Successful drawing
The illustrator Andrew Loomis is revered amongst artists for his mastery of drawing technique and his clean, realist style. His hugely influential series of art instruction books have never been bettered and Successful Drawing, the third in Titan's programme of facsimile editions, returns this classic title to print for the first time in decades. For over 60 years Successful Drawing has provided a superb resource covering all the techniques needed to master three-dimensional drawing. From the fundamentals of proportion, placement, perspective, planes and pattern, through a detailed examination of scale and the effects and capture of light, to the mastery of conception, construction, contour, character and consistency, Successful Drawing is filled with step-by-step instruction, professional tips and beautiful illustration. Engaging, witty, and wonderfully executed, this is a masterclass for amateur artists and professional illustrators alike.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
2mentions
2people
2020–2024years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Here is what I did: I started with drawabox.com, which is basically a very rigid but free of cost boot camp style of starting from just drawing a line on a piece of paper. Simultaneously I read Lynda Barries' book on comic making and her book "Syllabus", and adopted her way of doing quick visual journaling every day. I read the Loomis book "Fun with a pencil" which is a book aimed at kids for drawing cartoony little things progressing to more realistic anatomy. This lead me to Loomis' books "Figure drawing for all its worth" and "Successful drawing". (the latter being a book on incorporating perspective in drawing). From there I have used various resources. A breakthrough for me was Rebecca Tillman Youngs online course on portrait drawing (which is basically teaching the Loomis method of drawing the head in a slow and methodical way) in that it allowed me to draw faces that I genuinely was excited about. From there resources that have been useful to me are Marco Bucci's online class "Drawing for advanced beginners", the books "Figure drawing: design and invention", "Anatomy for artists, drawing form and pose", "the Vilppu manual", ""Anatomy for sculptors", and "Rey's anatomy" (not Grey's anatomy). The best book on perspective I have found is Atteberry's "The complete guide to perspective". I have read a ton of other books, but these are the keepers.
In five months I have gone through three 100 page sketchbooks and I have had fun and reached flow state pretty consistently the whole time through. The first of the sketchbooks was basically just drawabox exercises up until the 250 boxes challenge. At this point I transitioned away from drawabox as I was having enough fundamentals to have fun and make progress on drawings I cared about.
All these resources and books may seem overwhelming and you definitely don't need to go through all of this material. The key for learning drawing is to figure out what is exciting for you to draw and get over that first hump to get to where you can draw something you see have potential even if it is not great. That's when the momentum builds and it becomes self propelling. Drawing is basically a language for communicating 3d form on a 2d surface, and like learning Spanish the key is just to get enough of a vocabulary that you can get started conversing. The rest follows once you can talk a little.
- Understanding Comics by Scott Mccloud http://scottmccloud.com/2-print/1-uc/index.html
The four printed books by Edward Tufte https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/
Successful Drawing by Andrew Loomis
Composition: Understanding Line, Notan and Color by Arthur Wesley Dow
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