning how to identify what size and angle one thing is in relationship to another (and how those sizes and angles change as a thing moves in 3-D space). Contour/detail is all about finding more shapes and their relationships to each other(even the teeniest tiniest of details can be broken down into, 'hey, that makes a triangle'). Texture/form is all about finding how light or dark your shadows and highlights are and what shapes they should make when you fill in your coloring book. As soon as I understood this, suddenly all those art tutorials and books started making sense.
This is what they are telling you to do when they have you draw an oval and a kidney shape to make a duck, or to relate things to a horizon/vanishing point, or break down the proportions of the face into thirds, or have you draw a cube turning on it's side and so on. Yeah, it can get kind of complicated and fiddly as you work out how all the bits fit together in a specific thing you are trying to draw, but the basic principles aren't. When it gets confusing you keep breaking it back down to simple (am I finding a basic shape, a size, an angle? am I connecting the dots? am I coloring? did I forget to do one of those things?) And then you practice. You draw. Step number 1. You do it a lot. You make a lot of mistakes, because the muscles in your arm/wrist/hand/fingers haven't caught up to your brain yet. That's okay. You're teaching them how. You get the shapes wrong, but you correct it as you go, and the next time it you need to correct it less. Go ahead and use a compass or a template or a ruler if your circle/square/triangle is lopsided and that's frustrating to you. You'll still be teaching your muscles how to move to make the shape and you'll be shocked when you're just messing around in your sketchbook later and find yourself making those shapes passably well without it because your wrist remembers how to bend.
You. Can. Draw. Don't let anyone ever tell you otherwise. Do you have the actual desire and passion that will give you the motivation and persistence to keep at it in the face of that stupid curve that keeps coming out wrong 100 times before you figure out how to hold the pencil right (and you *will*) is more the question. I am 40 freaking years old, and have never been 'able' to draw a thing in my life. Except I totally can.
1. You learn to draw by drawing. No one has to tell little kids to pick up a crayon or a pencil and just draw. They do it constantly, scribbling here, there, and on your walls and favorite book. A good portion of the battle is won in learning what your pencil does and how it feels when it does it. You can't do that if you don't pick up a pencil and, well, draw. What kind of line does it make if I hold it like this? How does it feel in the shoulder when the line curves? What does it look like if I press hard or light? Every single thing you draw, no matter how 'badly' it turns out teaches you something new about what your pencil does and teaches your muscles new memories. The other day I discovered I could make passable stubble by lightly bouncing the tip of the pencil on the paper. I never would have figured that out if I wasn't playing around and bouncing the pencil in the first place (and I was mostly doing it because I was half paying attention to the tv and tapping the pencil as a nervous tick and then went...hey...that kinda looks like...what if I...). How do you draw? You draw. When you stop thinking about the finished product and just scribble, you learn.
2. The most simple representations are the best way to start pretty much any drawing. Little kids represent things using stick figures and basic shapes (circles, squares, triangles). They are doing it right. When trying to determine the relative proportion, relationship, distance, and angles in the things you are trying to draw, the specific details will *confuse your brain*. This is because your brain likes to emphasize or minimize things in relation to the symbolic value it assigns them. You really like the way that curve looks? It must be bigger than the line next to it. The eyes are the window to the soul? They must proportionally dominate the face. Your brain is lying to you. Work out the size and relationship of things to each other with detailess shapes first, and it becomes a million times easier (and you CAN use a ruler or other measuring device to do this if your symbolic brain refuses to cooperate, ever seen an artist hold up a pencil and mark off a distance with their thumb, or turn it at an angle? guess what they are doing). Your brain will still try to make that circle bigger than that square even when it's not, but you'll catch it faster and easier without detail distracting you and the more practice you get the easier it will become to get the sizes, shapes, and angles right (see step 1). A stick figure is actually one of the best ways to work out the relative size and relationship of the limbs on the human body. No really. The next time you catch yourself saying "I can only draw stick figures" think about that. Your stick figures are actually fucking awesome.
3. Connect the dots! Remember doing those in your activity books? Good. Now that you have basic shapes in the right size representing your thing, are you having trouble getting a line to go where you want it to go or curve where you want it to curve to create the actual contour of the thing around them? Place a small, light dot on either end of where the angle/curve/line begins and ends and connect them (and you can do this now because your basic shapes are the right size and in the right place so you have appropriate landmarks now for the length and placement of your lines/curves/angles). Now put a dot where the next angle/curve/line connects to that and do it again. Keep going. Holy shit, you just drew a passable outline that you can now fiddle with and refine and add details to with more control than you ever dreamed of (again, see step 1 for how you figure out the fiddling), how did that happen! It happened because you were doing that shit in pre-school. The artist in you can now choose the level of detail (what's a detail? MOAR SHAPES) to add or, if it wishes, to stylize your line drawing, based on the symbolic emphasis your brain wanted to assign earlier because you now know where everything should go, so making it bigger or smaller or further apart or closer or using darker lines on this and lighter ones on that, starts from the actual relationship that exists.
4. You have a line drawing now. You know what else is a line drawing? Coloring books. You give form and texture to your thing that you are drawing by shading. Shading is filling in your coloring book. With degrees of value (dark and light) when using a pencil. Shadows and light also make basic shapes you can identify by really looking at your thing, similar to step 2. Go back to that using your line drawing as reference points (the shadow next to the nose on this face is a triangle that sits about this far from the edge, and next to it is a circular area that is lighter than it, and that rectangularish shape next to it has no shading at all and is a highlight). I haven't started working with actual color yet, so I can't tell you how this will apply to that, but I am less scared of the day I pick up colored pencils or throw a line drawing into photoshop for coloring than I was when I started, I'll tell you that.
That's it. You literally have all the skills you need to draw anything you want and you have since you were a child. The technical bits can all be related to one of those steps. Perspective is all about learning how to identify what size and angle one thing is in relationship to another (and how those sizes and angles change as a thing moves in 3-D space). Contour/detail is all about finding more shapes and their relationships to each other(even the teeniest tiniest of details can be broken down into, 'hey, that makes a triangle'). Texture/form is all about finding how light or dark your shadows and highlights are and what shapes they should make when you fill in your coloring book. As soon as I understood this, suddenly all those art tutorials and books started making sense.
This is what they are telling you to do when they have you draw an oval and a kidney shape to make a duck, or to relate things to a horizon/vanishing point, or break down the proportions of the face into thirds, or have you draw a cube turning on it's side and so on. Yeah, it can get kind of complicated and fiddly as you work out how all the bits fit together in a specific thing you are trying to draw, but the basic principles aren't. When it gets confusing you keep breaking it back down to simple (am I finding a basic shape, a size, an angle? am I connecting the dots? am I coloring? did I forget to do one of those things?) And then you practice. You draw. Step number 1. You do it a lot. You make a lot of mistakes, because the muscles in your arm/wrist/hand/fingers haven't caught up to your brain yet. That's okay. You're teaching them how. You get the shapes wrong, but you correct it as you go, and the next time it you need to correct it less. Go ahead and use a compass or a template or a ruler if your circle/square/triangle is lopsided and that's frustrating to you. You'll still be teaching your muscles how to move to make the shape and you'll be shocked when you're just messing around in your sketchbook later and find yourself making those shapes passably well without it because your wrist remembers how to bend.
You. Can. Draw. Don't let anyone ever tell you otherwise. Do you have the actual desire and passion that will give you the motivation and persistence to keep at it in the face of that stupid curve that keeps coming out wrong 100 times before you figure out how to hold the pencil right (and you *will*) is more the question. I am 40 freaking years old, and have never been 'able' to draw a thing in my life. Except I totally can.
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