hi folks, i have been thinking of learning to draw and paint for some time now. always wanted to learn it from a proper institute. but things like working part-time and getting a college degree kept me busy and later my career left no time for things that i genuinely wanted to do. is it possible to learn now? how do i start? pencil sketches of objects? when do i move on to human forms? would like some outline from you experienced people here.
I learned by drawing what I was looking at. Trying to copy it the best I could. I went from doodling junk to making my Mom a birthday card with flowers on it (in pencil), I think when I was 6.
just draw, my advice though, is to know what you're drawing many pictures i've drawn in the past turned out rubbish because I wasn't inspired by what I was looking at. If you're drawing something for the sake of it, don't, just wait until you have the 'big idea'. and don't be too meticulous, a slow hand is as dreadful as a fast when drawing certain things.
there is no rule of thumb on how to get started.. its all about passion, which leads to practice... which leads to improvement. there is no ok draw objects for 4 months, then move to humans.. then full scenes.. nuh ahh. just grab a pencil, or a pen, or a marker, or whatever your comfortable with, and draw whatever it is that you want.. my best advice is this though.. a good artist has developed what some call an "artist" eye, and people who are good draftsmen have learned to really see what is in front of them exactly how it is.. not how you percieve it, not how you remember it.. but how it really appears.. and this allows them to translate that more realisitically. the higher your attention to detail the more real it will seem. but a lower attention to detail just means a more free "cartoony" style for lack of a better term. just go for it!
i have problem with steadiness of hand. can't draw curves,lines contours as finely as i should. any tips for improvement
I would begin by doodling. When you find yourself in a meeting that you can just listen to what is going on, try to sketch a scene in your mind. If you find that you can represent what you intend to sketch, then begin to sketch a scene that you can see somewhere. I carry a sketch pad with me, so that if I see something I like, I can make a quick sketch and perhaps take a picture with my phone, then I can paint it when I get home. This is a sketch I drew while at a meeting, listening to the others and adding my voice when needed. As far as painting goes, watercolors are pretty easy to do, and I would get a few instructional books and a good starter paint kit.
How to draw books are laughable. I never draw all those circles and lines for guides then erase them, I just draw. That owl image made me laugh.
thanks for the advice dutch.another rather hypothetical question -because i have not yet progressed to that level - is it possible to make a human portrait out of memory?
^yes and no if you don't have the practice (obviously) you probably won't be able to recreate a human form. what you would be doing is a representation of a human, which is fine and all - but may not be what you are after drawing takes a lootttt of practice. you have to draw EVERY day to ever get better. yes, literally, drawing at least one object, every day. start with a still life set up. they are super boring, but they train your eyes to look at objects and your hand to recreate the objects on paper. my advice is to not try to start off drawing the grapes that you see on the table, rather than just create the shapes and forms that you see -- an oblong circle has much less definition of what it is 'supposed' to look like in our brain than a grape. trying to draw a bnch of grapes from the get-go will likely end up in a REPRESENTATION rather than RECREATION
thanks purp another question.this is rather silly but please indulge me. there was this dutch painter called vincent van gogh. now whenever his name/work comes up for discussion in art/literary groups there is vehement debate- almost quarrelling. vincent was also controversial during his lifetime. what inspires this die-hard groupism for and against him? secondly there is a curious child-like quality to his works -e.g. "Bedroom at Arles" looks startlingly like a crayon drawing by a school-kid. i am not belittling him here, but was that deliberate? or the Potato Eaters? the Postman and Madame Roulin? also pablo picasso's odd shapes and combinations are beyond me. comments?
I suppose so. I sketch from memory all the time. I imagine that one should have the basic skills needed to make the sketch look like the subject, though. Little nuances, like one eye a little larger than the other, the basic shape of the face, etc. all work together to make the portrait look like the person. I'd start with a picture of the subject and practice a lot before I finally made a stab at the portrait.
the thing about art and art history is that HISTORICAL CONTEXT is everything, before cezanne, a painting was not aloud to be just look like a painting, before kandinsky a painting always had to be about something, before picasso a painting had to be done from a single perspective, and before Duchamp art had to be beautiful... these men changed the course of art in a profound way... i could go on, but if you just take it at plain site today, you will miss the whole reason its well known... its a hard thing to understand.. and its why most people complain about not getting art historical context
I just started drawing about 5 months ago. I started out just drawing cubes.. once I could do that, I started drawing things that are based off of cubes. (buildings, ect) after that, I started practicing shading on the cubes, and began drawing spheres. I dont know.. it all just started flowing after that. I´m not a great artist or anything, but every drawing gets noticably better as I get better at shading and learn more techniques.
