darthsketcher

2016-07-06 17:56

I feel quite the opposite. I feel textures 'beautify' everything!

Thanks Umconfortable! Not sure if this is cheating but for those of us newbies here is an example on texture exercises from Dynamic Sketching classes:

http://img00.deviantart.net/1e51/i/2016/073/d/8/dynamic_sketch_texture_exercise_by_carmorafael-d9v4x7p.jpg

Uncomfortable

2016-07-06 17:09

One thing people don't often realize is that you should not expect to draw well when you first tackle these lessons. You should by no means hold onto your work until you stop being embarrassed by it. You're not submitting it just to boast about how beautiful your drawings are - you're submitting failure to help identify what is going wrong.

Those who swallow their fear and accept the inevitability of failure, and the necessity of that failure, are the ones that ultimately make progress.

Uncomfortable

2016-07-12 17:23

The first paragraph of the challenge description says as follows,

You'll have 25 rows (obviously broken up onto different pages), each row will be roughly 2.5 inches tall, starting with a square of that height and width on the left.

Each row pertains to a different texture, so you're dealing with 25 textures - but you're drawing each one twice. The bottom of the challenge description includes an example of a completed row. In the square on the left, you draw the texture trying to observe it as carefully as possible, packing in as much detail as you can manage. In the rectangle on the right, you try and use that texture as a tool to transition from dark to light.

These are two separate exercises, and the first part of each texture (the high-detail square) should be done for all 25 rows before starting any of the transitional ones.

Uncomfortable

2016-07-15 16:34

The goal here is not to draw pretty things - so the fact that certain textures won't come out well isn't really a factor. In truth, there aren't really any textures that are easier than others, or more essential. Some may be a little more challenging to identify, but ultimately everything is just patterns made out by little shadows playing across the surface of an object.

Don't be afraid to fail, just jump right in and do the best that you can. You will fail, and you'll fail miserably, but it won't kill you to have done so - and most importantly, you'll learn from those failures.

Uncomfortable

2016-07-16 15:00

Colour is technically somewhat separate from texture, so you'd still want your keyboard pillow to transition to a pure white. The bar of pure black on the left, and the bar of pure white on the right should be completely unassailable and untouchable. It can be somewhat difficult in your mind to separate out the little shadows cast by the forms themselves, from the colour of the material, but do your best.

Aside from that, you're generally going in the right direction, although some of your textures (specifically the wood texture) feel a little sketchy and rough. Remember that your marks should be more deliberate, and that you should be doing this exercise with a felt tip pen.

Uncomfortable

2016-08-04 16:23

Bronze is smooth - it doesn't have little forms that stick out and cast little shadows. What you can use to convey it however are the way light reflects off the surface - it does so in a very particular fashion. This is a really simplistic example, but I would generally approach depicting those kinds of smooth surfaces with really long, parallel lines like this: http://i.imgur.com/xE4Luw5.png.

All in all, smooth surfaces are painfully simple to approach - it's when things get bumpy and scratched and scuffed and mucked about with, that things get complicated - and frankly, fun. Always keep in mind that texture comes from shadows - it's perfectly valid for something to be smooth, and therefore have a distinct lack of texture. Surfaces can be blank - not everything needs to have detail drawn into it.

Uncomfortable

2016-08-06 02:51

Asphalt, cloth, skin, wood, bone all fall under the exact same category as the textures I've demonstrated here or in lesson 2. Each one has tiny - often invisible - forms that cast little shadows onto the surface, and these shadows are what your brain perceives as the lines that ultimately become a part of your drawing. You may not see the forms themselves, because they're so small, or the lighting in your reference blows them out, but they are there, still catching the light and casting their shadows.

Brick's misleading, because when people talk about brick they're more likely to talk about the pattern, which is not the kind of texture we're talking about. We are looking directly at each individual brick itself, its surface - all of the little pocks and pores in the baked mud/clay/whatever bricks are made of these days.

Metal is... different, but also not. Or at least, brushed, smooth, polished metal. Rusted, chipped, dented metal results in more little forms, and gets bumped up to the previous category. Smooth metal has no little forms, and therefore is characterized by a distinct lack of texture. Now, I have absolutely nothing against surfaces being left blank. This is one of the issues a lot of beginners (I'm looking directly at you) tend to have - they feel that if there's no detail somewhere, if a surface is empty, that it's wrong.

It's not wrong. If there is no additional visual information somewhere... you can't just make it up. If something is so ridiculously smooth that it has no bumps, no pits, nothing whatsoever, you can't add your own. Well, that's not true - you CAN, it's well within your rights, but that becomes a design decision (adding imperfections) and that is not what we're discussing right now.

Now, metal does have another quality, though this is technically not related to texture. Metal - brushed or polished metal, at least - is highly reflective. This applies to water too, but at this point you shouldn't even be thinking about water as it is far too complex.

The reflection you get on metal tends to organize itself into bars, though this varies on the form itself. So, an example of how to draw a smooth, metal cylinder could be something like this: http://i.imgur.com/PzkC5p8.png (excuse the sloppiness). You can actually see the same sort of bar pattern if you look at an actual brushed steel cylinder.

Now, all that said, there's a seriously problem in your general outlook on these lessons. You seem to perceive these things as an opportunity to show off what you know, and when you find yourself not understanding some things, you stop.

That is not the point, and it never has been. The point is not to show me what you know, but rather to show me exactly what you DON'T know, in a way far more accurate and descriptive than words could ever be. What you think you understand, and what you think you're missing is of absolutely no consequence to me. You're thinking too much, and showing me far too little. You come to me for lessons because you believe that I know better than you. You could very well be wrong, but that is a decision you have made, and faith you've entrusted (at least for the time being). You cannot be half-assed about that. You either trust what I say, follow my instructions, do the work and submit it for review regardless of how you feel about it, or you choose to discount my experience (which is just as valid an option).

You cannot tell me what you're moderately competent at, you must show me. If you struggle with something, that struggle should manifest in something. That something should be brought to me. If you believe you're struggling before your pen touches the page, then that is no struggle - that is paralysis.

I definitely get the feeling that you're looking for secrets - little techniques that'll unravel entire mysteries of how things are done, so that when you go into drawing them, you can do so with the confidence that you're not going to screw it up. The secret is that you have to screw it up over and over and over, and learn from those failures. You can't get through this without making a lot of mistakes along the way, and reflecting upon them by yourself or with help from someone else. That's where I come in. You've emailed me about this issue before, and I'm pretty sure I told you something similar to this.

In that email, you also included two pages of dissections, which you still haven't submitted as part of a completed lesson 2. I don't understand why - this was back in April, and those two pages were more than passable. There were plenty of reasonably well done textures and experimentation, and others that were less good. That's exactly what I'm expecting and hoping for, so I have no idea why you're so dissatisfied with your own understanding of things. Again, these are things that I mentioned to you before!

From what I can see, you're making these cliffs up for yourself. You're clearly capable of completing lesson 2, but you're convincing yourself that somehow you're supposed to be showing far more skill. I really don't know how many ways I can convey the same message to you.

Long story short: Stop describing your problems and show me an attempt at completing lesson 2.

Uncomfortable

2016-08-15 13:17

The challenges (box/cylinder/texture) don't have any prerequisites. That said, I do recommend that for this challenge, you'd get the most bang for your buck if you completed it after finishing off lesson 2.

Regardless, if you submit work for this challenge (assuming it's done using ink), you will receive a critique.

Uncomfortable

2016-09-12 20:12

Oh wow, you poor thing >__> You weren't actually supposed to do the challenge, it was just there like a scary story about the boogeyman to make all the children behave! Just kidding.

Mostly.

You did some pretty great work here - I'm loving the vast array of experimentation, and the wide variety of textures you've chosen. With 25 textures, I guess the well starts to run pretty dry, so I imagine it can get tricky to find more textures to draw. Overall you've done a good job, but there's a few minor points I want to mention.

Firstly, whenever you have an area that is meant to be solid black, always fill it completely - think about the actual shapes you're designing. There's only a few areas that I noticed this, but it's primarily those little unintentional white slivers amongst a sea of black that are very clearly unintentional. Basically the important thing to remember is that you want to convey intent - even if your particular approach to a texture is completely absurd, if it looks intentional, people will roll with it. Here and there you get a little scribbly, so that sense of intent diminishes (not uncommon, admittedly, after you've drawn a bazillion of these things).

The other thing I wanted to mention was that it's important to be aware of the tool you're using - it's a felt tip pen, and it draws in a certain way that is different from how, say, a pencil will behave. So applying the mindset one has when drawing with a pencil won't always work particularly well. The fish scales kind of came across to me as something that falls into this kind of category - they would have worked quite well had it been done with graphite, but having been done in ink, the execution felt a little less certain.

That said, sometimes it's unavoidable. There's a lot of textures that ink is really awful for. At the end of the day, it's a learning tool - you're forced to actually consider what those transitions are all about, forced to weigh the lights with the darks, and forced to draw things with much more intent than you might require when drawing with a pencil or with paint.

Anyway, you've done really well, and I can see that you've learned a fair bit. Keep up the good work, and consider this challenge complete.

Uncomfortable

2016-10-23 22:35

I'm not surprised! It was well worth the time though. Over the set, I can see that your general grasp of how to approach textures in general, how to identify the play of light across the surfaces of your reference objects certainly matured. This is as much a product of the span of time over which you did this exercise, as the number of textures you explored. Sometimes it just takes time for concepts to start to bud in your mind.

One recommendation that I'd like to make as you move forward is to decrease your use of exploratory, sketchy lines and try and think more before each mark you make. It's very easy to get caught up in doing a lot of short, more random strokes, but this takes away an opportunity to really think and plan out every mark, and to convey a sense of deliberateness.

Still, great work. Congratulations on completing this challenge!

Uncomfortable

2016-11-04 20:02

Excellent work! I think what stands out the most here is that you're exhibiting a strong understanding of how forms can bleed into one another, and how while the distinction between different forms remains, the lines that define them in the drawing can disappear and reappear throughout. You've demonstrated a lot of patience and care, and have experimented with a broad range of textures with great results. Admittedly, my wrists ache a little from looking at this - I can't imagine how exhausted you must be.

Keep up the great work and consider this challenge complete. If you don't mind, I've marked this particular submission off on my spreadsheet as being particularly exemplary, so I may use some of the images in the future to show students what to aim towards.