Fun With a Pencil
Written by commercial artist Andrew Loomis in 1939, this book serves as a cornerstone to learning to illustrate. It not only offers comprehensive and expert advice, but also shows the fun side of drawing and illustration.
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- 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.
- Many more beyond this but these are my for sures.
People / Soft Skills:
* How to win friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie
* Secrets of Consulting - Gerald Weinberg
* Peopleware - Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister
* Nurtured by Love - Shinici Suzuki
* Turn the Ship Around! - David Marquet
* Never Split the Difference - Chris Voss
http://dhemery.com/articles/resistance_as_a_resource/
http://dhemery.com/articles/managing_yourself_through_change...
Macro Skills:
* Toyota Production System - Taiichii Ohno
* Workplace Management - Taiichii Ohno
* Thinking in Systems - Donella Meadows
* Fifth Discipline - Peter Senge
Agile:
* Extreme Programming, Explained (2nd ed.) - Kent Beck (the annotated bibliography is a goldmine)
* Chaos: Making a New Science - James Gleick
Programming:
* Implementation Patterns - Kent Beck
* Test-Driven Development, By Example - Kent Beck
* Refactoring (both editions) - Martin Fowler
* Refactoring to Patterns - Joshua Kerievsky
* Practical Object Oriented Design - Sandi Metz
* Functional Programming in Scala - Chiusano & Bjarnason
* Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided By Tests - Freeman & Pryce ("The Goose Book")
* Modern Java in Action - Raoul-Gabriel Urma
* Java Concurrency in Practice - Brian Goetz
* Grokking Algorithms - Aditya Y. Bhargava
Architecture:
* Righting Software - Juval Lowy
* Release It! - Michael Nygard
* Site Reliability Engineering - Beyer, et al. ("The SRE Book”)
* Domain Driven Design - Eric Evans
* Introduction to Permaculture - Bill Mollison and Mia Slay
* Fun with a Pencil - Andrew Loomis
Design:
* All books by Edward Tufte, especially “The visual display of quantitative information”
* The Elements of Typographic Style - Robert Bringhurst
* Understanding Comics - Scott McCloud
* Design of Everyday Things - Don Norman
* Notes on the Synthesis of Form - Christopher Alexander
* The Timeless Way of Building - Christopher Alexander
- There's tons of free ones on youtube so there's no need to spend a bunch of money. Proko has some good stuff on his channel. He does a lot of comic book stuff but he's a classically trained artist. Pretty sure he's got a beginner's section. He also has some videos giving advice on learning resources. There are lots of others that are really good too.
Drawabox.com has some good free stuff too.
If you'd prefer books I think Andrew Loomis books might be public domain. Fun with a Pencil is a good one. If they aren't public domain you can get them for $10-15 on Amazon because they started reprinting them.
How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way is also a really good introduction to drawing. Don't let the title fool you though because its one of the best beginner's drawing books regardless of the genre.
Those are just examples though, there's tons and tons of great resources and everyone has their favorites.
- A few resources for learning how to draw.
Books:
* Fun with a Pencil by Andrew Loomis (everything Loomis is great)
* Perspective made Easy by Norling
* Christopher Hart's books (friendly to beginners)
YouTube:
* Proko
* Alphonso Dunn
* moderndayjames
Websites:
* Drawabox
* Kazone
Podcast:
* Draftsmen (Marshall Vandruff is an excellent source of guidance)
- I have been learning to draw for the past 2 months or so. I want to get into digital painting but I am still learning the fundamentals with a pencil + paper.
A few things that have helped me so far:
- Setting aside at least 1 hour a day to draw. This one is the most important.
- Drawing from the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards
- Fun with a pencil by Andrew Loomis
- Ctrl+Paint: http://www.ctrlpaint.com/ especially the Traditional Drawing, Composition, Perspective and Anatomy sections.
- Sycra's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0373FA2B3CD4C899
- I really don't like how much that book (and other books of the same author) is promoted. I am into drawing for quite a long time already (and I also think it helps me as a programmer etc.) and I've heard about that book like thousand times, so I've finally read it. I understand why it's impressive: because author delivers the material like "so, there are some techniques to use your right side of the brain instead of the left one and woah… you see, you draw much better now! It's magic! By the way, I have million students who couldn't draw, but they took my courses and now they are master-artists and own their own design saloons." And you probably actually will draw better than you expect (especially when you don't expect you can draw) after some simple guidance and a few tries.
What I'm saying it's very populistic, but explains many thing the wrong way, which may cause some problems if you'll want to improve your techniques later. If you are learning to draw I'd better recommend you start with Andrew Loomis: "Fun with a Pencil" or even Vilppu Studio tutorials if you have serious mindset.
