Constructive anatomy

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1. egypturnashOct 2024
   I learnt to draw long ago but I started dancing at the age of 45 and got decent. It helped a lot that I'd learnt a few things about how to learn:

   * give yourself permission to suck, you don't know a goddamn thing yet and you know this

   * if you notice that you're terrible at doing some part of the work, don't keep making excuses to avoid it - dive into it, embrace the suck, watch closely to see what you're doing wrong and try to not make the same mistake the next time

   * keep doing it, find a way to make it a regular thing

   specific to drawing:

   * you have a few major tasks: install a simple 3d renderer on your brain, learn to break things you see down into simple shapes and build them back up on the paper, and learn to move your body so as to control your favorite mark-making device (pen, brush, stylus, sponge, spray can, etc)

   * the first two tasks carry over to any medium but the last one may not - I've been experimenting with paint lately (after 25y of working in Illustrator) and I have absolutely no real idea of how to efficiently use brushes and other objects to put paint where I want it, so right now I have a few canvases that I'm much more concerned with experimenting with different ways to make marks on then I am concerned with making a nice image on. that said, pencil/pen on paper is a great medium to start with, it's easy to get a decent array of marks out of them without much practice, plus you can easily carry it around in your bag and take it out wherever you go with very little hassle

   * study masters, think about what they're doing, copy/work over their stuff - trying to make your hand move the same way as someone much more skilled than you is very powerful, if you know enough to make some guesses about how they made the marks you can see. "How would [master artist you love] handle this image?" is a great question to be able to ask yourself when you're stuck on something.

   I hear drawabox is pretty good for the "install a simple 3d renderer and some basic models on your brain" part of this task list. Me, I mostly learnt from the Preston Blair book on Animation, Bridgman's Constructive Anatomy, Loomis' Figure Drawing for All It's Worth, and a life drawing class with a teacher who was largely following Glenn Vilppu's Drawing Manual. That last took me from "you seriously want us to start with 10-20 second poses to start each class?" to "noting down enough of a pose in 10s to turn it into a full drawing later is a blast".

   also, take care about ergonomics, you can fuck your wrist up badly, learn to "draw from your arm" instead of "drawing from your wrist", once you do it will let you draw faster and larger, and it will help you keep the Carpal Tunnel Fairy away from your wrist.

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2. potta_coffeeAug 2023
   Wrong, there are some excellent books that can teach drawing skills very well. I'm a trained studio artist and I've found great value from books. I recommend Bridgman's "Constructive Anatomy". Go through the book and copy every drawing. You WILL improve. Even after years of practice, I was able to take my drawing to the next level. There are lots of other great books out there. Drawing isn't rocket science.

   https://www.amazon.com/Constructive-Anatomy-Dover-Artists/dp...

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3. egypturnashJan 2017
   With any new skill you need to be willing to sink a lot of time into it. And you need to be fine with being absolutely terrible at it in the beginning.

   I usually tell people who want to learn to draw to go to http://johnkcurriculum.blogspot.com/2009/12/preston-blair-le..., get the Preston Blair book, and start doing these exercises by master animator John K (creator of 'Ren & Stimpy'). You will get a lot better, a lot faster. These exercises focus on simple cartoon characters who wear a lot of their construction on the outside; once you can draw cartoon characters, you can keep drawing more of them if that's your thing, or you can build on top of that and start learning anatomy and drawing more complicated characters. (Or do both.)

   There's other well-regarded drawing courses on the internet and someday I should probably pick a new one to send noobs to, what with John K kind of being an asshole - but I learnt a hell of a lot when I worked under him, and he is really good at teaching this stuff.

   Most of what I know about drawing more complicated figures came from a combination of Bridgeman's "Constructive Anatomy" and Loomis' "Figure Drawing for All It's Worth", and a life drawing teacher who hewed very closely to Glen Vilppu's drawing manual. If you can fit some life drawing classes into your life then TAKE them, you will learn a ton.

   Also: Make a space in your life to do this. I ride the bus a lot, and before the advent of smartphones, I'd have little to do to amuse myself besides stare out of the window, read a book, or pull my sketchbook out and draw. Maybe draw some idea floating around my head, maybe draw something I glimpsed out the bus window, maybe something based on my fellow passengers, maybe just some cubes, or the hand I wasn't drawing with. I got a lot of practice in without feeling like I was making myself "practice". Whatever you may be learning, if you regularly drop yourself into a time and place with nothing much to do besides the thing you wanna learn, then you'll do it more often.

   Don't blow several hundred bucks on a ton of paints, or on pro software and a Wacom tablet. Just start with a few hardback sketchbooks and some pens and pencils. Oh, and not mechanical pencils. Just grab like a pack of Ticonderoga 2.5Bs, they're cheap and pretty good. And try holding them so that the side of the point addresses the paper for a lot of the beginning of your drawing; this will do several things for you:

   * it will train you to keep your wrist fairly steady, and to draw more with your entire arm; keeping your wrist straight and steady will help keep the Carpal Tunnel Fairy away. * it will make your initial lines light, and prone to fade away as your hand brushes the paper; this keeps you from bearing down to gouge an impossible-to-erase line in the paper, and gives you more room to make mistakes before having a dark, illegible mess of lines you can't draw over.

   Don't get lost in trying to save a drawing, either. Paper's cheap, turn the page and try the same subject again, or a new one.

   When you make a picture you like, hang it over your drawing board, turn it into your computer's backdrop, and keep trying to draw something better than it. You may find yourself hating it because you start seeing all the mistakes. That's great - go draw something new that doesn't make those! (This may take many tries, some mistakes are harder to stop making than others.)

   Don't worry about "your style". If someone points out a mistake in your drawing and you find yourself wanting to say "but that's my style!", then you are just covering up your weaknesses unless you can actually sit down and bust out a version of the drawing that Does It Right. When you can do that you can legitimately say "dis mah style". Steal stylizations from artists you love (you're looking at other people's art, right? A lot?), make your own based on reality.

   You will find a lot of people declaring "rules" of drawing. Always do this, never do that. The truth of the matter (IMHO) is that all rules of art are actually just warnings: "never do this" really means "if you do this without thinking about what you're doing it'll probably turn out badly". Know the rules, know which ones you're breaking, and break the fuck out of them while staying well within the boundaries of the other rules you know.

   (I spent a decade in the LA animation scene, then burnt out and draw comics now. If you wanna look at my work to decide if I'm someone who you should listen to in this, it's all at http://egypt.urnash.com)

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4. egypturnashMar 2012
   Note the important caveat to my recommendation of the Blair: it is the best text on drawing IF YOU USE JOHN K'S EXERCISES. By itself it is a good book on cartooning; with the addition of John's exercises it becomes an awesome power tool for building skill.

   (And honestly the real value here is John's exercises; you can get almost as much value out of them by freeze-framing great cartoons and drawing off of them. In fact I know for a while he was trying to package his course into a book, copiously illustrated with examples from the classic cartoons to work from, but ran into rights issues.)

   Loomis is awesome too, I learnt a hell of a lot from him. I also learnt a lot from Bridgman's "Constructive Anatomy". But I feel the simple starting point of John's exercises for the Blair book really make it a great place to begin, and work up from.

   (Of course I may be biased, as as I'm a cartoonist who's passed through Spümcø.)

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