Too Stubborn To Stop

[ebi]

just a thumbnail



Currently focusing on:
Gestures
Loomis studies
(soon)) using myself as substitute live model
proper set up still life


(2013)

This year is going to be mostly about fun. Because if I'm not having fun, I won't learn anything.

My only problem is that I'm a lot like this when drawing:


So I do need to remind myself to slow down every now and then




(2012)

Just continuing where I left off, I guess. People, don't ever get repetitive strain injury. It sucks.


My drawing a limit is 5 min. to one hour a day, depending on my arms, so don't expect any major improvement for the next 200 pages.
I'm seriously contemplating shoving a pencil up my nostril and drawing like that just to extend my drawing time.

I switched from manikins to wooden blocks and cylinders and wooden farm animals apparently.
Going to try and understand the basics for the next 12 weeks and then I can start drawing lessons.


(2011)

revised my plan 'cause the other one was a dead-set plan to burning out.

New, more sane plan:

- Just draw and use whatever book I deem useful at the time
- No tight schedules/deadlines/"must-do's".
- Have fun.
- Stay away from computer (no programming :'() (the more I use the computer, even with speech recognition, the longer recovery from RSI takes >_< I got it from knitting btw how ridiculous is that )
- Report back here as often as I can.

Tada!
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(2010)
Here's some hands I did, as one of my last exercises from the Betty Edwards' book. They're a bit off though
When I draw them, I kind of feel like I'm cheating...







See you soon!

[nickydraws]

Good start. Working through some of Betty Edwards' exercises seems appropriate for your skill level right now, but I wouldn't waste much time on Nicolaides. There are some interesting ideas in that book but I don't think it gives you very good results. The scribbly drawings in the book are a good example of how you'll be drawing. Loomis is good. Keep going.

[ebi]

Thanks for the encouragement!
After about six lessons (6 x 3 hours) of Nicolaides I kind of decided that it isn't for me at the moment. It was kind of taking the fun out of drawing so I put that aside, though I liked doing the scribbly gestures hehe.

I'm currently starting over with DORSOB, and after that will probably continue with the keys to drawing, before moving on to Loomis. But I agree, Loomis seems good. Less intimidating than the other books.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As uneventful as they are, I'll probably post my DORSOB results here as a way to keep this sketchbook going. Apologies in advance.

From this point on I'm instilling my new motto:
type less, draw more.

*sorry for any weird sentences.
I got Dragon Naturally Speaking to take the strain of my arms/wrists, but...this program seems to have a life of it's own!

[Passhunate]

These hands look pretty good. Keep drawing from life.

[Saramel]

Looking good so far - as long as it's just for study, and you are giving credit where credit is due, no need to feel like you are cheating! A very important component of studies for most arists and in an academic setting is "master studies" - drawing/painting "copies" of master works to try and figure out with your hand what your eye couldn't as far as technique, color mixing, proportion, composition, etc. As long as you give credit and use it just for learning, you are fine.

Also, I'd love to see some hands done with basic shapes - I think that will help you understand why one hand looks correct, while another might feel "off". Loomis and many others have exercises for this.

Hope you are feeling better, can't wait to see more!

[ebi]

here comes a big rant.

I'm sorry it's taken such a long time. I really wish I could just saw off these arms and replaced them with really cool robot arms. I have hardly done any drawing in the past months. And I'm really tired of starting Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain over and over and over again.

I managed to do one more hand, a really long time ago, holding a pair of scissors... But that's pretty much it.

I'm thinking of switching over to Keys to Drawing... and maybe that really snazzy hardcover version of Figure Drawing for What It's Worth:p a new book with new exercises .

But I still need to find a way to make the actual drawing part less painful.
it doesn't help that I usually have a death grip on my pencils.

Maybe I'll start using a timer. draw for 5 min, take a really long break....
And I guess now is to perfect time to practice spending more time looking at the object then looking at the paper...
Or maybe I can instil a line limit lol. It really sucks, because I also need to think about taking notes for school and stuff.


sorry for any misplaced words etc. I'm still using speech recognition software.



this hand and the scissorss still seems to look quite off, but I can''t wrap my mind around wh what makes them look off.. well, at least he hand...
I think I will focus on shapes from our own though. And not just my hands:p

[p sage]

Aw man.... Betty Edwards + Nicolaides = recipe for frustration, IMO.

(Check the link in my sig)

Vilppu, Michael Hampton, Bridgman, Loomis, Bammes, and any of the construction methods would be far better for learning the figure IMO... even the Charles Bargue method.

"Learning to see" is a nice catchphrase, but in reality it's more like "learning to think and interpret and filter what you see".

[ebi]

I agree! especially using Nicolaides. Though I did like the gesture drawings

I now have a book from Loomis on the way! I'm really excited about it, because I have this book as a PDF on my computer ... but I never use it, because I hate using the computer to read books.

I have some of the Bridgeman books, but I find them a bit intimidating at the moment, Loomis' tone is a lot lighter it seems. so I'm saving the Bridgeman books for when I'm more confident.
Hopefully I'll be able to get some of the Vilppu videos around Christmas


I also got a little water colour set (from Koh-I-Noor), though now I regret not buying tubes...
On the other hand, I think this is a nice little set (and it has a lot of colours) that I can use to learn more about water colours.
I figured that, when my arms start to hurt from drawing, I can switch to painting for a bit. Though I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing.

likewise, I got a bunch of nibs and some ink to add some variety ( to my movements/the way I hold a pen etc. as that really helps).

hopefully this way I can draw moar and hurt less:p

[ebi]

Exercises from "Vanishing Point"


don't know why I wrote digital.





Copying Loomis

I feel really sorry for this guy.

i'm wondering whether I should switch to just drawing basic shapes from life first , or if I should stick to doing the exercises from the perspective book and copying the drawings from Loomis' book:/

I think regarding watercolor am going to switch to tubes as I really hate "contaminating" my pans with another color (e.g. when I accidentally let a drop of dark blue fall onto a pan of orange, it drives me crazy).

but I'm wondering what colors I should get...
I kind of want to limit myself to 3 to 4 colors (since I'm on a budget), but I'm not sure which...
Right now I'm thinking of burnt sienna, yellow ocher, turquoise and davy's grey...

I really like the colors in the drawings from Tatsuyuki Tanaka's Cannabis Works, but I'm not sure which colors to pick to be able to emulate those...
http://www.amazon.co.jp/gp/customer-...e=UTF8&index=0

I'm also wondering about watercolor paper....
Since I'm just starting out, should I directly go to 300g/sm or should I go for slightly cheaper paper that's 200g/sm?

and I am also wondering about brushes...
I only have a fan brush, a really big and a small square brush and some of those "standard?" thin sable brushes..
but I read somewhere that a squirrel mop brush is a must ( but they are also $$$ )...

[ebi]

jar, take one



Jar, take two







copying from loomis. I wonder if I should get one of those wooden puppets so I can create my own poses...(I'm not yet ready to draw people from life).





Fun with watercolors (copied)

[ebi]

more fun with watercolours.

[ebi]

I finally found a treatment for my arms that sort of works

Typing is still painful, but I can draw again ..sort of *celebrates*

not much, but it's a start.



what I was trying to draw in 30 minutes



I also did a bunch of quick sketches etc. but bleh.

Tomorrow I'll try it again but I'll double the time to see if it makes a difference.

Also, I need to break this habit of drawing/writing everything a bit slanted!

[ebi]

1) I have this feeling that I'm doing the whole gesture thing completely wrong.

2) I'm also having some trouble just drawing blocks.

Just to clarify...
When people say that you should start by drawing blocks and cylinders and spheres, do they mean that you put, say, a cube in front of you and draw exactly that?

Or do they mean you put the cube in front of you and just use it for reference... Or in other words, you think up cube on your paper, but you look at the real cube to see what the lighting does and... uhm.. Things like that.

Because, so far, and as you might tell from the above picture,I find it pretty impossible to just sketch a cube and get all the angles/everything right without a ruler. :/

[ebi]

did some more but scanning = pain.

[takashmen]

hello there

what can i say, you have good plan, but missed some important things
the most important is theoretical background
rules of perspective for eg.
here's thread i set some time ago maybe it will help http://conceptart.org/forums/showthr...op-Study-Group

also i'd rather recommend you to buy hampton or some figure drawing book more up to date then loomis
http://www.amazon.ca/Figure-Drawing-.../dp/0615272819

the best of the best option is to purchase Vilppu Figure Drawing Class, videos are more helpful cause you actually see it

if you have more questions ask anytime

[ebi]

Thanks for the encouragement!

At the moment, perspective is a big problem for me. I have three books about the subject, one of them is "vanishing point" by Jason Cheeseman Meyer. I like that but the best, because it explains everything pretty well… But, I have no idea how to apply what I learned there to real life.

For instance first you learn about one-point perspective and then at the end your homework assignment is to find a room with lots of rectangular shapes and to just draw what you see. But I have no idea how to find the vanishing point in real life, especially not when I'm sitting in front of a wall. Really Confused about That.

Anyway, today I have mostly watched YouTube videos on drawing cubes as I rested my arms a bit haha. I did a bunch of sketching but I'm not happy with it, so I'll come back later tonight to do some more drawing (I guess I'll try that homework assignment, even if it's going to suck..and I really should clean my room so I have less crap to focus on) and upload some stuff here.


edit:



Uhm...yeah... This was my third attempt. I had no idea what the hell I was doing. I think I'll just stick to simpler things for now.

I had fun though. So... maybe I'll continue.. but I'll keep these drawings to myself and won't post them here.

[ebi]

woohoo

I managed to draw for about one hour today! First time in like six months that I could do that! I have a feeling the fat clutch pencil has something to do with that.

Though, I did push my luck a bit …I used the computer way too much today so my arms are still really sore. after this week I can rest my arms for two whole weeks (safe for my daily drawing session ).

There were only two gestures that I felt sort of happy with, really trying to limit the amount of lines I use for gestures. I have a tendency to just start drawing the whole figure, which is wrong for this type of exercise.





I started taking pictures of myself to use, instead of pose maniacs. Maybe if I get good at posing I can earn some money as a live model haha.

Then I sketched some real-life things. unhappy about the Box, Sort of Happy about the Mouse, Though While I Know That it's probably the least of my worries, I should've paid better attention to the shadows they should be a little bit more round if that makes sense, the curves are too sharp?

[ebi]

I wasn't able to do a lot today. I had to work on an unexpected deadline from school, which involved a lot of writing/computer work, so that ruined all my drawing plans.
But, I wanted to produce at least something so here it is.



reference XD

[ebi]

Some things:

1. Perhaps it's a better idea to draw in the morning/afternoon, as by night time my brain is too frazzled to focus and I quickly become impatient with my drawing (e.g the scissors lol).

2. Starting "Vanishing Point" again.

3. I kind of wanted to do this self-portrait thing today... But going through the Loomis book (and attempting to make a start) really demotivated me lol, so my goal for next year is to enter a self-portrait on 1 November! (and to start practicing now, no matter how much I suck).

[ebi]

I couldn't draw as much as I wanted to today. I think it's cause I switched to a thinner pencil and I got a little stressed out from today's exam which equals aching arms.

if anyone knows where I can find a super chunky clutch pencil that holds 0.5-1.0mm leads… please let me know!!


One of the muscles on my right hand is spazzing so much it's like there's a little alien baby in my hand… freaky :/

nevertheless, I hope I can finish the first chapter from vanishing point this weekend. I'm now at the part where I have to draw a scene with train tracks, but it's giving me a lot of trouble (it's kind of like the tile floor drawing, but it doesn't start exactly in the middle.)

Maybe I should work with A3 paper and a larger ruler?





I also got some cheap(er than what I ordered) oil paints/canvases/brushes) to get an idea how oil paints work…


So I made a little scale thingy… only to find out that I probably did it wrong :p





Also I don't think I will scan wet paint again XD
(don't worry, I used a plastic sheet in between the scanners glass and the canvas!).

[ebi]

I started on the train tracks assignment from the book, but it's drawing all those lines with my ruler once again isn't the greatest thing for my arms. Maybe if I can find a ruler with a handle or something, perhaps that will help….. Maybe I can glue one of those stress balls onto it.
Anyway, I have to start over three times but finally I managed to get some train tracks that look okay, tomorrow I'll finish the other train tracks and starts to fill in the drawing with a train and some other stuff.

For some reason, painting doesn't have as much of an effect on my arms as drawing, so I attempted to use my oil paints, just for fun…
hopefully I can get this perspective thing down fast so I can apply it to real life and so I can start painting more soon!

I try to paint one of the wooden sheep that I got, but in the end I got a little too caught up on getting the colors right and so the back is a bit botched and the legs too.



Rference:

[ebi]

More cubes. Using the yoitisi tut.
I also drew on three A3 sheets, but those are too big for my scanner there even worse than these cubes so I didn't bother to scan them.







The train track assignment has been canceled for now because I think the train I'm supposed to draw there is beyond my level, so I decided to just try and draw a street view from some Google pictures.
You cant see it very well in this picture, but this is it so far. There are already tons of mistakes in there, so I might just finish it and then start a new one.





My biggest problem, at least the thing I worry about the most, is when you're drawing, say, streetlights… they're all probably a few meters apart, but how do you keep this space in between them consistent in perspective?


Since my arms are aching again, I'll stop drawing for today. Maybe continue with some painting

[ebi]

All right!

Today I managed to break another record! Two hours of drawing and about two hours of painting.
I really like how painting doesn't affect my arms as much, so when I have to stop drawing I can still do a little bit of painting

I don't have much to show for the painting, actually at first I started with the simple cube drawing… but I wasn't paying attention to color/whatever At All. So at first I was all "woo hoo I'm painting!", And then I was like WTF IS THIS 0_o



So then I started over again, this time actually trying to look how light works and how the colors relate to each other (with a little bit of help from the color scale I made up there) and I think it turned out a lot better.



though the part where the cube is resting on should probably be darker as I put it on a dark blue, clothbound sketchbook. but I was too afraid to mess up my painting so I decided to stop.

(I was using some sort of UFO shaped light source with a ring of LEDs around this huge cluster of LEDs, so that's why there's like a white beam there...I need to find find myself a normal desk light)


I really liked trying out my new brushes! Though my Chungking flat brushes don't look new and shiny anymore :/

[ebi]

and then my arms started to hurt again. Lesson learned! I shouldn't draw beyond my pain threshold. I shouldn't even get near it. Anyway, after some rest and was able to draw some again. But I think from now on I'll only update maybe once or twice a week, so I won't have to face the computer as much.


this is really bad, but hopefully I will laugh at it once I'm better.


I feel like I should do other stuff, then just trying cute.
Not trying cute, drawing CUBES. Speech recognition software*shakes head*


don't really know what this is (found it lying about the house), but this drawing makes me want to learn more about shading and such. So I can make more realistic graphics. Drawings, not graphics.


this is really crappy, but I intend to do more of these with other objects to get better.


try to do some crosshatching, but since the fruit, whatever this is (I think it's for decoration or something?", has purple lines I found it really hard to indicate what is part of the fruit and part of the shaking. Shaking with a D instead of K.


I ended up switching my gestures with the manikins from Loomis, I find it a lot easier to get the right posture with these, instead of my weird scribbles. But I really need to pay attention to proportion!

Well, that's it for now.

[ebi]

I always feel a bit guilty when I skip a day or more uploading things to my sketchbook
my arms still hurts, and now my spine feels bruised so… what the hell!


Anyway, I managed to do some more "gestures" and I plan to do more of those in the following weeks.

[ebi]

Just some pictures from magazines. Shading makes me feel like I'm cheating. Am I cheating?

Drawing essentials by Deborah Rockman will be arriving this week, so then hopefully that will help me to progress in drawing from life. I'm really looking forward to receiving it!

Also, from now on, just assume that pretty much every new post will start with: I hate RSI.
I seriously do not get it. One week will be virtually pain-free and the next week all I have to do these sneeze and it's back full force.
So, even if I'm going at a snails pace, at least I'm getting something down on paper, which in my opinion is always better than nothing.
Currently I'm still practicing the little stick figures from Loomis, as I discovered that I keep screwing up the more advanced ones, so I figured I probably don't really understand the stick figures enough.

And, even though the drawing them from life would be better, I'm giving faces to a go now. Once I get over my "fear" for drawing eyes, then I'll start drawing them from life.

[ebi]

Instead of bashing myself for every line I put onto the paper, and starting over, with a new sheet of paper, every single time...
I'm finally starting to realize how making mistakes can help you get better. So, I made heavy use of the eraser (I didn't buy three erasers for nothing, though I've already lost two)... And corrected every line I didn't like to do best of my ability! Yay for progress!

Of course it's still not perfect, and I didn't realize how lumpy the shape was until I scanned it... But, for the first time in a long time, I realize how nice it can be to JUST DRAW.

The thing I was trying to draw was some rubber/foam ball that's used for RSI, as it was the only spherical object in my room. Now, I really want to try my hand at clear glass marbles or shiny Christmas decorations.

And, I really need to invest in a good desk light, because the UFO light I'm using just doesn't cut it for this kind of stuff.

[ebi]

You should also assume that pretty much everything I write in the following posts will start with "I know that this is far from perfect/sucks/looks horrible."etc.
I'm trying really hard not to actually write that, for the sake of feeling good about drawing and knowing that if I keep it up I will improve somehow, quite possibly. But I am painfully aware at how much I still need to learn a lot!




This one is freaking embarrassing, I try to draw my own nose with the help of the mirror, then decided to draw the rest of my face around it but as you can see… yeah, no comment .

I will probably add some more stuff later on, I want to copy at least some bones from this big book of anatomy for artists (I have no idea what bones I am copying though, because everything is in German

edit

shoulder blade?? + my pencil is too fat for shading drawings byb crosshatching :/



I finally got my "drawing essentials" book! the good thing is that it clearly tells you what to do and what to watch out for (e.g. not tilting your measuring stick when you're trying to draw stuff that's foreshortened ), so it's really easy to apply it to your drawing. The only thing that's hard for me is to judge at what point I have to put the book down and draw, because I have a tendency to just keep reading until the end of the chapter. Tomorrow I will prepare my "sighting stick" + view finder and start using it!

I also have "how to draw cars the hot wheels way" on my way from the US (it seems sold out in most places, but Barnes & Noble still have copies of the book), so that should be fun to!

I have decided, just as a goal to keep me on the right track, that I want to get good enough at drawing to be able to do industrial design! No idea how feasible that is, but it's nice to think about and a good kick in the ass when I feel like I'll never get good enough.


Maybe it's because I have finally accepted that I am going to suck for a long time, so I should just suck it up… But it’s less daunting to draw from life now!

Anyway, a couple of things I should probably consider for the next couple of weeks:
A) babble less, draw more (Though it's very easy to "write" too much when you have speech recognition software)
B) Take more time for each drawing, instead of rushing them.
C) Start drawing more from life, with the help of "drawing essentials", perhaps focused more on the line drawings more than shading.
D) Used the eraser more!
E) point D times 100
F) Don't be satisfied with the first try (Which, once again will lead me to point D)

[ebi]

I spent about 40 to 45 min. on this and yet it looks like I drew it in 5 min.
Is it possible to be too focused on using a measuring stick?
Maybe I should stick to drawing fruit for some time?

Same goes for the cubes, I spent like an hour drawing cubes and they all look crappy.

[Ryan Provenzano]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ektQPOQ9HeM
Hmmm well I think if you want to do cube/box exercises, this guy will help you out a bit. Try moving them across your paper as if you were animating it. He also explains why the exercise is significant.
I like everything you are doing here. Still lifes are great practice. Although it looks like you need to practice your ellipses a bit.