Questions for the artists in the house

Cafe Society
1

I’m teaching myself how to draw, and I’ve been working on pencil sketches. I’m getting to the point where I can make some fairly decent portraits that have at least a passing resemblence to the subject, but I’ve got some questions about the process itself:

  • How long does it take you to do a complex drawing? Say, like this portrait? It takes me a long time, and I imagine a lot of it is just lack of skill and practice, but I’m wondering how fast an experienced artist would knock something like that out.

  • How often do you make mistakes while drawing? I’m constantly erasing and re-drawing lines. I don’t know if it’s because I’m rushing, or just uncoordinated, or what. Or maybe that’s normal. Are you constantly erasing? Erasing once every few minutes? Once or twice in a whole picture? Never?

To me, the process so far feels decidedly un-artistic. It feels very mechanical, making measurements, studying lines and copying them, etc. At this point, I can’t draw something from memory to save my soul, and I’m in awe of people who can create complicated images that have never before existed, like fantasy paintings. I’d be interested in hearing what the experience of drawing feels like to the rest of you. Do you see the picture in your head and just copy it out from there, or does the picture sort of unfold before you as you draw and you let it take its own direction? If you draw a face of someone who has never existed, do you just start drawing basic features and start changing as you go until things look ‘right’? Or do you see the whole face first and just draw it from memory?

Also, any little hints and tips for pencil drawing would be appreciated. I thought I’d start with that, work my way into colored pencils, and then see if I want to continue drawing from there.

2

I try to avoid pencils, for the very reasons that seem to be frustrating you. Pencils are for doing very precise, time-consuming type work, but I prefer scribbling, which is why I use charcoal and oil pastels. sure, it’s messy, but it’s fast. If something doesn’t happen for me quickly, it probably will never happen. Some of my best (complicated) work has taken me the least time–it happens so fast I end up twiddling my thumbs, wondering if I should do any more or will that just mess it up?

As for making mistakes, charcoal is so quick it’s easy enough to start over. About making measurements and checking lines, I’m blessed with a good visual memory and a feeling for proportions. This is offset by the fact that I cannot–literally, cannot–draw straight lines.

You might want to go for some formal training, especially learning the principles of design. It’s a sort of mind-bendery that takes a while to get used to but is always helpful. Kind of like riding a bicycle. One of the best lessons I ever had was a session where my teacher gave the class a bunch of graphite powder and told us we weren’t allowed to draw any lines. It went far in breaking a lot of habits.

Umm…sorry, I don’t have any examples of drawings to hand, but I do have a blurry photo of an old oil painting here:

3

Glad to hear you’re working to expand your horizons.

There are all sorts of things that qualify the artistic process – taste, methods, habits, preferences, experience – but I’ll venture a few thoughts and suggestions. Since I like to work with pencils and have a pretty traditional view of art (read: I like realism), my position and advice may jive with your intended direction.

  1. With pencil, my upper limit on complex drawings is usually about an hour, not necessarily because the drawing is perfect - I just get bored. I admire people who can stick with it for hours and hours but unless I force myself or get forced, 45 minutes to an hour and I’m done. Oil painting, on the other hand…

For reference, here are some timed figure drawings (warning: nudes [non-erotic]): one-minute, five-minute, 10-minute, 25-minute. I try to use an appropriate style for each pose-time. I can usually get a drawing to a fairly complete-looking state in 15-20 minutes.

  1. I don’t use erasers much anymore except for subtraction-highlights. It wasn’t always so (see below).

Your observation about the process being un-artistic is a good one, but rest assured after practice it will get easier. As with any skill, you have to learn the “vocabulary” first, and form solid habits. Once that’s done (note: it’s never really done), you can concetrate on being artistic while your hands do the work.

I highly, highly recommend checking out local colleges or community centers to see if they offer figure drawing classes – oftentimes, they will be free and open to the public. You just show up with materials and they supply the model. I spent two years going twice a week to one and it helped to build my abilities tremendously. It was also fun and stress-relieving. It was hard work, and sometimes frustrating, but over time, I got confident in my abilities and stopped stressing over my deficiencies. When I started I would scribble-erase-scribble-erase ad nausaum but now I can lay down lines – in ink, even – quickly and with hardly any fudging.

I’d also advise that you try to vary your style between tight and loose. If you get frustrated because you can’t capture the curve of the leg just right, break out some charcoal and get your hands dirty with wild, broad strokes. If you tend to be a wishy-washy broad-stroker, try focusing on being extremely precise, spending at least a half-hour taking down every detail of a particular object (face, hand, whatever). The variation will keep you creative and, more importantly, prevent you from getting bored with the same-old same-old.

Hope you stick with it. Good luck!

4

Umm…yeah. That would be here: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v246/kemspit/Painting.jpg

It’s the last one I’ve done in a long time.

5

When I’m drawing with pencils, my eraser is as important as my pencil. Get a good eraser - I like the big, pink rectangular erasers that come in their own pack. Many erasers that come on regular pencils are horrible. The slick, hard ones are the absolute worst. Make sure your eraser is soft and crumbles up easily.

Wash your hands constantly so that the graphite that will collect on your drawing hand does not smear other parts of your drawing as you draw. Erase all smears as soon as they happen to keep your paper white and clear so as not to distract you.

I draw in a rather elaborate style that is best described as being extremely inefficient. Some things I put more detail into than they need (like wood and textures) while I leave things like hands and faces simplistic. This is just the way I prefer drawing, and I draw with a regular Bic mechanical pencil. This means I need to draw a lot to fill in dark space, but I don’t mind because the fine point gives me more control. A typical drawing, done in my style, will take from one to four or more hours of illustration, because I use a lot of lines.

I erase and redo constantly. I will fiddle with something for a long time before I feel like it’s passable (and even then there are usually things wrong with it anyway.)

This cover took me about three hours to complete.

This one took me a little less time.

This comic page took hours and it is full of mistakes and do-overs and half-assed stuff. I still need to fix a million things on it and I did it months ago.

6

A lot of what the measuring lines and everything is about isn’t to teach you to draw so much as to overcome the symbols you have in your head.

That is, if you want to draw a nose, you might make a > type shape, or you might draw an eye as a football shape. These are the symbols you have embedded in your brain for these parts of the body and while close, they are still just approximates.
So first you need to first train your brain into not thinking of body-bits in terms of symbols; instead they are lines, angles, and lengths. Once you’ve done that, if you want to draw a warrior woman swinging a great big barbarian sword, you just need to do some studies to learn the lines, angles, and lengths of the various parts of a womans body or a sword. With that memorized, it’s just a matter of glueing those back together into a body at the desired angle, in the right pose.

Or indeed, if you can envision something, you just need to be able to envision it clearly enough that you can measure the parts in your head and lay everything out on paper like a stenographer.

Drawing realistically is largely about breaking down the complex task of drawing these great complex things into simple non-complex steps. This might make it seem not so grandiose at first, but with time the need to agonize over every line fades away.

But if you want to draw free-hand fantasy scenes or such, you should also start studying perspective and such.

Barbarian woman, mmmmm

7

I haven’t done a commisioned pencil portrait in almost two years, but the last one I did took me about 40 hours. It was a rather complex one though, with two people in the finished portrait.

I did a simple tattoo commision right before that that only took about 20 hours, I spent more time researching the subject matter and looking for referance pictures than I did actually drawing it.

I have a whole portfolio of work but I have not been “in the mood” to do anything new lately. It hits me in spurts. I may do 10 drawings in 2 months, and then not touch a pencil for two years. ( I allude to this curse in my profile)

8

This is essentially the theme behind Betty Edwards’ Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

In my opinion, this is THE book to get for teaching yourself drawing. While I am visually artistic, I am an awful draftsman. I could barely anything past a decent stick figure. After picking up this book, I was able to make portraits that, by golly, actually look like the people they’re supposed to represent within one or two months. I’ve tried drawing books in the past–this is the only one that’s taught me anything useful.

9

Thanks for the responses. I don’t have any problem getting past the ‘symbols’ of things. I read Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, and that part has never been a big problem. I can look at a face and just see the shapes, spaces, lines, and shadows, and the proportion between them. My problem so far is transferring that to the page. Once I start drawing, I can instantly see where I’m going wrong, where something is out of proportion, etc. If I keep at it very diligently, I can recreate what I’m seeing with my eyes fairly well.

I’ve ruined a few drawings though by simply getting ahead of myself. I’ll start drawing fine strokes for hair, and after drawing 10 or 20 I’ll realize that I got the angles wrong, and have to erase a large area. I have consistent problems with getting the spacing between eyes, noses, and mouth correct, and I have to keep erasing them and re-drawing them. Eventually I get it right, but by then the paper may be almost ruined by the number of times I’ve had to erase and re-draw. I suspect this is just lack of skill with the pencil and lack of experience in putting lines to paper, and I’ll just have to keep practicing.

I have a graphics tablet and Adobe photoshop, and that makes it a lot easier. I can select an entire mouth or nose and subtly move and shift it until it looks ‘right’. Maybe that’s my problem - I’ve been working with computer design software so long (I used to do a lot of Corel work), that I’ve become sloppy about the initial drawing. My habit on the computer is to just draw fast, then use bezier tools or dragging/stretching to make lines look like they ‘should’. Now that I’m working on paper, maybe I’m trying to use the same technique and it’s given me bad habits.

10

Ah, well that’s just a problem of not doing the fifteen second rough first.
Before you do any detail, you should have a lot of really light lines tracing where everything will end up on the page. For instance, if I’m drawing a full, standing human I’ll first draw a single line down the center of the page that twists like they do. Then you figure out the width of the torso based on the height of line etc.
If there’s a background, then you should have a squigly showing where the tops of the trees will be or items of furniture. And again, that should all be drawn within like 15 seconds.
Work around the page too. Don’t necesarrily do the nose then the hair then the whatever. Just float around, adding to the page and getting things just slightly darker at each pass. If you have to erase a whole bunch, you don’t want to have a lot of dark spots and you want to catch it early.

11

Great advice. Thanks.

So do you erase those fine lines after you’ve filled in detail? Or do you draw them so that they’ll be covered by shading?

I was going to try drawing a grid on the page and overlaying a grid on the picture I want to draw so that they match - I figured that this would make it easier to locate shapes, since seeing what goes inside a smaller grid cell is easier than trying to locate stuff on an empty page. It would also make it easier to get the composition right. But then I thought it might be difficult to erase the grid lines later, especially if I’ve been drawing details across them.

Does anyone else use grid lines, or dots, or anything else like that on the page to help establish the composition and basic proportions before drawing detail?

12

I’ll second the recommend for “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.” It helped me too, but not as much as pulykamell, apparently. I am able to make portraits that resemble what the people they’re supposed to represent look like in about six months. And it generally helps if they’ve had a horrible auto accident or industrial machinery incident in the interim.