Drawing/Sketching fundementals thread

General Discussion
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Damn, those are nice ass drawings.
In terms of what I’m lacking? Honestly, I feel like it’s all subjects, lol.
I’m still a noob since I really haven’t been drawing long at all (4 months now). The perspective class I’m at the CGMA academy, I can understand why it’s not for beginners. They don’t really teach you fundamentals per-say, but rather how to expand on it. I’m glad I’m keeping up with the class, but man is it difficult, spending all nighters every week to get homework done for both my classes.

I’m currently working two part time jobs since I’d like to take my art classes a bit further (need dat money to afford it).
My community college classes are great, since they don’t cost all that much and I have a teacher who’s able to point out the errors of my drawings. Sadly, I don’t feel as though he’s a great teacher in terms of educating us how to draw, but as long as he can point out exactly what I’m doing wrong, I can easily self teach myself those mistakes.

CGMA on the other hand is quiet amazing. So much so, I’d like to take as many classes as possible from them.

At this point, I do carpal tunnel exercises twice a day so make sure nothing bad happens to me since I’m drawing a good 4 - 8 hours a day. So much so, when I’m in front of my computer not drawing, I feel empty. There’s even nights I have trouble sleeping cause I feel I need to continue drawing… I dunno… going crazy, I think :expressionless:

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Nah, that’s not insanity knocking at your door, just a great deal of motivation.

I admire that kind of drive though, as I never feel compelled to do anything art related unless someone’s hitting me with a deadline.

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I’ve put myself in a situation where, even if I myself don’t feel motivate to do personal studies, my homework piles up.
There are times I would slack off, go on a day or 2 with only an hour worth of personal studies. But I’m told that sometimes rest is a good thing. There’s times on certain chapters I’ll be stuck on a exercise and it’ll take me hours to complete. Next day, it’ll take me less than 5 minutes to re-do.

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SRK’s GD is a clusterfuck of topics. I’ve been here for 5 years and only now see this thread thanks to Pozerwolf’s recent post.

I haven’t drawn a decent thing in ages. I missed my life drawing classes from last September. I’d be a liar if I said I’m practicing, but the latest struggles I’ve had was drawing hands. Grasping the complexity of the hand still troubles me when it comes to laying it down on paper.

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What would you like to apply drawing fundamentals towards?

Might be a random question, but it’s interesting to know what people’s goals are with this type of thing.

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Ugh, if only it was the other way around for me.
My teacher was impressed as to how I draw hands and feet. But I’m ass at constructing the body so I’m trying to learn more about the the body proportions.

Since I do a lot of perspective work, I basically just draw hands like a block then go on from there. To me, I find that to be the easiest way to go about it.

Just learning fundamentals in general since I’m completely new to drawing. To be more specific, I’m learning more about perspective (like how to draw buildings, spaceships, and landscapes) while learning the very basic of human anatomy (figure drawing).

I’d like to adapt a style something close to Stephen Silver and Lauren Faust; I enjoy Stephen Silver design and style while Faust’s way in getting “cute” out of a character is very appealing to me. For now, I’m simply just learning anatomy and so on. I doubt I’ll be making characters this year but my head has been flooding with ideas for years, and it bothers me I have no way to bring these characters to life. It’s rather painful feeling I go through and I feel that placing these characters on paper is the remedy. So I literally gave up everything all for the sake of drawing.

VERY LATE EDIT:
I’d like this topic to be more active, but hopefully I can get something going once I’m able to post my work later this year.
I doubt it’ll be as good as you’lls work, but it’s something to show and hopefully we could help each other out.

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I know one thing that bothers me is that I can’t Figure Draw for the life of me.
I don’t know, perhaps I’m going about this the wrong way, but I don’t know how to draw a human body. I’m using the Loomis’ method 8 heads tall (like everyone else), and it fails me horribly.

I’ve drawn over 500+ figures using this method, and I keep making the same mistake over and over and over again.
I see what I’m doing wrong, but I don’t know how to fix it.

My question is:
What happens when someone isn’t 8 heads tall? What then?

How do you measure the shoulders? I know using 2 heads to measure it, but using that method always gets me very wide shoulders.

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I thought the 8 heads rule is the guide for the typical tall adult figure. However large the head should be, the figure should be composed of 8 measurements of that head. There are other measurements for other body types (young, fantasy, elderly), and the measurement could change to 6 or 7 parts. Shoulder width also varies based on the subject (normal build vs athletic vs young, elderly, fantasy Gollum-type figures). I might post more info to clarify.

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The thing is, when something isn’t 8 heads tall you’ll have to change measurements for a more accurate pose. Problem is, I don’t know how wide things will be if you’re model isn’t 8 heads tall since using 2 heads wide is no longer part of the equation either.

When I try to sure this method, my shoulders always come off as way too wide. And I’m unsure how to fix wide shoulders.
Even using Proko’s technique on measurement, I still have this issue. I even tell myself “draw shoulders smaller” still comes off wide.

I’m cursed drawing wide shoulders for the rest of my life ;_;

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Currently started my next CGMA course while I remain tackling my personal studies.
I’ve also found a small art school (not exactly a school, but not sure what else to call it) and went ahead and enrolled with them for a good 2 months. They teach really simple stuff, but as a beginner, any knowledge is good knowledge I feel.

The CGMA perspective class was quiet impressive.
Can’t wait to see what I’ll learn from Dynamic Sketching. I’ll post up some work from the assignments they offer perhaps in the next 4 weeks and hopefully get some critiques.

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Hey @Sexperienced. I hope you’re still around. I wanted to really get into drawing. I always had a talent for it, but I just never pursued it and perfected it. But now I have that passion back for drawing and sketching. I’m working a contract job right now with the contract lasting for 6-7 more months. My goal. to develop my drawing and just general artistic ability to a level where I can use my talents to make a decent living with it within that time frame or a lil longer. I would love nothing more than to get up every morning and just draw, illustrate, animate, storyboard etc for people and make money that way, on my own time. I don’t know if I’ll become big and make serious money doing this. but if I can make enough to live comfortably doing what I enjoy I’d be good. Anything more than that would just be extra.

I read through the thread and I see how much you stress learning from drawing from real life. So I’m assuming developing such skills would help with all aspects art drawing, including cartoonish, comic and more stylized illustrations. So could I go about teaching myself? If so what tips would you have for self teaching? I.E Staying focused, setting a time for practice and sticking with it, setting milestone goals, what to learn and in what order etc? Or would I be better of taking some art classes? Oh and I’ll stop by the library Saturday and see if I can upload what I’ve been drawing lately

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There’s tips all around here, and people are very willing to help.
A lot of good resources out there too, and it’s possible to even setup a personal study guide to give yourself goals on what to do.

I’m currently under going the passion you’re speaking about. Though, I don’t post in here much due to lack of traffic. However, I’m willing to share the methods I took once everything is set.

But to understand the level you’re at, this is the #1 question I see:
Draw a Circle, a Cube, and a Cone. Shade them, give them a shadow. Post results, and that should be easy enough to see where you’re at.

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After that, draw people. I remember when I did an portfolio interview for an Illustration program, the guy said me “if you can draw people, you can draw anything”.

I can draw cars because I understand rigid geometric body forms pretty well, but I don’t understand organic stuff at all. The human body is so complex and organic I can barely wrap my head around visualizing muscles.

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Speaking of, I remember one of my teachers (actually, more than one) stated something like this:
“If you can draw X shapes, you can draw anything. People say I can only draw landscapes, or buildings, or humans. No. If you can draw landscapes, you can draw people. If you can draw buildings, you can draw animals. There’s no such thing as that ‘one type’ artists.”

And honestly, I agree.
If you are able to draw cars, that means you’re able to draw boxes. If you can draw boxes, you can draw people in perspective. Muscle come from learning simple contour lines. This is no different then say, drawing a gap on the car from the wheel to the hood.

BTW, those X shapes were:
Cube, Sphere, Cylinder, Cone, and a Pyramid.

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Been doing a lot of life drawing and analyzing everything I look at. Fun stuff.

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OK I’ll do that. I don’t have a scanner at home so this weekend I’ll hit up a office depot or the library and see If I can scan some work.

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Good stuff.
Post results when you can! :smiley:

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I’m on the opposite end.

Humans and living organisms can be fun to draw…but I shy away from drawing any vehicles/firearms/buildings/etc.

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I know I’ve gathered from random people, it’s always best to draw something on the side of a style you like to help improve yourself. Thing is, I feel like I can never tackle said style cause I have no way to approach it. I feel like completely learning fundamentals for a full year, then tackle whatever style I’d like to approach (doing random fan art to help me understand said styles).

Though, it’s not a subject I’m afraid to tackle all together. I tried to draw out a small city in my perspective class. Sadly, it came out looking “blank” because I had 0 idea how to draw organic things (like bricks to a wall and what not). However, I passed since I was able to construct the buildings correctly to said assignment. Upon seeing the other students work, some of them looked completely amazing, but failed cause they missed the entire point of the assignment. I guess fundamentals goes a long way.

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I always used to draw in class, I preferred using a ballpoint pen with a small tip or using a fountain pen and tilting it from sides to create different thicknesses of lines.

Can’t stand drawing with a pencil, the sharpness goes away and your making lines that become too thick, can’t be bothered to keep turning the pencil cause after a while it becomes a drag, especially if you’re making a smaller drawing and doing finicky stuff like eyes on a small drawing.

Some simple tips for beginner, american comics are great because some artists have a really good grasp on muscles (can also use a bodybuild book or just fighting game artwork to train this). They are very bad for depicting realistic motion though, so avoid most American comics if thats what your trying to train.

Some manga, even simple ones like naruto and harder ones like blade of the immortal are great for learning to put motion in your works.

Can’t really recommend many artists of the top of my head for facial expressions, it really depends on the style you’re doing.

Also training like that asian guys concept from a page and 2 pages back is great for developing skills in harder to do areas like the hands and feet from certain angles. Since I used to draw with pen if I did a thick line and fucked it up the drawing was done (if I did thin line it could potentially still be corrected). The area I failed with, if I didn’t fail because of lack of concentration or working too quick but actually having problems with that area in that angle I’m trying, that’s usually when I did those concept sketches of body parts like the Asian person did from 1-2 pages back.

Ballpoint pen shadowing is something I enjoyed and did well. Apparently some people don’t really understand that you can easily get many different shades of color from the same pen depending on how hard you push. It’s not that difficult if you’re acquainted to drawing with ballpoints.

Some of my personal favourite artists and art from games, sf2hf artist (the one that did the anime movie style art), St artist, sf3 artist, ss64 artist, metal gear artist, castlevania artist.

Even professional artist, some of them started at a level not that great but have evolved to great status (tekken concept artist for example) while others never I’ve never seen do anything bad (castlevania artist). I think mid to late 90’s there were almost no more bad artists in a lot of mediums. Look at game concepts and art from the 80’s, lots of mediocre art. Look at mid 90’s and later, so much more fucking professional. It’s safe to say art and peoples perception of it in general has levelled up. There have always been great artists, but the level you need to have nowadays to be considered just good is much higher than it used to be.