Looking for a mentor

**sektor2814** · June 11th, 2009, 01:46 AM

Hi all:

I know I do not post here often, but I thought I would give this a try. I desire to be a comic book illustrator, but I wish to improve my drawing and pen control skills before stylizing my figures. There are a lot of problems with my art, but here are a few I have managed to observe in my own work. I am seeking out a mentor who could help me with my art, as I do not really know what exercises would be a suitable remedy for some of these problems.

1) I lack confidence in my line art. I use a lot of back-and-forth strokes and do not have enough pen control to draw accurate "C" and "S" curves. This is especially problematic when drawing figures, such as women, or even hair. I also have difficulty drawing accurate, sweeping straight lines and my line art comes out rather messy with those back-and-forth strokes or hairy lines.

2) I have been told I have approach, observation and priority problems when it comes to drawing (i.e. when drawing from life, and I am never really sure how to approach something). This happens quite a bit when I'm trying to draw something I see in the proper proportions and perspective, and I use the wrong approach or think far too hard.

3) When drawing from life my portraits come out looking somewhat stylized and I have trouble making them look photorealistic. An example of what I'm talking about can be found at this deviation on my DA page here http://sektor2814.deviantart.com/art...-Jon-125188556

4) I have difficulty with some pencil techniques in general, like various forms of pencil rendering, hatching/cross-hatching, and textures.

5) I have difficulty properly and convincingly applying light and shade (especially with hatching and cross-hatching), which I guess is also part of what is causing #4 above.

6) I have difficulty successfully applying linear perspective to drawings made from life observation (like a room I'm looking at), and I can never really tell where the horizon line is supposed to be.

Please let me know if anyone could help me with this. Thanks.

**dcorc** · June 17th, 2009, 12:28 PM

Originally Posted by sektor2814

Hi all:

I know I do not post here often, but I thought I would give this a try. I desire to be a comic book illustrator, but I wish to improve my drawing and pen control skills before stylizing my figures. There are a lot of problems with my art, but here are a few I have managed to observe in my own work. I am seeking out a mentor who could help me with my art, as I do not really know what exercises would be a suitable remedy for some of these problems.

I'm increasingly "unsure" about this mentoring forum - I see quite a few people posting here who have made very few posts on the site, don't have a sketchbook (OK, I know I don't have one myself here, currently!), looking for one-to-one mentoring, when they've often dealing with pretty standard problems discussed in lots of other threads on the site, or where there are already relevant demos in the downloadable content etc. I think a lot of the people asking for mentors would do better to make a sketchbook, and read discussions in other sketchbooks, the critique forum, art discussions forum, etc.

One thing good about your comment here is that you are self-critiquing, you have identified specific issues you feel are problems to be worked on.

While I'm not offering my services as an ongoing mentor here, as such, perhaps by discussing the points you raise it might still be of some help? And if others feel my advice is incorrect, it might stimulate some further discussion?

1) I lack confidence in my line art. I use a lot of back-and-forth strokes and do not have enough pen control to draw accurate "C" and "S" curves. This is especially problematic when drawing figures, such as women, or even hair. I also have difficulty drawing accurate, sweeping straight lines and my line art comes out rather messy with those back-and-forth strokes or hairy lines.

I'm not really a line-art person, I'm an oilpainter and I'm mainly interested in just using line to establish initial placements, but here goes - are you drawing large, drawing from the shoulder and elbow rather than wrist and fingers? Even if your eventual aim is inked comic panels, some experience doing large fast charcoal drawing might be of help? Also, how about doing "clean-up" - re-drawing good lines onto a fresh sheet with a lightbox for example?

2) I have been told I have approach, observation and priority problems when it comes to drawing (i.e. when drawing from life, and I am never really sure how to approach something). This happens quite a bit when I'm trying to draw something I see in the proper proportions and perspective, and I use the wrong approach or think far too hard.

There's an excellent thread going currently about observational vs constructive approaches to life-drawing. The commonest thing I see in a lot of work is bad proportions because people are concentrating on detail prematurely. It seems to me that all the successful drawing methods use some sort of pre-drawing stage to block-in the general proportions, whether it be plotting out points as per Bargue/sight-size, drawing an "envelope" around the basic shapes as per Tony Ryder and others, Nicolaides/Villpu gesture, or doing construction based on geometric solids as per Loomis/Bridgeman etc

3) When drawing from life my portraits come out looking somewhat stylized and I have trouble making them look photorealistic. An example of what I'm talking about can be found at this deviation on my DA page here http://sektor2814.deviantart.com/art...-Jon-125188556

Think "planes of the head" and "values" - check out Tony Ryder's book on figure drawing. Also, for (photo)realism, think more in terms of mass-drawing than line.

4) I have difficulty with some pencil techniques in general, like various forms of pencil rendering, hatching/cross-hatching, and textures.

Me too !

5) I have difficulty properly and convincingly applying light and shade (especially with hatching and cross-hatching), which I guess is also part of what is causing #4 above

Start out light, apply "washes" of tone. Lots of lightly-applied hatched areas will build into convincing tone - check out David Kassan's foot demo here:
http://www.davidkassan.com/foot_demo.html

(you'll need to scroll down to see the various stages). Note how his shading follows the with/across the form. One point David commented to me is that people often leave much of the skin as white paper, whereas he tends to take the general tone down, reserve white just for highlights.

Try to think of big forms, and assigning values to planes in relation to their angle to the lightsource. General arrangements of values need to be consistent across big forms. Detail modulates these, rather than overriding them altogether.

6) I have difficulty successfully applying linear perspective to drawings made from life observation (like a room I'm looking at), and I can never really tell where the horizon line is supposed to be.

Horizon-line's easy - its always at eye-level - it cuts through anything, at any distance, at the same height above the ground as your eyes are. As to application - try making a view-frame out of a couple of L-shaped bits of stiff cardboard, and fix the position of that and your viewpoint, so you are framing a specific scene, see if that helps at all?

Please let me know if anyone could help me with this. Thanks.

Hope it might help, or encourage others to join in and comment?

Dave

**dcorc** · June 19th, 2009, 05:05 AM

...and that's another problem with this mentoring forum - a lot of the time, I see posts (and who knows how many PMs) which, although they took the member who wrote them (in this instance, myself) quite a bit of time and effort... they seem to have been shot off into the middle of a black hole, because the OP doesn't either see them at all, or if he/she does, doesn't reply and give any feedback. (Though in this case, people might reasonably argue its my own silly fault for bothering, considering the OP said "I know I do not post here often").

In other words, for those of you asking for a mentor, please check your threads (subscribing to them for email notification is a good idea), and please, if you do get a response from someone, reply so they don't feel like they've wasted their time.

**sektor2814** · June 26th, 2009, 07:00 PM

Oh, sorry! I did not even see this! I thought it had been ignored, and I forgot to subscribe to this. I have also been really busy and concentrating on the exercises and assignments for my mentorship. This was really helpful, thank you! I will try and write up a formal reply when I have some more time to read everything and investigate some of the techniques and readings you mentioned.

The reason I do not post very much is because, while I have been registered for some time, I have been very busy with school/family/work/etc. and have not had much to show. I am involving myself in a mentorship in the hopes of improving my line art quality and hope to be posting here much more in the times to come. I apologize for my lack of involvement.

**dcorc** · June 26th, 2009, 07:13 PM

Sorry - I'd guessed you'd probably not seen it - really, I'm trying to get a general message across to people not to forget to check their threads when they get a chance (as its another factor which I'm sure puts people off the idea of mentoring) - anyway, hope the post's of some help. Happy to try to answer any questions, if I can.

Dave