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John Kenpon posted:edges? (*edited because I am not awake yet.) Edge variety in traditional painting is frequently a result of tightly controlled brushwork, i.e., a diffuse edge will be composed of many very small but crisp multidirectional brushstrokes. Or sometimes it's a hard edge, but the value contrast between the two opposing planes will be so slight that the edge will appear softer than if it were a harsh black-and-white value difference. It's not as common in traditional painting to work edges together that much, because it makes everything mushy, as you are observing. Here are two good resources: http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=51913 http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2008/06/depth-and-edges.html Try to start by thinking about forms as planes rather than curved surfaces. Many older how-to-draw/paint books encourage this approach. When working digitally, a square brush will give you better control than a round brush. Also, turn your opacity up to 100%: John Singer Sargent posted:If you see a thing transparent, paint it transparent; don't http://www.scribd.com/doc/27078763/Craig-Mullins-Sargent-Notes neonnoodle fucked around with this message at 12:36 on Oct 16, 2011 |
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Oct 16, 2011 12:27
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A tutorial I made a while ago about how I separate lineart in Photoshop.
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Oct 20, 2011 19:59
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pandaK posted:Don't know if this is a good place to ask, but would you guys say that using a traditional pencil is vitally important to properly learning to draw? I ask because I find mechanical pencils more comfortable, but I always feel that my drawings feel too clean. Would you recommend switching to a traditional wooden pencil or is there nothing inherently wrong with using mechanical pencils? It depends what kind of a line you want to achieve. With a mechanical you're going to have to go over certain lines many times to make them thicker. With a conventional pencil, you get more control over thick and thin lines. If that line weight variation is not a major part of the look you're going for, I don't see any serious problem with using mechanical pencils exclusively. You might also consider a lead holder (clutch pencil), which is pretty much a giant mechanical pencil with bigger leads. Those are nice because the grip is the same as a regular mechanical pencil, but because the lead is broader, you can sharpen it to a point or use its sides for thicker lines or shading. Also, you can swap out leads of different hardnesses.
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Nov 22, 2011 13:29
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Already Bored posted:I was wondering if anyone had suggestions for how to increase the thickness and density of paint? The problem with this plan is that as you add thickeners or other substrates, you will lessen the chroma of your paints. That means you will never be able to get vibrant colors, and mixing two colors will decrease the chroma even more. That's why student-grade paints are so crappy: a lot of base and very little pigment.
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Dec 30, 2011 16:45
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I want to crosspost this in here because I think it might appeal to some of you folks. QUEST OF ART! The MMORPG for Creative Types If you want to get XP for doing your exercises here as Quests, you should come play.
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Jan 5, 2012 21:54
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Pollyanna posted:That reminds me. What is the role of depth, perspective and proportion, anyway? I remember back in art class in like, fifth grade (which I was utterly terrible at) we did something like lines on a horizon and making a 3D house from a 2D facade, or something like that. I can make a decent 3D cube and I understand the concept of keeping lines parallel in such a way that it creates believable depth, but a cube (or maybe a simple chair) is about as far as that extends for me. What is the name for these concepts and what can I do to exercise them?  The first four, as you can see, do not rely on perspective at all. But they can all be combined with good perspective drawing to accentuate the effect.
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Jan 17, 2012 16:10
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Dick Danger posted:First I open the photo I want to work from in another window and try my best to replicate the shape and structure of the photo as linework, using angles and guidelines to accurately replicate what I look at in the other window. What you're missing here is a fundamental element of form. Your line drawing is good, but line drawing is almost like the enemy of painting, because "lines" represent things which don't directly translate into solid forms. Coloring in a line drawing (as with comic books) is not the same thing as painting, and even if you're good at coloring linework, it doesn't mean you'll know what to do to draw for a painting. When you paint (realistically), you're trying to capture the way that light bounces off of surfaces, and a line drawing doesn't necessarily show you where the surfaces are and what angle they're at relative to the light. That's why, in your case, when you remove your line drawing, you find you have so little to work with - your line drawing didn't give you the information you were going to need to paint. For instance, your drawing of the hair doesn't show you the planes of the overall mass of the hair. Yes, the hair flares out and then in, and you've captured the curve of that angle nicely, but that angle doesn't help when you take away the line drawing. Instead, think about modeling a wireframe model, visualize what it would look like in a 3D program:  See how there are no curves, but rather smaller planes/squares? Each part of the hairdo has a front, a top side, an underside, etc. Each of these planes is going to reflect light at a different value:  The same is true with all the other masses of the picture. Traditional painting manuals have urged a planar approach to preliminary drawing work for hundreds of years. Once you get a deeply-ingrained understanding of form and light, you can do "pretty" drawings in preparation for paintings, but until then, attractive linework will be your enemy instead of your friend.
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Jan 18, 2012 14:30
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Copy someone else. I'm not being sarcastic. Really, find someone else with another style which you admire and copy them for a while. Then you'll get exposed to how they approached certain drawing tasks, differently from the way Turner does. Then, when you're tired of copying them, find someone else and copy them. Keep doing this for many years, and eventually all these processes will blend in your mind. Copy, copy, copy, copy, copy AND pay attention to what you're doing while you copy. (This is, of course, in addition to drawing from life and drawing for fun/from your imagination).
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Jan 31, 2012 14:08
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Hello thread, I made a painting demo video and I thought you might find it interesting/helpful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztXQvKMnhas Let me know if you have follow up questions.
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Feb 29, 2012 02:23
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Times posted:I'm self-teaching digital painting. I've committed to drawing one drawing a day to help learn. That Andy Partridge is some awesomeness right there. The Martians have nice clear body forms/silhouettes. I can't wait to see what your project turns into.
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Feb 29, 2012 15:03
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Palpek posted:I like it too. I have just a tiny tiny criticism for the video itself. You're right-handed, could you place the camera on your left side next time? This way your working hand won't obscure the view. It was still good of course. Yeah I would have preferred to do that, but I was using a stupid webcam and hanging it on the light fixture, which was as far as the cord would reach. I would really like to do more of these and do them with a proper top-down camera setup, but I don't know what kind of camera to get that won't be too expensive. Is this the kind of thing you could do with an iPod Touch/iPhone? Or will it not be good enough...
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Feb 29, 2012 16:17
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gmq posted:This is probably a super stupid question but, starting from zero, how long would it take to learn to draw something like this: There's no clear answer to something like that. You can invest thousands of hours of work but keep doing things the same way, make the same mistakes, and stagnate. You can also improve extremely quickly through careful study and self-critique. Generally speaking, I like to go with the pseudoscientific Malcolm Gladwell stock answer that it takes 10,000 hours of (thoughtful) practice. Start now. edit: it also doesn't matter when in life you start. People who start young get a lot of those 10,000 hours done early. But you could find yourself at age 50 being just as good an artist as someone else was at age 30. If you're OK with that, then get going. neonnoodle fucked around with this message at 18:23 on Mar 18, 2012 |
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Mar 18, 2012 18:15
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Crossposting this tutorial video I made, I thought you guys might find it helpful: How to Make Limited Palettes in Adobe Photoshop https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slm9uZQ4mqQ
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Apr 1, 2012 22:04
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reallivedinosaur posted:I've been sketching a lot of skeletons, it's a lot less forgiving than the 'head, chest barrel, hips, cylinder arms/legs' type of posing, at least in my mind. It's hard to draw a pose that doesn't make sense when you're connecting all the bones, so I figure if I draw enough skeletons I'll eventually drive it into my subconscious, and draw more realistic people. Maybe try deconstructing some master drawings or photos and overlaying the major forms like the head (just cranium and mandible), shoulders, arms, ribcage, legs, hands, feet. Just concentrate on constructing the proportion and foreshortening correctly, without any musculature or bony detail. *By the way, those wooden humanoid mannekin things they sell at art stores SUCK. They are completely wrong and don't bend in any way that a human bends.
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Jun 20, 2012 00:33
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iron maiden
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Nessa posted:Every time I lift up my pen after finishing a line, I get big blobs of ink at the end of my lines. What am I doing wrong and how can I fix this? I'm afraid I'm not using the best pen right now because all my fine Microns and Faber Castells are dead, but I get this problem with any pen.
Nessa posted:I'm way worse at inking digitally. I can't even draw digitally. I don't know if it's because the aspect ratio of my tablet is off or what. I mean, I could try Flash, but I doubt that it would help me get better at inking by hand. Photoshop sucks for inking. That's why Manga Studio has become the de facto standard for digital comics within like 5 years of coming into existence. Also, even if you use smoothing or vector points, I personally still don't consider it cheating. First of all, working digitally puts you at an enormous disadvantage when it comes to fine motor control. It doesn't matter how good you are, it presents a challenge for everyone. Digital tricks are mostly there to compensate for a handicap. Second of all, if the finished product is good, your audience doesn't give two shits how it came into being from a technical standpoint. Other artists get self-righteous about that for their own personal reasons, but if you're doing your work to entertain people, it doesn't matter how you work as long as you make people happy. And besides, where do you even draw the line when working digitally? Using vector lines/smoothing is cheating, but working in layers isn't? Using free transform isn't? Using the undo command isn't?! It's true that you won't learn to ink with ink until you learn to ink with ink. But some people never learn to do that and their work is still awesome and nobody cares except jerks and Luddites. It's just a big stupid dick-measuring contest. That's my feeling on it, at least.
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Jun 25, 2012 18:23
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Bubbacub posted:I'm dredging up an old post here, but Watterson has a thorough background in fine art and that definitely comes across in his cartoons. There's a reason why C&H looks so much better than, say, Dilbert. I am pretty sure that Watterson is self-taught (I believe he studied political science at Kenyon College, and never studied art in an organized academic setting).
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Jun 28, 2012 00:43
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When in doubt, make the foreground body part in your foreshortened figure REALLY BIG. It's a good cheat.
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Jul 2, 2012 14:20
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Yin posted:The sad truth is I just don't have the time, or more importantly, the discipline, to sit down at a desk and try to form my chicken scratchings into consistent shapes, let alone anything recognizable. I lack the drive, mainly because I don't want to learn to be an artist, I just want to learn how to doodle. The tradeoff just hasn't seemed worth it.  http://www.amazon.com/Ed-Emberleys-Drawing-Book-World/dp/0316789720/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1342962862&sr=8-3&keywords=ed+emberley http://www.amazon.com/Ed-Emberleys-Drawing-Book-Animals/dp/0316789798/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1342962862&sr=8-1&keywords=ed+emberley Ed Emberley books might be perfect for you -- although you have to be able to draw squares, circles, triangles, etc. If you don't have the discipline to actually control your own hand enough to draw a square, then I don't know what to tell you. But if you go through some of those Ed Emberley books and learn the formulas, you will at least be able to draw a sort of hieroglyphic symbol of lots of different things. Emberley's designs are very charming and fun to learn.
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Jul 22, 2012 14:16
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I'm interested in proffering my services as a private art tutor. I enjoy art teaching and doing critiques/drawovers/paintovers, and perhaps some of y'all might want to get personal instruction, targeted lessons, homework assignments etc. for your money instead of just videos. For now I'm asking $25 for a 30-minute class on Skype, plus one critique/paintover. Please PM me if you'd like more details. This is my video tutorial channel if you want to get a sense of what I sound like and the kinds of things I do.
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Aug 15, 2012 20:41
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Stroszek and Diseased Dick Guy posted:nice things Diseased Dick Guy posted:acrylics All paint is composed of pigment (colored fine particles) and a vehicle (liquid stuff). In oil paint, the vehicle is linseed or other vegetable oil. In acrylic paint, the vehicle is composed of water with binder particles in suspension. When in the water suspension, the binder particles can flow around freely and the paint is workable. As the water evaporates, the binder particles stick to each other (and your surface) and polymerize. Eventually when all the water is evaporated, the binder has solidified and is pretty much like hardened glue. Like glue, it is very sticky and thus will adhere to almost any surface without priming. It's also flexible and won't crack even on curved or irregular surfaces, and thermoplastic so it can expand and contract with changing temperatures without cracking. Acrylic mediums are just vehicle, without pigment. When you add paint to them, you're extending the amount of pigment over a larger amount of vehicle, which will affect the color density. That's why good pigment-dense paint is more expensive, but less wasteful because it can be stretched further using mediums. The textures are a matter of personal preference and what you want the final effects to be. If you want oil impasto-type effects, you need serious chunky paste medium. When you thin acrylic paint with water, you are diluting the vehicle and dispersing the binder particles into a larger quantity of water. This is usually fine, unless you use so much water and so little paint that you disperse the binder particles so sparsely in the water that they can't stick to each other very well anymore. That prevents the paint layer from polymerizing and forming one big mass when it dries, so you can find it rubs/chips off a little bit. So when you want to dilute your acrylic very thin, use liquid acrylic medium and not just water. If you're working on paper (or illustration board which is just cardboard), it's a good idea to first lay down a layer of medium. You can make your own illustration board by using acrylic medium as glue. This is great because you get your choice of paper and color, and mount that poo poo on masonite or wood: http://www.donatoart.com/technique/mounting/mounting.html This guy glues his drawing down on board, then adds more layers of medium to seal in the drawing, then paints in oils over it (you need to do that with oils because linseed oil will cause wood/paper/canvas to rot unless you prime it). When using just acrylic, sealing the drawing with medium impregnates the whole surface with waterproof plastic, so the paper won't soak up water from the wet paint and buckle or distort the color or texture. But you can also paint with thinned acrylic directly on plain paper as though it were watercolor. Varnishing isn't for the protection of the underlying surface, but for the protection of the final paint layer from dust and grime, as well as to make everything shiny and the colors look "wet" and rich. You don't need need to varnish an acrylic painting right away. It's not going to rot or explode or anything. As long as you keep it clean and stored properly, you might not even need to varnish it ever. You could varnish it a month or a year from now. In some ways it's an aesthetic choice, and/or a long (long, long, loooooong)-term preservation issue. Golden has a kickass YouTube channel where they demo lots of their products: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xVa-Fi2dIU
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Aug 16, 2012 18:14
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Pimpmust posted:I got a little question here for those who know this poo poo, related to drawing hair and inking. Here's what the linework looks like on that image without any color at all:  It's pretty "designy" and stylized, not too naturalistic. The outline of the hair mass is a relatively uniform weight. The inner line details are about half the weight of the outline. The spot blacks are chunky. It looks like the fine interior lines follow the general path of the spot blacks. So if I were you, I'd attack this in stages. First, plan out the overall form and motion of the hair masses:  Then the outline in a single or relatively uniform weight:  Then design in your spot blacks. I have no idea how these work, I just tried to follow the feel of the movement:  Then with a finer line, add the interior details, following the rhythm of the spot blacks:  The hierarchical approach, with each stage following the previous, will keep things organized and consistent.
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Aug 23, 2012 19:40
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approach until it sticks? I don't got an art education so I barely know what to search for, but there got to be books written on the subject that don't come down to "First draw this general shape, then fill in the loving Owl", right?
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Disproportionation posted:I want to try out painting. I've done a couple digital studies, but I actually would really like to pick up a paintbrush, do something new. However, I don't really know how to really get started, and it doesn't help that I'm a poor student.  "Watercolors are hard," I suggest you start with those. You can learn a ton and make a whole bunch of paintings really fast without equipment/solvents/crap filling up your house. They dry quickly and you can make a portable kit and get painting from life in minutes.Get a cheap pad of watercolor paper to start out with. You can get expensive paper later. Get one of those plastic brush pens with water inside. Mix on a plastic palette or a disposable meat tray or whatever. However, don't be cheap when buying paint! You don't need to overpay either, but go for the store brand of "artist grade" paint. Tubes of artist-grade watercolors go much, much further. They can even last you years. You will only need a few colors anyway. Absolutely essential are a warm and cool version of red, yellow and blue: - quinacridone violet(cool red) - cadmium red (warm red) - lemon yellow (cool yellow) - cadmium/hansa yellow (warm yellow) - pthalo blue/cyan (cool blue) - ultramarine blue (warm blue) I like earth tones but they're pretty optional: - burnt umber - burnt sienna You will learn so much about colors this way. You can spend all the time you want just playing around with mixing colors, seeing what happens when you mix one color into others, and how much of each color you need to push and pull the mixture in a new direction. I think this is the smallest initial outlay of money for the largest amount of growth potential. No solvents, no canvas, a single brush, and you can crank out paintings for years and years. neonnoodle fucked around with this message at 21:24 on Sep 10, 2012 |
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Sep 10, 2012 21:21
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I've been writing a ton of material for a "How to Start Drawing" guide. The only thing which worries me is that it's pretty abstract and heady, and knowing my own history with "How to Draw" books, it's likely to be tl;dr material for people who just want to get started right away. The summary is that, in order to draw, you need to develop two separate, distinct abilities: Observational drawing: the ability to draw what you see without "editorializing" or "symbolizing" it. This is what a book like Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain teaches you. Constructional drawing: the ability to logically deconstruct what you see, and then logically reconstruct those forms on the page. This is what books like Andrew Loomis' teach you, or the Preston Blair cartooning course. People can get really, really good at only one or the other. If you get really good at only observational drawing, you can find you still have no ability to create a scene or a character from your imagination. You become what they call a "meat camera." You do great when there's something in front of your face, but it doesn't all carry over. If you get really good at only constructional drawing, then you can end up with stiff, formulaic work which constantly adheres to idealized and generic types. You can lose the variety and weirdnesses of the squishy real world. If you get really good at both, then you can do all kinds of things. You can construct a believably solid character or scene from your imagination, but remember to add variety and make it imperfect and specific because of what you remember from your observational drawing.
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Sep 13, 2012 17:44
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Giant Boy Detective posted:What sort of thing do you do to practice constructional drawing? Fill pages and pages trying to reproduce Loomis's head construction lines accurately? (...Already I long to go sketch a face based on the photos of the draw goons thread instead.) To me, copying cartoons is a great way to practice both construction and proportional consistency, because when you work from characters you have been looking at practically since birth, your lizard brain will alert you instantly when the drawing is wrong.
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Sep 18, 2012 22:58
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Gormless Gormster posted:I've been copying basic poses from references, then reproducing them from memory for a short while now. But for 'pieces' which I intend to complete (color and detail and such) I insist on starting from scratch. 
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Sep 19, 2012 15:05
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Giant Boy Detective posted:I haven't looked at actual images of them yet to cross-check on the off chance it'd disrupt the exercise/experiment. So, did you mean to draw them from actual reference or draw them from memory first?  , yes, draw them from reference first! After copying about 10-15 drawings of a character I tend to internalize the proportions enough to invent my own pose.
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Sep 19, 2012 20:49
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Nessa posted:My problems have always been that I quickly get bored of my idea and I don't get more than a few comics done. I either think the idea is dumb, not original enough, I run out of ideas for it or I don't connect with it enough on an emotional level. As you put more work into a project, you will get more and more excited about it. Same deal with the emotional connection. Your ideas are like your children. You have to give them love and support and nurture them for them to grow into what you want them to be. When you give them enough love, eventually they have a way of suddenly taking on their own life force and loving you back. You'll never connect with them if you don't take enough stock in them or work for them. It's kind of like having a vegetable garden. Your idea is like a seed, maybe. It's easy to plant a seed, you just bury it and put some water on it. It's what happens NEXT that makes all the difference: you have to weed the bed, fertilize it, water it, keep bugs and rabbits away, etc. All the while, either nothing will be happening, or what will be happening will be slow and won't bear any resemblance to the picture on the seed envelope. If you just abandon the seed at that point, you can tell yourself all you like that the seed was no good, that the soil was no good, that YOU'RE no good -- none of that is necessarily true. You just need to do the work to give the seed a chance to do its own thing. In a way, you're not making the thing grow -- it does have a life force of its own. But you're making it possible for it to grow, making it possible for that life force to come out. Without putting in your part of the work, and without in some way having faith that the growth is happening under the ground, you'll always feel like you can't come up with anything good.
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Sep 24, 2012 22:24
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< alert/>What you're worrying about : "I don't have interesting life experiences I can write about" -- there are several potential solutions: 1. Use your mundane life, no matter how simple/boring, as your inspiration, because it will come from a place of true understanding. 2. Research something which is interesting to you and work with that, communicating your enthusiasm for the subject through your work 3. Seek out new life experiences. Get out of your comfort zone. If you find your life is boring, put effort into making it less boring. Talk to people you've never talked to before. Go to an event or a place you've never been. Volunteer or find some other way of getting involved with new things and new people. The other thing I will add is something I feel extremely dogmatic about : CHARACTERS > STORY Young writers get really hung up on plots and premises. This is especially insidious in the SF and fantasy genres, where worldbuilding and story conceits ("Everyone is immortal!" "Everyone has a secret ghost dragon!") feel so sensational. If you cook up a really thrilling series of events for your plot, your characters will almost always become inert pawns. Their personalities will be irrelevant, because their roles will be preordained. All that matters is that they advance the story forward. When this happens, you frequently end up with stock characters: young knave, wise old man, spunky little sister, evil witch. THAT is the breaking point, that's why stories suddenly feel stale, tired, derivative, forgettable. Characters who feel like real, living beings, who are based on real people, who have distinctive personalities and idiosyncrasies -- they will make the story happen without you, the writer, having had to plot much out for them. Events will take place because of their choices. They will almost write the story for you because they seem to have a mind of their own. The stories which arise naturally from good characters are the stories which become enshrined as timeless classics. Sometimes, there's barely even a plot! Good characters will keep your reader/viewer's attention no matter what they do, because they bring their uniqueness to everything, no matter how simple. For example, consider this premise: "________ has to deliver a message." Now imagine filling in the blank with a stock character ("a naive but hopeful young boy"), versus a distinct character like Han Solo, Marge Simpson, Wolverine, Rarity, or Jack Sparrow. When you plug a unique & specific character into that situation, your mind can instantly start to see what they'd do, how they'd get into trouble, how they'd react. The story takes off with them in the driver's seat. You don't have to be the puppetmaster. So when you approach writing, I believe you must start from real people, real personalities, specific things you have gleaned from people you've known. Your friends and family, people from your neighborhood, etc. Once you find the characters who seem to breathe with life, they will show you the way. </ >
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Sep 25, 2012 15:22
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Snowbot posted:Thanks for the advice. Honestly what I really need to do (along with the other stuff) is practice more, I draw maybe one hour a week if that and I should draw one hour a day. However, a lot of people do the dance of draw-erase-draw-erase-draw-erase, constantly interrupting themselves because their line wasn't perfect right away. That kills the flow and usually isn't necessary anyway, because imperfect lines can become invisible if the correct lines are found and emphasized. Whether you erase or not, have it be a liberating experience instead of one which slows you down.
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Nov 13, 2012 20:42
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It takes practice.
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Jun 13, 2013 14:43
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Fangz posted:Are there any good resources for learning to draw animals, cats especially? This Gnomon Workshop video is fantastic.
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Jun 13, 2013 15:39
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Vermain posted:I've been trying to sit down and do at least a few gestures nightly in order to try and hammer home the fundamentals. Would anyone mind giving me some critique? I picked two pages out of the lot that I thought were fairly decent: What is your goal? Can you give an example of what you'd like to be able to draw like?
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Oct 27, 2013 16:47
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CloseFriend posted:My direct drawings have been getting better, but I still don't understand how I can take this knowledge and apply it to drawing from imagination (with reference, of course). To what extent do ratios and negative space and planes carry over when I draw the same object from different angles? Or do I just practice eyeballing all of that? When you work from a book like Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, for example, it gets you from Stage 0, "symbolic drawing" to Stage 1, which is drawing what you actually see instead of a preconceived symbol of it. If your observational drawing skills are still forming, you have to practice a lot to hone your perception of proportion, scale, etc. Negative space is a good strategy for double-checking weird or arbitrary shapes, it gives you something indirect to focus on so your eyes can perceive what's actually there without your intellect interfering. All the exercises from DOTRSOTB are ways to get your eyes involved in the process for the first time. But after you've gotten decent at using your eyes (as it sounds like you have), you have to start bringing the left brain back into the picture through construction. When that happens, "optical" techniques like negative space or blind contour drawing stop being helpful because you're now "building" instead of "copying." If you want your observational drawing to help you invent forms, you have to approach drawing by deconstructing what you see into simple 3D primitives in perspective. Engage your left brain and reconstruct what you see, rather than just copying the superficial surface details. When you look at your subject, take note of the vanishing points and then build up solids on the page through linear perspective. Observational drawing is still important, because it helps keep your drawings from getting too "perfect," monotonous or uninteresting. Observation gives realistic imperfection and character to constructed drawings. But you still have to have a solid geometric foundation underneath.
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Dec 23, 2013 15:50
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pandaK posted:No, not even file size. The preview window says something about the canvas changes, but I don't see any physical differences. OK, it's because you're making the pixel density larger but keeping the canvas size the same. Make the pixel density 300, and then set your image size in inches/cm. Edit: think about it like this: you've got a canvas that you've set to be, say, 500x500 pixels. At 72 pixels per inch, 500 pixels would be a little less than 7 inches wide. At 150 pixels per inch, 500px is 3.33 inches wide. At 500 pixels per inch, 500px is 1 inch wide. At 5000 pixels per inch, 500px is 1/10th of an inch wide. So if you keep making dpi/ppi bigger and bigger and bigger, you're making your 500px canvas smaller and smaller and smaller in real terms. neonnoodle fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Jan 2, 2014 |
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Jan 2, 2014 17:53
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Entenzahn posted:Inbetween the books and video-tuts I get on beginner's drawing I feel like I'm a little overwhelmed with options. There's so many workflows and techniques and crutches, I should practice much more often but I have a hard time getting started. I open my sketchbook and then I don't know whether to make a quick line-drawing, or a contour drawing with terrible crosshatching, or do it like in DWTRSOTB and rub graphite all over my paper and erase the brighter areas.. on top of that I always feel like I'm cheating when I measure things with my pen or block in a still-life. Measuring is not cheating at all, it's a good habit and it never stops being important and useful.
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Jan 9, 2014 16:52
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Bro Enlai posted:I've always used the writing grip, myself. I imagine the overhand grip is mainly intended to avoid smudging, but that's not really an issue with a tablet.
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Jan 11, 2014 01:57
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noggut posted:TLDR: Kevin Chen and Frank J. Reilly Reilly's approach is great and I use his principles more than probably anyone else's. The thing that's nice about Reilly is that he built the idea of aesthetic appeal into his figures as a primary element, not as a superficial later consideration. Rhythm lines train you to look for what is attractive and dynamic in whatever you're looking at. It also makes capturing likenesses a lot easier because of the way different aspects of the face flow into and relate to one another. Loomis was also a Bridgman student but I don't think he brought as much of an original style or voice to his work. Loomis also never quite mastered the oomph of Bridgman's concrete-slab approach to the figure. Better to go back to Bridgman, I think. The late Fred Fixler was a student of Reilly and put some good tips on his web site.
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Jan 23, 2014 23:28
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JuniperCake posted:If it helps, you can also thin a paint by using some turpenoid or maybe some galkyd medium and it'll cover a little more area than it would if you just applied it straight.
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May 31, 2014 15:17
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The Duke of Avon posted:2) Everything says to draw from life and to "draw what you see" but what I want to know is, how the hell do you draw things you don't see? If I draw a person who's sitting in front of me, it's very obviously that person's face, from that angle, in that lighting. But if I try to draw a generic "face" without looking at anything, it probably won't even look human, because I can't picture things in my head clearly and I don't really know what a nose looks like if I'm not looking at one. This is possibly helpful when I'm trying to draw something in front of me, but I'm useless if I try to draw something I can't look at. Is this something that would change on its own if I practiced, or is it a separate skill? However, eventually it will be necessary to use your brain again, and to actually learn what things look like and why. Some people learn the optical approach and they never do anything else. Their work tends to plateau and they become dependent on having something in front of them. That's where the "structural" approach comes in. That involves learning how to deconstruct what you see into solid forms in perspective. The better you get at deconstructing what you see into these solid forms, the better you learn how to construct and turn three-dimensional forms in perspective, the more freedom you will have. So when you say that you don't know what a nose looks like, the structural approach involves looking at a nose and not just seeing the contours/outlines, but the structural nature of the nose: what parts of it are kind of like spheres or boxes or cones or what have you.
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Jul 1, 2014 14:25
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 18:08 |
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Keys to Drawing is the best best best best best best best
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Sep 10, 2014 14:40
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