It takes two weeks to really learn the technique of drawing if you have someone to guide you. It takes a month to learn on your own. Learning how to draw is easy. Learning how to apply that skill to making something creative is hard.
If you want to learn how to draw, rent a book on it at your library and practice in your spare time. People will be looking at your work like you do people around here in no time.
I’ve put a ton of work into some stuff, and I have drawn stuff I was proud of, but I have no sense of perspective in spite of taking some act classes, so I doubt I could ever do anything aside from super cute doodles in the margins of paper.
Art and drawing is something that can be learned to an extent, but I absolutely think it’s something you need a certain degree of talent to do very well in. If you follow The Transporter’s advice, I’m sure you’ll be able to draw something worth sticking up in here.
Ndikip has the right idea. Find a picture of a character out of a game magazine or something. I know a lot of people start out tracing. That’s cool, but you can’t be afraid to try to do it on your own. Trace it the first time if you have to. Tracing it will get your mind set to the scale of the actual drawing. Then after you’ve made the first copy do the second copy without tracing.
Buy a bunch of those little one dollar writing journals at the store and fill one up a day. Just don’t waste paper. Make sure that you fill up the entire page. You learn more from your mistakes then you do your successes.
Use quick jerks of the wrist in like a semi circle. That will get you making pretty good curved lines. Play with doing that until you can make whatever type of curved lines you want. Practice your textures on another sheet of paper by taking your pencil and going back and forth in a zigzag steadly going from real real dark to real real light. Do that a bunch of times and that’ll fix your shading.
After you’ve gotten the texture down draw with a pen. It’s hard to draw with a pen. You’ll always have the urge to erase, but thats the point. A lot of people become too dependent on their eraser. Be brave and draw as fast as you can. Don’t worry about the mistakes. Just draw a bunch of drawings. You’ll know your good when you can draw something cool with a pen.
Try to draw something new every day. Whether it be a comic character or if you get to feeling brave something original. What you have to keep in mind is at first everything you draw you’ll think looks like crap. After a few weeks of practicing you’re promised an improvement. You just have to be patient enough to wait for it.
I use to try and draw what I saw. The problem with only drawing what you can see is eventually you’ll loose your imagination. You won’t be able to come up with stuff easily without looking at something else. When i was a kid i use to draw all sorts of weird shit. Now I have to really focus hard to come up with a doodle that doesn’t look like trash.
If you guys want me to kinda make a tutorial thread with a bunch of tips and scanned exercises, i will. But, I’ll stop if people aren’t posting up scans of their stuff.
Perhaps I’ll take a swing at Balthier FXII?! o-o …naw, I’m lazy. <_<
I don’t know if it’s because of my nature to over analyse everything, but for some reason, whenever I take some break of drawing (sometimes months) I always find that when I come back to my pens, I draw better (as if the way I view things matures with each passing days of something… I don’t know really. It’s just how it work for me). But yeah, sometimes it can take some time for my hand to get back on track, but it’s always a matter of minutes (half an hour at worse).
Continue drawing and practicing as much as you can. I’m sure over time you’ll figure out a technique that fits you and then you won’t lose your touch as much.
x2. I draw a comic myself, with two friends of mine, one of whom is the writer and the other does the digital inking/coloring. Only the latter never does any work, so eventually we’ll have to sack him and I’ll have do do everything. Bah.
suck
With my own drawings (haven’t done it in two years :/ ) I cut up my drawing into boxes. e.g. (excuse crappy look, scanner doesn’t work well) with the below drawing, I created the outline for her approximate size of the head and hair etc then I created 6 separate boxes then within each box I took my time getting everything right.
I don’t consider myself a good sketcher/drawer/artist, art was my worst subject in school and I hated going to it everyday. If your patient though and take the time to get things looking right, you can accomplish some really great drawings.
What I miss the most though is the brainstorming sessions we had just tossing around ideas. We came out with all kinds of great stuff then. Too bad we couldn’t make it work though! :notgood:
It takes patience to draw. A lot of the mistakes people make is pressing too hard when outlining their subject. Personally I found that light tracings of how you wish for your subject to look, then erase the parts that aren’t needed afterwoods. Problem is that people press too hard when drawing and then when they make a mistake it’s harder to erase without leaving a mark on the page.I still haven’t gotten the hang of this (heavy hand). I began using blue lead which helps a lot.
With my own drawings (haven’t done it in two years :/ ) I cut up my drawing into boxes. e.g. (excuse crappy look, scanner doesn’t work well) with the below drawing, I created the outline for her approximate size of the head and hair etc then I created 6 separate boxes then within each box I took my time getting everything right.try using head proportions or "line of sight" measuring-Getting proportions by holding out your pencil horizontally, and your thumb vertically in front of you. That way you can always measure precise angles. It helps a lot, and also you won’t have to go back and erase all the boxes.
Another was a superhero-special forces squad type, that is actually on hiatus. They had the ideas and storyline, and I put it into comic script form (I was also the writer of the group). Then everyone sort of went in different directions (storywise) at a certain point.
I think the "last straw" was when one of my friends completely changed what I wrote (everyone liked my version but him). I had deleted my version (stupid, I know), and gave him a copy to make the panels, the finished product was totally different. Unfortunately, he no longer had my copy, so that pretty much stopped it cold. Our group turned into 4 after that. Then I moved and the crew was pretty much done.
We’re trying to attempt it one more time (actually they are, they just asked me to help them put it together), this time it’s a different story, which they have yet to tell me about it. Who knows, we might make it work this time.
Once it’s up and running (not any time soon though), I’ll post something about it.