mymodernmet.com: Drawing is one of the most basic ways to exercise your creativity. Whether you’re using a pencil, pen, crayon, or even your fingers, the skills you gain from the activity translate to a bevy of different media. Learning the fundamentals is simple to do, but like all art, they require a lot of practice to master. But once you do, you’ll have the ability create images you’re truly proud of.
6 comments:
I think it is interesting how this article suggests that you start your drawings with light lines. The drawing teachers I had in high school always made me and all the other beginners draw with the darkest lead pencil, usually a 6B or an 8B. I very much disliked having to use the darker pencils, because no matter how light I tried to mark lightly, or no matter how much I erased, I could not get rid of the mistakes that I made. Or the mistakes I thought I was making. The intention these teachers had for me was to draw without the option of going back, and by making "mistakes", to learn and develop my skills and style as an artist. I was surprised that "Do Not Be Afraid To Make Mistakes" was not on this list. Yes it is important to "mix it up" and take risks mixing techniques together when you draw, but I think its is more important to just draw and not be afraid of how it is going to turn out. You get better with practice, so make dark marks and do not look back.
When the article title said basic, they really meant basic. The author pretty much just goes into different forms of movement for drawing and kind of explains some things about drawing composition like how dark stuff is shadows and light stuff is in a highlight. I think these styles and drawing motions are important, however I think it also would have been helpful to include things like ‘pick a light source’ or ‘perspective makes things look bigger when they're closer and smaller when they're further away’ something like that to establish good composition and not just shading techniques for beginners. For one thing, most people who start drawing don’t necessarily need help knowing how to move their pencil around but need help in the translation from real world to page. There is something kind of tricky about seeing something as it is and representing that on paper in such a way others will understand it.
When I first opened this article, I thought it was going to be much more helpful and interesting than it was. To me, drawing is a self discovery process and though these techniques are important, they do not need to be explicitly listed it out in such a fashion.
The article almost seems clickbait-y to me. I clicked on it expecting a nuanced suggestion or technique. Instead, it gave me information that I could learn from looking at any drawing for ten seconds. I was hoping for new ways to translate the world around us or facts about how tree trunks are actually grey. I did not want to read an article who's first suggestion to me is to "start moving back and forth." Almost of the suggestions on the list have a preface of "this seems obvious" so I do not understand why they would write an article when everything is already known.
While it is helpful to know different drawing techniques, I think it is more helpful to know how to apply them. I also think it is fair to point out that an article is a difficult medium to convey drawing and motion. Overall I found the article just tangencial, like I’m not really sure what to do with the information. But I don’t think the information in the article is key to learning how to draw, but it could be useful. If I were to augment the article, I would add more process oriented techniques rather than just a series of different ways of training. Learning the process of drawing, is more important than actual technique which can come with time and practice. Drawing is a subjective process, so what might be important to me might not be important to someone else. In that way it's easy to disagree about what to put in an article about drawing.
For me drawing is really hard. I feel the pressure to make everything I draw amazing, but my physical ability just isn’t there, so I am faced a barrier that is preventing from even starting. But inside I know that the only way I have any chance at getting better is by practicing and just doing. I’m not going to improve just by sitting here and writing about drawing an reading articles about it. This article was nice because it broke down what seems like a daunting task into little steps that look like they are manageable to the armature artist. This makes the giant monster that is art a little less menacing and gives the beginner the courage to go out there and wrestle with the beast. Now, I say that this will be a wrestle because it will still not be an easy task to draw. I takes time to acquire skill and the mental strength to hurdle over that gap of perfectionism and fear of bad output. But by using these simple techniques the gap between pencil and paper might just get a little smaller so one day that pencil can touch the paper to create what may just be a masterpiece.
I’ve been drawing for as long as I can remember, but I still enjoyed reading this article. The examples they put in of drawings done with the tips they wrote about are stunning and really show you how these little things all come in to play as you start to get better and better at drawing. The writing style though is a little too simplistic. Like almost every part says if you do this more it looks darker and if you do it less it’s lighter. Which is a given, of course. The most important thing you need to know about learning how to draw, which they didn’t put in this article, is that it just takes a lot of practice. Both practice drawing these simple techniques by themselves, but more importantly, practice drawing from real life and copying images so you learn how to see shapes and how they go together.
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