General Questions and Discussion

[yoitisi]

Allright, this is the place for everyone to shout out loud what you think, feel or want to know about that does not immediately concern the assignments at hand. You may even post the results of the football game of your local club as far as I'm concerned :D Complaints or tips are allowed as well.

Also, if you're not one of my mentees but want to ask something about the assignments, this is the place.

[yoitisi]

I posted a sort of list in the Assignment area in the first post. If you were curious of where we're heading with all this, take look at it. I might add a few things and maybe change the order a little, but for now it'll give you an idea of what I'll do in the coming weeks.

[UnSharpened]

I have just come up with a idea of how to draw cubes in 2-point perspective, so I kind of draw the cube by using the method reversely in assignment2. Though maybe it's not necessary to do that:^^;:.
http://i215.photobucket.com/albums/cc33/matining/IDWquestion.jpg

[yoitisi]

Unsharpened: Uhm, you mean a cube above the horizon seen from below right? In that case, yeah it would probably work that way. In the end though, I want you to drop the drawing of the horizontal and the angles and do it all intuitively and by eye, in which case the method doesn't really mather all that much anymore :)

[arttorney]

It's going to be awesome to learn a systematized approach to drawing ellipses. Eyeballing them usually seems to lead to inconsistency within the drawing. We glossed over ellipses in perspective pretty damn fast in Drawing I last year. Basically I just got a handout that doesn't make very much sense.

[yoitisi]

Arttorney: Yeah there's going to be some mathematics involved again, and a couple of ways to guide and control the ellipses. Eyeballing them is still a bit of the process in the end I'm afraid, but at least I can tell you what to look for :) I'll have to get my story together and make some examples first though.

[enrigo]

ellipses are really tricky even with constructions, maybe that's only true for me, in the end you seems to have to rely on a steady hand and sharp eyes to get a good curve. It's so useful but I hate it :ore:

[yoitisi]

Enrigo: I forgot to say, but we'll get to that as well :) Drawing ellipses is actually not that difficult, the most difficult part is getting them where you want them. Again, I'll try to explain it all tomorrow or at least make a start then.

[UnSharpened]

Dose the pose affect your drawing?
I don't have a decent work table. It's big enough, yet I still wish I can have a better work table.
http://i215.photobucket.com/albums/cc33/matining/IDDquetion1.jpg
These are the ways I draw ID stuff. I found it's easier for me to draw straight line if I stand, but I get tired quicker. On the other hand, it's not easy to draw nice straight line if I sit. Just wondering how you guys draw ID stuff:P.

[enrigo]

standing seems kind of strange, I think sitting down and try to make room for your arm movement seems to be the best idea.

[yoitisi]

Unsharpened: Hmm there is something to say for all of these, I think it's mainly a personal choice. For example, the reason you draw better straight lines standing is because your arm and in fact your whole body has more freedom of movement, and therefore it's easier to use your whole body in one sweeping motion for your lines as opposed to sitting down and drawing form the elbow. I know a couple of people who like to draw standing (including myself since I got me a proper architects drawing table :)).

Pose 1 in your image is much more usefull though when doing rough thumbnails and little doodles that don't require huge sweeping motions. Pose 3 might be a bit awkward for two reasons, the first is that your drawing board is quite unstable. The second reason is that your sheet of paper isn't on or near to a 90 degree angle on the line from your eyes to the sheet. The same happens in pose 2. The problem with this is that your sheet adds its own real time perpective to your drawings, which you'll only notice if you hold your sketch up and view it from a distance (your cubes for example might be higher than you estimated because your angle of view on the sheet foreshortened your drawings). It took me a while to realise this myself when I started out drawing ID stuff in my first year, but ever since I make sure I check my drawings from right above to avoid this particular problem. A table that you can change the angle of working surface of is therefore very usefull :)

[enrigo]

How do you draw the final thick line on the cylinder ? I try going slow and it turns out too wobbly and when I go fast it usually get way off.

It has been something that bothers me for a while, when I need to trace a good line out of the sketchy ones.

[yoitisi]

Enrigo: Hmm good one. When doing straight lines, I usually make a couple of quick lines over each other to get a thicker line. If it's a big drawing however, I do it more slowly. For cilinders I do it slowly as well, as quick lines tend to become pointy at the ends instead of continueing the ellips. However, once we get to cast shadows things get a little easier on this point :).

[arttorney]

Practicing the lines and ellipses is making it noticeably easier for me to draw a long curve or line in ink without the squiggles.

Golfers call it "the yips" when you are trying to putt and you just have some kind of perverse tendency to hit the ball in a totally wrong direction. I can feel when the yips are about to happen to me in the middle of a line now. At least with dip pens on bristol board I can get away with stopping the pen on the paper and waiting for a second to get my mind squared away before I proceed. I don't know if you can stop with fineliners and get away with it, though. I doubt if one could stop like that on regular paper with a dip pen either.

Sometimes my hand just wants to twitch for no apparent reason. Drawing can become an act of will mastering your own subconscious.

[yoitisi]

Arttorney: I've got that too when I had too much coffee or simply am worked up too much. Usually jumping around and bouncing off the ceiling and walls helps :D (or just quit on the caffeine...) Seriously though, maybe try to relax a bit more. Sometimes when I get really concentrated while working on something and suddenly snap out of my concentration I get scared into those sudden yips as you call them. It might come from fear of making the wrong move while wanting a straight line, which of course only makes it worse. If you encounter this, it sometimes works to just draw the same straight line all over again (a couple of lines in on top of each other shouldn't be a problem if you draw thin lines).

[arttorney]

Ha ha. It's like tightrope walking. You can go along like "everything is cool ... everything is cool... " and then when you think "Hey wait a minute I could screw this up." and all of a sudden you are in trouble. It was a big help for me when I realized that more often than not, a screw up will be covered by the hatching or something anyway. Thinking that "it's not the end of the world either way" helps me to relax a lot.

[UnSharpened]

Drawing from life. That's the best and most useful advice, probably most often as well to me. Yet I am still wondering, is studying photos, watching TV, movie or whatever to do with drawing from life? I found that I don't really go out for sketching a lot, the time which I have chance to draw real people is only in my life drawing class. Now I am planing to do more study from photos, thus I just want to make sure whether the way I am going for is cohesive to the principle of drawing from life.

Thanks for any suggestion from you guys:D.

[enrigo]

Drawing from life. That's the best and most useful advice, probably most often as well to me. Yet I am still wondering, is studying photos, watching TV, movie or whatever to do with drawing from life? I found that I don't really go out for sketching a lot, the time which I have chance to draw real people is only in my life drawing class. Now I am planing to do more study from photos, thus I just want to make sure whether the way I am going for is cohesive to the principle of drawing from life.

Thanks for any suggestion from you guys:D.

I'm in a similar situation too, but the life drawing class I signed up for was canceled so I never draw any figure from life at all. :(

I would love to know what is the best thing to do in this case, should I draw fruits and stuff from life or figures from photos(to learn some anatomy)? :mod:

[yoitisi]

Arttorney: Funny thing is, in my first year I was terribly afraid of messing my drawings up beyond repair. The last couple of years my confidence in my own skill has grown a bit I must say, but the most important thing I learned is that even while drawing with pen and markers, there always is a way to correct mistakes. If something really gets out of control there's always the big black marker and white pencil :D It helps to experience this as you become less afraid of messing it up and subsequently you mess things up less.

UnSharpened, Enrigo: A little confession here...I've never done a minute of :lifedrawing: in my life...alright maybe I did some self portraits and I did draw a couple of people a long time ago, but that is it. I do use reference photos for anatomy and all, but I also look around and try to remember what I see. Actually, I'll have my first human figure drawing class somewhere in March and I am kind of nervous already :P Probably not the best thing to say this I guess, but it is unfortunately true. I did however draw a couple of objects and apples and stuff from life. I recommend those as well as drawing from photo's, as it trains your eye to really look at the world and figure out colors and stuff. Also, always keep your eyes open. It should become a second nature to analyze your surroundings and thinking about how you would draw it. It might sound kind of crazy and weird, but it has helped me greatly in developing my visual library. Drawing from photographs is in my experience a little easier than doing the real life drawing thing, as the subject won't move or change that much :)

Blah long story, I should probably try to figure out how I got this far with my art as I realised when reading about other peoples process I kind of did things the hard (and wrong) way. Might post some very old drawings in here sometime to show how it all started :D

[UnSharpened]

A little confession here...I've never done a minute of :lifedrawing: in my life...alright maybe I did some self portraits and I did draw a couple of people a long time ago, but that is it.


Really? It's surprising!:P. Yet your work is still fascinating, I guess that's how you apply your daily observation from life into your work. I understand what you said. One thing difficult of drawing from life is that I get distracted easily:^^;:, plus, yap, the photos are static. So I think that I still have to force my self to take my sketchbook to where ever I go.:P Just training to do more observation.

[yoitisi]

I'm afraid the next assignment will take me a while longer, I still have to structure the story and make most of the example drawings :( There is a project deadline coming up this Thursday so hopefully after that I'll have more time. In the meantime, check out the older assignments again if you want to practice.

[Khornate]

Hi, was just wondering if there's any more positions available to join in the class.

I'm a first year industrial design student this year and could really use the help to sharpen my drawing skills.

[yoitisi]

I guess it's time for a public statement here, as my mentorship has slowed down to a halt as it seems :(

Updating and making all the examples became a bit of a problem the last couple of months as there were a couple of projects and clients that kept me quite busy, so the tempo with which I updated here was slowly decreasing. On top of that, or maybe because of this, it seems I lost a couple of students.

Now that I have a few weeks holiday I had hoped that I could update it a bit more frequently, but only a couple of students left and the fact that I need to work on my own portfolio for a while, I think it's better to tell everyone that the next update will have to wait for a while.

I do intend to put up some new stuff one day, as there is much more to tell yet. However, I might change the structure a bit so it becomes more of a tutorial than a mentorship, so it can be open to everyone. I might start a second class someday as well, but so far I don't have plans for that.

I'd like to thank all the students that kept up with me and with the lessons, I think most of you have something out of it :)

[Anid Maro]

Hey Yoitisi, I'd like to thank you for doing as much as you did do. Though I never directly participated I learnt a lot by reading through the assignments and working some of them out in my sketchbook. The shadow construction stuff in particular, I swear I spent at least a week messing around with that in my sketchbook.

So thanks again, and I look forward to when you have the time you need to return to this.