How did you learn to draw?

Cafe Society
1

If you always knew how to draw instinctively, well, you’re always welcome to post, but that’s not what I need. I am looking for people who could not draw at all, not even straight lines, and improved their skill so they can at least draw recognizable things.

Did you take a class?
Did you look on the internet?
Did you just pick it up by examining the world around you?
Did someone teach you?
How did you learn perception? How did you learn shadows and all that?

Even if you just draw basic things, please answer! I don’t want to be a grandmaster of drawing or anything like that. I would just like to be able to draw a few recognizable things.

2

I was in middle school. I worked my way through my mother’s copy of Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain. Then I sat down and practiced after school every day. Probably from 8th-11th grade, I spent an hour or two drawing every afternoon. I got good at copying existing pictures, less good at drawing from life.

3

I learned in a theatre design class, using “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” by Betty Edwards to get into the right mindset for sketching and drawing. It is a great book, and a used one is fine, and any edition is fine. It sounds a little woo-woo, but the techniques are solid, and you’ll get much better, very quickly, just because you’re learning to look at what you’re actually seeing, rather than what you think you are seeing. After that first great leap forward in ability, your skills will increase much more slowly, based a lot on your ‘eye’ and your innate muscular control.

After I was started, we also used “Designer Drafting for the Entertainment World” by Pat Woodbridge, for perspective and landscape drawing, and “Figure Drawing for Fashion Design” by Elisabetta Drudi for costuming work. I would recommend either or both of them for technical skills improvement, but only after you’re familiar with the basic skills of sketching and drawing.

4

I bought Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and I did a few of the first exercises but I never completed it. It did change my ability in that before I started I didn’t think of myself as someone who could draw, but after I did the upside-down drawings, I realized that I did have the ability and the determining factor was going to be how much time I was willing to devote to it.
Then I took a couple of theatre design classes in college. One was focused on set designing using a drafting program but that still required sketches and the other was a hybrid set and costuming class that integrated sketching, coloring and modeling. I was never great shakes at any of it, but I made passable stuff.
Now, my drawing is relegated mostly to sketches of coffee cups and soda cans because that’s what’s usually on my desk and making a shadow that I can try to copy while on long phone calls.

5

I don’t remember a time when I didn’t, to some extent, know how to draw. Both of my parents were artists, and I remember going to the art museum with my mother, and her picking me up and showing me certain things that a given artist would do to achieve a certain effect. I mostly remember her teaching me that learning to draw is dependent on the ability to look and see.

When I was in kindergarten, we each had to draw a picture of a fairy godmother. I was the only kid whose drawing was anatomically correct. Yeah, those visits to the art museum paid off.

I have read “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain,” and there was very little that I didn’t already know. I highly recommend it, if you really don’t know how to draw.

6

My dad got me started when I was a small child. For example, he showed me how to draw human figures by roughly sketching bodies as connected “bubbles” and then filling in more detail.

Never really did much with it. I did take an Intro to Drawing class as a college freshman; I was a science major and needed the “arts” credit. We would be given assignments and the professor would put them up and critique them in class. It was at 8am and I rarely made it. It was kinda funny when in one class he was critiquing everyone’s drawings and when he got to mine he stopped. He said he had no criticism and asked who drew it. I raised my hand and everyone looked at me like “Who are you?” I don’t think any of the Arts majors recognized me.

I’ve been meaning to get back to it and by coincidence I just checked out a “How to Draw” book from the library two days ago.

7

Seems to be a theme forming…

I always drew, but was quite crappy at it when I was younger. Starting around 7th grade, I started actually reading, studying, and practicing. Drawing on the Right Side… is still in my library, along with Freehand Drawing Self Taught. It’s a skill, like good penmanship, and if you apply yourself you can get quite good at it, even without a lick of talent.

8

Really, really, REALLY, REALLY look at what you’re trying to draw. Then draw a lot, no matter how cruddy you think it looks. Just about anybody can draw if they really try, it’s whether you have the patience to keep at it.

Most of the drawing problems I noticed in others was they did not have the patience to truly look at something and then truly try and emulate it. They would half-ass it and miss all the important things such as the flower vase was only half as tall as the cello in their still life, etc.

I only truly took an interest in drawing during my midle-school art classes and a stint in detention. I drew as a hobby through high school, going through the ups and downs of trying to stick to a style when I shouldn’t have. I went to college for a fine arts degree and it did help, but more because they forced me to do still lifes when I otherwise would not normally have.

Anyway, back to the learning how to draw thing. Sit your butt down and make a still life. Then try to draw that still life in pencil or charcoal. Notice how tall things are in relation to one another, then correct when you make mistakes. Get up and walk around the still life to understand how and why objects look the way they do (the tops of cups viewed on the side, no matter how close to level you are, always make an oval, not a cat’s eye for instance).

My teachers loved to make you work in vine/stick charcoal because you couldn’t erase well and you couldn’t focus on fine details at first. Always start “big”, that is, focus on the overall relation of objects to one another and mark them out on your paper as guidelines, and then get to the detail later. Ideally, your paper should be a big piece of newsprint if you’re using charcoal. No namby-pamby 8.5" x 11" (you can use that if you only want to use pencil though). Then you start filling in the details. You’ll probably notice by this point - objects don’t usually have hard outlines the way cartoons draw them. Really, their shapes are defined by their shadows! So you can do outlines to guide you, but don’t do them too heavy, and focus a lot on the shadows. This is why it’s good to start in black and white - so you can focus on learning how to draw forms first. Charcoal is also good for this because it’s good for laying down thick shadows.

After you feel pretty confident you can start playing around with color pastels, or move on to drawing people, or try out oil paint, or do pretty much anything you want. I find color to be very hard - even now I am still playing with warms and colds and what a pale person’s skin REALLY looks like on a warm day - how their shadows are actually blue but their cheeks pink - all that fancy stuff.

After you feel like you can do a pretty good realistic scene you can move on to drawing whatever you want - stuff from your head, the boats in the quay, space scenes, whatever. The whole idea is you learn to draw from life, and after that you learn how to stylize that based on your perceptions. That was the whole idea of the impressionist movement - they drew what they felt from the scene more than what was truly there. But you can only extrapolate different styles and perceptions from reality. You can’t start with “How to draw Manga” and really learn how to draw from that. You have to start with what’s right in front of you.

Draw yourself naked in a mirror. Draw the 50 million poses your hand can take. Draw your cat. Draw a stuffed animal. Draw the people sitting on the train. Draw, draw, draw. Practice is what does it. There are pointers to learn - drawing is the art of relation. The human face has a lot of relations to make this obvious. The sides of your nose line up vertically with your inner eye. Your mouth corners line up vertically with the middle of your eye. Where the tops of your ears connect to your head are straight back from your eye corners, the bottom of your ears line up with the bottom of your nose. Etc, etc. Being able to see these sorts of relations and use them to match what you’re drawing, even on organic objects, is the key to drawing well.

BTW, I always thought I couldn’t paint even though I could draw. That was because I had only ever tried acrylic and it dried too fast for me. Then I was able to try out oil paints and it was an absolute dream. Expensive, but definitely worth it.

9

I had an opposite problem, from the first grade through the third I was always the top artist in the class. Around the 4th grade the other kids starting catching up with me and by the 7th grade I had fallen woefully behind in my drawing. I love to draw but seem to have no ability. I will try the book you recomend.

10

Some people trace to get the feel for the shapes of things.
I mostly just sat down with a magazine and copied pictures of video game characters. Now I can sketch faces fairly well and other stuff from real life. I suppose working the eye hand cordination thingy helps. I also took a drawing class, it was helpful but also stressful.

good luck!

11

I’m way out of practice, but this is the book that did it for me. Something about the way it was presented just clicked, and I was able to draw recognizable portraits of people that I didn’t think was possible. And it only took me a few weeks of exercise to kind of “get it.”

But it’s always required great concentration and patience, and I can’t draw well just from my imagination, even though I am a visual artist (photography.) It’s just not instinctive for me. Watching people who are truly talented at it is like watching magic.

12

I have always had a natural talent for drawing, and I took some art classes in high school and college. I doodle and draw a bit for fun and relaxation, not so much any more but fairly often in time past.
Three years ago my son (age 17) had a massive stroke and had to be rebuilt from the ground up. He lost a lot of visual ability, so as part of his therapy we started doing the “How To Draw” feature in the Sunday funnies. That was the last bit of concentrated drawing I did. It became a fun exercise; we started posting our efforts on FB and many of my FB friends joined in. I would scan and post the How To Draw feature, and whoever wanted to could post their efforts and interpretations. There were no rules - it wasn’t a contest - so people were free to riff on the theme. You can see my cartoonish work right here. Although the stroke was devastating and traumatic, the How To Draw art became a warm, community building event.

13

I was always a terrible artist. I never understood why. Then one day I realized that I had to shut my brain off. Draw things exactly as I see them without judging or interpreting. I spent a great deal of time just getting the details right. Really and continually asking myself “is this how it really is, this aspect, or is this how I am parsing it in my mind?” I became an extremely talented, realistic drawer literally overnight. Now, I had also heard previously to make short, choppy little strokes to draw, rather than do a single continuous line, which had never really improved my artistry. I also figured out that your eraser is your friend during my drawing. And afterwards I learned the value of sketching out the general proportion and what that holding-your-pencil-up-with-one-eye-closed thing is about. But it really was that one little trick and it really was a dramatic, instant improvement. Don’t interpret or filter. Don’t think. Shut off your brain and constantly question and adjust without judgement.

14

For me, I was one of those horse-mad girls, so I started trying to draw horses. VERY BADLY at first. My horses looked more like gloves and I wish I were kidding. But because horses were important, I kept trying and trying and trying, and eventually I understood what I was doing.

From there, I just applied what I had forced myself to learn to other things.

(I learned to play the piano the same way. It’s a theme with me.)

15

I have a bit of aptitude so I took a drawing class. A book that is really good for getting started which was recommended by the instructor is:

The Natural Way to Draw - A Working Plan for Art Study
http://www.amazon.com/Natural-Way-Draw-Working-Study-ebook/dp/B00D45RYPW/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1387582940&sr=1-1&keywords=draw+the+natural+way

That can get you over the hump so that you can start to refine your skill.

16

A very good friend of mine told me: “Throw down about a thousand pencil lines, ink somewhere in the middle, then erase the pencils.”

Best drawin’ advice anyone ever gave!

17

Like this https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRJ_Jq1ATdpmthkLF_1r5kEibaVIasoYFRKhI2djcd8uGOv8u-W

18

My dad used to start small business all the time. When they’d go bust there were reams and reams of useless stationary available.

Also, for reasons obliquely referenced above, it was healthier to stay out of sight, away in my room drawing.

19

Going to slide this over to CS, since it seems a bit more “CS-y”

20

I used to copy things I saw in Mad magazine, for example. Then I just started drawing on my own. My parents fully expected that I would have a career as a commercial artist, but I only liked to draw as a hobby. I think I got really good at it, but once I started down a technology career path I gave it up. I don’t draw at all any more but probably could if called upon.

I think some people have a natural predilection for drawing, just as some people have a natural predilection for sports or spelling bees.