I am going to pick up the Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain book tonight with a sketchbook. If I get brave enough I may post some before and after pictures. Thanks everyone for the information.
Good for you, dorkus! That’s a great book. Do keep us posted!
And DO NOT leave your work out when your clueless airhead roommate is around, or she might SET HER DRINK ON IT.
Unfortunately I speak from experience. What a dip.
For those who said to Not draw using photos, grids, tools, and/or technical drawing skills, etc. I agree that you don’t want to become dependant on these techniques.
But, as someone said, for a beginner, it is good practice. I think you can learn a lot about scale and depth using these suggestions. You should eventually get away from this as time goes by.
This technique is training your perception of what you see. That is the importance of technical drawing. The ability to accurately represent your model. Whether it be it a landscape, portrait or whatever…once you put away the drafting tools and begin sketching freehand, you will at least be confident in your ability to accurately draw what you see. Bringing it “to life” as they say is another matter. I feel that is a talent, not a skill. Therefore something not really teachable. (Kinda like music, I can play the notes/chords etc. but to me I’m not making MUSIC) on the other hand…put me in the kitchen and ** I COOK** fuck a recipe book. 
Get the basics, like depth and scale. More importantly, pay close attention to shade, hue, texture…all the subtle details that an untrained eye will miss.
Your unique style and interpretation will develop in time.
I learned a lot from drawing from photos. I also drew from life too, but the using of photo reference (but not gridding and certainly not tracing) really did help a lot. I did tons of drawing from photos.
I would never suggest that drawing from photos is bad. Just only drawing from photos, and being dependent on that grid thing–that can be very limiting if the artist then can’t or won’t break away from it and draw from life too.
I agree with t-keela that drawing accurately is a skill that anyone can learn. The “talent” part does come in with the “bringing it to life” part. I think people set too much stock in “talent” (I think that much of what people assume is “talent” is really just a lot of practice and effort), but yeah, there is that intangible thing that transcends skill, and it is unique in each of us.
I guess I’ll add this:
Try to find a good book about lighting. I’m guessing that a book on photography or 3D graphics might due the trick. To make a scene look realistic you need to understand how light and shadow affect your subject. For example, a person backlit by a single spotlight has a different feel from the same person in well lit room with high ambient lighting.
How you shade a drawing will tell the audience if they are looking at skin, concrete, metal, rubber, or whatever instead of “Generic Solid Material[sup]TM[/sup]”
Well I got the book last night and a sketch book from the local big chain. I read through the first chapter but didn’t have any pencils to start with. I was going to get them today but everything was closed in the area thanks to the metro shutting down for the “hurricaine.” I did do a pen sketch of my cat though. It was ok, but I can’t shade or do hair with a pen. I will be getting back after a week or so when I start practicing with the pencils.
Well I got the book last night and a sketch book from the local big chain. I read through the first chapter but didn’t have any pencils to start with. I was going to get them today but everything was closed in the area thanks to the metro shutting down for the “hurricaine.” I did do a pen sketch of my cat though. It was ok, but I can’t shade or do hair with a pen. I will be getting back after a week or so when I start practicing with the pencils.
But as Tracer said, it gives an excellent grounding in perspective, musculature and anatomy, distinction between sexes, facial expressions, proportion, composition. Exaggerated, for sure, but from there you can pull it back into reality.
Then use other lessons to learn to ‘see’ what is really there. Practise getting that down on paper. Then learn techniques for shading, blocking in darks and lights, fiuguring out the minimum details required to get a recognisable image (the curve of the back, the hump of the shoulder, the lines of the throat).
There’s tons more.
Eventually you’ll combine all this into great art.
Have fun!
Update.
I draw better than I remembered. I finished the first 3 exercises in the book. My self portrait was recognizable but not very good. It still had a cartoony themes and things didn’t look quite in proportion and the shading was definately too dark. The portrait of a friend from memory looked like my typical cartoony drawings. My hand drawing was actually pretty good. The shading was consistently too dark. The overall form though definately looked like my hand.
When I was drawing the hand, I suddenly went into another mode where I was drawing the empty spaces rather than the hand itself and then went to fill in the outline with the details. That one really surprised me. It was really the best drawing of a hand I think I have done. I spent about the same amount of tim on it as the other drawings too. The shadows added too much depth and contrast.
I am not exactly a total beginner when it comes to drawing but I have only ever been able to draw things from my mind rather than drawing what I see. If I get brave enough I will try to post before and after pictures at the end.
This may not be of particular use to dorkusmalorkusmafia in learning to draw with more realism, but the Fantasy Art Resource Project (FARP) is a surprisingly good online resource for art tips. I stumbled across them by accident and wrongly assumed it would be nothing but “How to Draw Fluffy Unicorns” and “Busty Elf Maidens 101”, but I was wrong! Some of the articles deal specifically with fantasy art, but there are also quite a few good ones covering basic artistic techniques like shading, perspective, working with colored pencils, etc., that could be helpful to anyone. I learned a lot from their section on digitally modifying pencil drawings.
Sign up for drawing classes in your area. Having a teacher give you input as you work is really helpful.
I’m taking my 2nd human figure class, and I feel like I’ve really improved from my cartooning style of before. We do different styles, such as contour, silhouette, and values. Contour helps you define the edges of your art, while silhouette and values help you decide the best ways to make your drawings stand out.
At the beginning of class, we usually do a few warm-ups by having the model do 1 or 2 minute poses while we draw her with long strokes, rarely lifting pencil from paper. It’s just a general outline of her body, making the points of stress the darkest. It loosens up your arm and wrist so your later drawing will be more fluid. I find this helps a lot.
One time we did self-portraits, and I was standing next to the window. As this was in the evening, it was getting progressively darker outside, so my light source was dwindling, and I wound up making myself look like a klingon. All the dark areas of my face kept getting darker, and I wound up being essentially this black face with white moles popping up. I ditched that drawing and tried again. This time I faced the center of the room, directly in front of the light source. The folds of the skin around my eyes were the places of shadow this time, as well the mouth area. With just eyes, hair, beard and mouth, I didn’t have to do any outline of my face to make it look like I had definition, and it took me about 5 minutes to do. I feel like it’s one of the best pieces I’ve ever done.
You mention the areas where light and dark meet dorkus, and that is so true. If you can manage to pull that off, you move up several steps.
I highly recommend using willow charcoal. It’s a skinny charcoal stick, so you’ll be able to get better detail than with the thick charcoal sticks. I didn’t think I’d like using charcoal, but I’ve done some of my best work with it.
That FARP site is pretty interesting. I will be looking at it in more detail after I finish the Right Side book. I drew the Picasso line drawing of Stravinsky upside down last night (one of the exercises) and damn if it didn’t turn out well.
I should really preview. Anyway, I am using pencil styled charcoal sticks currently. I bought a little set that has various hardness of charcoal from soft to hard, a white stick, a kneaded eraser and a sharpner at the local art store. I think after I get out of this book I may switch to pastels since I like they way they feel a little better. It really feels like I am progressing right now and it has only been a few days.
Yeah, isn’t that a great exercise? Really drives home the point that most of our initial problems in drawing is thinking too hard about what we’re drawing and thus draw things how we think they should look and not how they actually look.
I didn’t think I could draw until I bought that book and within weeks I drew recognizable portraits. It’s the most awesome book for beginners on drawing. Good buy!
IMHO drawing/painting a convincing cat is a tough assignment and may not be the best exercise for learning the ropes. In rendering hair or fur, the instinctive tendancy is to got caught up in the details and ignoring the overall mass , ie. a classic case of “failing to see the forest for the trees”. This is especially so if there is any sort of patterning on the fur. That can confuse you when you’re trying to indicate light and shadow. I’d recommend starting with simpler, primitive shapes (ie. a simple still life) and once you get the hang of that using those primitives in more complex forms.
Also when drawing the figure, get the simple relationships between body parts down in as few lines as possible. A few well placed lines or indicated light/shadow areas will be much more convincing than individual hair strands.
Oh, and I heartily second the advice of limiting the photo reference!
Good luck and have fun!
It has been about two weeks since I started going through the book. My drawing from memory looked like a bad cartoon and my self drawing wasn’t recognizable as myself. My hand turned out pretty well.
I skipped the chair exercise but am going back to it since I actually had a model. My boyfriend posed for me and I drew my first recognizable picture of another person. I was particularly proud of his head shape and foreshortned arm. I also did pretty well on his eyes and used the white charcoal pencil for added highlights. It still has a way to go but there is a definate improvement from the first set of pictures to the current set.