alexvostrov in the post "Lesson 4: Drawing Insects and Arachnids"
2017-11-12 19:44
I've discovered an unexpected love of stag beetles! I wish I had a giant one to ride to work.
Here's lesson 4:
Overall, the biggest discovery for me has been that I need to loosen up when drawing. Often I focus so much on flaws that drawing becomes a big chore.
In the middle of drawing the bugs, I decided to accept that everything I draw will be a bit crap and to fill the page with "lovable monsters". Weirdly enough, accepting that every drawing will be seriously flawed somehow helps me draw better. Even the lines flow smoother.
alexvostrov in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"
2017-10-14 19:09
The plant monsters have been defeated! https://imgur.com/a/c3ZBk
Looking back, I've definitely improved, even though it doesn't feel like it. Things I still struggle with:
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Confident construction & lines. I often screw up proportions and re-draw the construction several times. That makes the drawing look scratchy.
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Hierarchy. Sometimes I figure out how to use line weight to compose everything together, but complicated plants still often confuse me.
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Texture & Shading. I'm too eager to jump in with cross-hatching. This misses an opportunity to convey form and detail with texture.
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Subtle details. Realistic bits like the edges of leaves often get lost.
I big lesson has been to chill out and to roll with the mistakes. I've screwed up something big in every single drawing. All of them are pretty iffy copies, but you just shrug and say "The proportions are wrong, but I'll just keep drawing how it would look if the proportions were like this"
alexvostrov in the post "Lesson 2: Organic Forms, Contour Lines, Dissections and Form Intersections"
2017-09-10 02:48
Thanks for the feedback!
I think that I might try chopping up blobby forms into cylinders to see how everything joins up. Sometimes going along the minor axis of the shape feels flat to me and maybe that will help me understand why.
alexvostrov in the post "Lesson 2: Organic Forms, Contour Lines, Dissections and Form Intersections"
2017-09-08 18:33
It's done! http://imgur.com/a/QnCGD
I was expecting to have the most trouble with texture, but actually that was the best part. I enjoyed the problem solving aspect of "how are we going to communicate this texture in pen?"
I think that I need more work on positioning things in space. Working on form intersections exercise again would be a good idea. Maybe instead of throwing random forms everywhere, they have to be in a certain position relative to each other - that way errors would be more visible.
alexvostrov in the post "250 Box Challenge"
2017-08-23 22:36
For sure, I'll drop you a message when it's presentable. It's a bit modest right now, but it's better to ship early rather than late with these things.
alexvostrov in the post "250 Box Challenge"
2017-08-23 15:31
I threw it together with Unity. It's pretty basic at the moment, I don't even have a main menu to select the various exercises (there are 3 at the moment).
I'll polish it up a bit over the next few weeks and throw it out into the wild to see how it does. I should also probably playtest it with a few people to sort out the UI design issues.
I think that there's a huge potential in this idea. The biggest obstacle to practice is getting quick and accurate feedback. For a lot of this stuff (like value judgement) we can have the computer throw thousands of examples at the player. I've also used what I know of learning psychology (spaced repetition) to speed things up, but there's probably more to be done.
I'm pretty excited to get to figure drawing. It should be reasonably easy to get mocap data off the Unity store and to make simple figure proportion exercises.
alexvostrov in the post "250 Box Challenge"
2017-08-22 23:27
Whew, that was a bit crazy but at the same time I think that I learned quite a bit. I pay attention to box edges in a different way now that I've seen all the possible ways to screw them up.
In parallel with this I actually wrote a training game for myself to develop my intuition. It throws incomplete boxes at you and asks you to click where the missing corner should be. I spent 1 hour each day playing it, before drawing the boxes. I've been graphing my error magnitude and it's about half of what it was at the beginning.
alexvostrov in the post "Happy Birthday, /r/ArtFundamentals!"
2017-08-16 16:10
Draw a box is awesome. I wasn't even aware of the constructionist approach before I found it.
Most art courses seem to sit you down and tell you to draw what you see. Observational drawing is great, but it never made sense to me as a system.
Finding your site inspired me to start daily art practice again. So far, this is the longest uninterrupted stretch of practice that I've done.
alexvostrov in the post "Lesson 4: Drawing Insects and Arachnids"
2017-11-13 21:06
Thanks for the feedback.
I'm a bit surprised by the wasp comment. I considered them to be the most troublesome of the lot.
If I understand correctly, you think that I'm worrying too much about making a "finished" drawing and not focusing enough on solid construction.
The wasp in the lower-left is the only one where it's just pure construction - no fancy stuff on top. Is that why it's more successful?
It sounds like I need to hide all pens but one. No more switching from Micron 01 to 05 whenever I feel like it. Playing around with "Let's go over everything with a brush pen" is making it harder to focus on the fundamentals. Is that right?