How Do You Draw From Your Imagination?

[MurkyDreams]

I'm not sure if this question has been asked already, but I made a search and couldn't find it.

How do you develop your skills to draw from your imagination, rather than from life? I guesss you need to draw a lot from life before you can be any decent at drawing from imagination, but is it as simple as that? I've tried drawing from my imagination, but failed miserably. And this just makes me more and more discouraged to draw cause it seems like an almost impossible feat. Are there any specific things that can be done to increase one's ability to draw from their imagination?

[fukifino]

In general I think you need to practice a few things, namely:

-The basic forms
-Perspective

If you learn how to draw and render the basic forms, how to light them, how they interract with each other, you've probably all you really need. Combined with an understanding of perspective and you can place any of those forms anywhere in space. Reduce what you want to draw to basic forms and half your work is done. That gun is an elongated box, that leg is a cylinder, that spaceship is an egg, etc...

For the figure, I think you need a solid grasp of anatomy. Understanding that you can think of the leg as a cylinder is important, but you won't know to think of the knee as a box when viewed from position X without knowing how the knee is constructed and how it reacts when placed in certain positions.

At least...that's my idea of what you need to know. Maybe someone who's actually halfway decent at drawing from imagination will chime in too.

[kgb]

I also think surrounding yourself with lots of reference materials. But never stop drawing from life.

[Red_Rook]

drawing from life effectivly consists of taking an existing object or objects and changing them in some way, preferably towards the more extreme, taking various elements of an object and fusing them together works to, along with creating a story and function for whatever your doing. For instance if your desining a creature, how does it eat breath sleep chew fart sneeze etc.that helps

[jfrancis]

If you can draw a skeleton in a pose, and if you can muscle up that skeleton with some specificity and accuracy, you've gone a long way toward drawing any figure from the imagination.

You asked for "specific" suggestions on learning to draw from imagination. Here's mine:

Get Eliot Goldfinger's anatomy book

Get Poser (eep!) but use it in skeleton mode.

Do this:

http://conceptart.org/forums/showthr...threadid=24932

[Corvus Corax]

Most people have already said what i'm thining,
but i'll put in my 2-bits anyways...

Every thing you draw from you mind originaly comes from somewhere,
something you have see before,
Real life drawing is the key to drawing stuff from your mind.
For a while I would only draw stuff from my mind and after a while my pictures seemed to go out of perportion,
or maybe I was just noticing their flaws more and more,
So i realised, with a bit of help from another artist,
that I needed to practice more stuff from life.
I've been doing that lately
and it seems to be helping