It's pretty, but is it art?
The answer is, "No, it probably isn't." Still, for the past couple of months I've been making a kinda-sorta-serious effort to learn how to draw. Drawing is one of two abilities I've always envied like heck in other people (the other one being singing, but I gave up trying to sing years ago, for which the world is surely grateful). And being in comics fandom thee last few years, I've spent a whole lot of time looking at other people's drawings, which made me think that what the heck, maybe I should try it. Like, really try it, not just doodling stick figures in the margins of my work notes. So I bought this book, because I'd heard it's a good one to learn from, and I did a bunch of the exercises, and spent a couple of weeks drawing random stuff around my apartment. A chair! A door! Some fruit! My left hand from five different angles! I did seem to be making progress, but not in a very interesting way. So I decided to move to the kind of stuff I was actually interested in, and started copying figures from comics panels. This turned out to be really good practice -- superhero comics have lots of boldly drawn figures drawn in dynamic poses. And my volumes of Essential Avengers and Essential Iron Man are printed in black and white, perfect for copying in pencil.
Things I've learned so far:
1. Shading is really important.
2. Hands are really freaking hard to draw.
3. You're drawing the head too big. Draw it smaller. No, smaller than that.
Anyhow, after a couple of weeks of practicing I've made a few drawings that I totally hate, so I'm posting them here. I figure in a few more weeks, I can post some new ones to see if I'm improving.
I do think I'm improving a little, at least in terms of figuring out proportions and composition and how foreshortening works and stuff like that. But I'm still not convinced I'll ever move on from copying other people's drawings to actually coming up with my own. We'll see, I guess.
This entry was originally posted at http://marinarusalka.dreamwidth.org/573473.html. You may comment there using OpenID.
Things I've learned so far:
1. Shading is really important.
2. Hands are really freaking hard to draw.
3. You're drawing the head too big. Draw it smaller. No, smaller than that.
Anyhow, after a couple of weeks of practicing I've made a few drawings that I totally hate, so I'm posting them here. I figure in a few more weeks, I can post some new ones to see if I'm improving.
I do think I'm improving a little, at least in terms of figuring out proportions and composition and how foreshortening works and stuff like that. But I'm still not convinced I'll ever move on from copying other people's drawings to actually coming up with my own. We'll see, I guess.
This entry was originally posted at http://marinarusalka.dreamwidth.org/573473.html. You may comment there using OpenID.