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[Darkmere]

Fun with a Pencil by Andrew Loomis

This deserves to be mentioned twice, I think.

I'll probably check this out myself honestly...

I'd be interested to know what you think of it, since you're far more experienced than me.

For some reason the fundamentals and the way he presents them just "click" for me on a much deeper level than "just take something and draw it, repeat." Even though that's exactly what it is, it's presented in such a way as to make something fairly complex (faces, even cartoony ones) seem easy. If you're already used to breaking things down by form and shape, there may not be as much to glean. I've found it quite useful even with zero art supplies to get me to think about deconstructing form, and since I'm limited right now to line work and practice (mechanical pencils and scrap cardstock, yay), it fits what I need perfectly.

If you(the generic you)'re new, though, and need practice on fundamentals, by all means try it. All you need is a pencil and scrap paper. Worst case, after an hour you throw your stuff in the trash and move on.

[MadMalkavian]

I hate to be a downer, but you can't learn to make art from scratch, you can just refine innate talent.

Luckily it's an innate talent that every singly human being on this planet that lacks some severe brain injury or developmental problem possesses!

This kind of hits home for me. I am unable to draw life but I have some affinity with drawing geometric landscapes and some affinity with cartography.

All I can offer in advice to the original poster is that art classes might help. What might also help is taking a sketchbook out somewhere, like to a park, and just drawing whatever there is around you. Getting that practice in will help, and not just the basic exercises either. You've got to get some experience outside of that. It's all the advice I can really offer on this, and I hope it helps.

[Parsely]

This has been so good for me. Thank you, everyone, for all your help. <3

[Darkmere]

So, after a few days of digging and practice, I've decided to post a list of useful stuff.


The Fun With a Pencil .pdf can be found here. It's very educational regarding basic form and some line work, with any kind of pencil and any kind of paper.

The cheapest, most comprehensive sketching starter set I found was here.

There's a comprehensive glossary and guide to teach-yourself techniques here.

[Neonivek]

However, I usually see the advice to "just go draw things."

Yeah... It is rather annoying and tends to be the advice you get for everything. People only seem to know one cookie cutter aspect to learn something...

Anyhow my advice

STEAL!

Steal other's art skill. Steal like you are stinking plagiarist.

[GlyphGryph]

"other peoples art" counts as "things".

Lots of people advocate 'drawing from life' and sure, that's valuable, but honestly I still don't think it's as valuable as drawing from art. Especially drawing from art from memory.

[Neonivek]

It is mostly because... as I said most people only know the "One method" of learning. That is often times a sink or swim attitude that will frustrate and lose most people.

[Vector]

Well, I doodled a motivating "get to work" placard to put next to the computer, so that's progress.  Maybe I'll try copying something tomorrow, that seems like a good idea.

[Neonivek]

I will say, however, that one of the reasons why a lot of people say you start with trying to draw stuff without learning drawing techniques is that through compensation for your lack of skill, you develop your own style.

Which is, as an artist, what you are always going to be balancing. How much you take from others to boost yourself, and how much you learn yourself to create your own.

[Solifuge]

I'm a strong advocate of learning by studying foundational techniques and doodling on your own, rather than by imitating existing styles. Sure, copying the styles of existing work is a way to make things that look good quickly, but it doesn't really give you a good understanding of what you're doing and why. Also, by the time you want to move beyond a copied style, you'll have to unlearn and break a bunch of bad habits and techniques you've spent all that time building, and watch as your artwork gets "worse" as a result (though really, all that's happening is your lack of foundational know-how starts showing).

I could draw a parallel between this, and learning how to go through the motions of an academic discipline (memorization and repetition) vs. understanding the foundational principals behind that discipline, so you can truly understand and advance the discipline.

[GlyphGryph]

Copying has it's limits, but I think it's quite valuable. It helps you get a strong foundation of being able to see and then recreate what you are actually seeing, and then get immediate feedback on what you did wrong when you compare them. It's about technical control.

By no means should it be the only thing you do, that's a given I would think. But recreating another person's work is hard, and you can learn quite a bit from it.  You realize "I looked at this and did this but that didn't look like the original at all! How did he... oh, maybe... yeah, that looks right! Cool, I didn't think of doing it that way!"

Imagine a fighting game. There are a few ways to approach it - you can do "fundamentals", by learning the move lists and the principles of positioning and the reach and angle of attack for each character. You can learn by "doodling", just playing around with your character against the computer and getting comfortable controlling him. But there's another way to learn, one that shouldn't be ignored - studying the technique of those who are good at the game. Looking at a match and going "Okay - why did he do this here? How did he do this here? Huh, I didn't know you could do that at all..."

Imitation is not going to get you there on it's own, but studious imitation, studying the experts and trying to do what they did, is still, in my mind, an incredibly useful tool. Understanding the fundamentals and building a strong foundation is important to getting the most out of this, of course, butjust like with doodling - if you are doing so without any aim, desire, or knowledge, you will not improve.

[freeformschooler]

"Good artists copy, great artists steal"

[Vector]

I've got a style that doesn't look like anyone else's, though.  Sure, it's influenced by a whoooole lot of cartoonists, but I legitimately can't point to some other person and say "yeah, that one looks like mine."

Also, reality is a style.  I realize that people consider it the absence of style and artifice, but I think life gets more interesting when you see it as a particular type of 3D rendering.  Don't put it up on a pedestal and act like it's non-improvable or whatever.

I'm learning art the way I learned mathematics--from the point of view that "math enters the mind through the hand."  I may not be able to prove Urysohn's Lemma on my own yet, but I can write it down and understand it; and then, once I've understood it, I can emphasize or de-emphasize different aspects of the construction as I consider necessary.  Mathematicians have particular styles for their proof-writing, many of them immediately recognizable, despite having uniformly trained in this way in a field that emphasizes "right and wrong answers" (in the view of the public).  Similarly, we mostly learn to write from copying our kindergarten teachers, but we all have different handwriting. . .

Anyway, what I'm saying is that, at least in this case, I know what I'm doing and will try some other sorts of exercises tomorrow.  I'm setting aside an hour every day for this, so don't think I'm stopping here.

[Solifuge]

-snip-

Imitation is not going to get you there on it's own, but studious imitation, studying the experts and trying to do what they did, is still, in my mind, an incredibly useful tool. Understanding the fundamentals and building a strong foundation is important to getting the most out of this, of course, butjust like with doodling - if you are doing so without any aim, desire, or knowledge, you will not improve.

Okay, I thought you were basically advocating learning art by tracing, and that set off some alarms.

Sorry if I took that too literally, but I know professional artists who spend years learning to imitate Disney or John Romita or even people like flipping Seth MacFarlane, and then just stop there. It's a great way to learn how to go through the motions, and approximate stylish art without ever really understanding why they're doing what they're doing. And it makes them a not insignificant amount of money, which makes me irritated and sad.

[Eotyrannus]

I have just figured out that Solifuge is secretly a camel spider!

To keep it on topic, I drew a camel spider recently!



IT IS CLEARLY SOLIFUGE.