Imitational Drawing from life
Learning to draw what we see requires to see things as they are out there in the external world. We must put aside our prejudgments, our stored and memorised stereotypes and habits of thinking. We must overcome false interpretations, which are often based on what we think must be out there even though we may never have taken a really clear look at what is right in front of our eyes.
Traditional Renaissance perspective conforms most closely to the way people in our Western culture perceive objects in space. In our perceptions, parallel lines appear to converge at vanishing points on the horizon line (the viewer's eye level) and forms appear to become smaller as the distance from the viewer increases. For this reason, realistic drawing depends heavily on these principles. The Durer etching (above) illustrates this perceptual system.
The system worked beautifully and solved the problem of how to create an illusion of deep space on a flat surface -- of recreating the visible world. Durer's simple device evolved into a complicated mathematical system, enabling artists from the Renaissance onward to overcome their mental resistance to optical distortions of the true shapes of things and to draw realistically.
Corner Exercise.pdf | |
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Profile Portrait Exercise.pdf | |
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STRATEGIES FOR GETTING SKETCHES FROM REALITY
Blind contour drawing is a drawing exercise, where an artist draws the contour of a subject without looking at the paper. The artistic technique was introduced by Kimon Nicolaïdes in The Natural Way to Draw, 1941 and it is further popularized by Betty Edwards as "pure contour drawing" in The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, 1999.
Blind contour drawing is a drawing exercise, where an artist draws the contour of a subject without looking at the paper. The artistic technique was introduced by Kimon Nicolaïdes in The Natural Way to Draw, 1941 and it is further popularized by Betty Edwards as "pure contour drawing" in The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, 1999.
A gesture drawing is a laying in of the action, form, and pose of a model/figure. Typical situations involve an artist drawing a series of poses taken by a model in a short amount of time, often as little as 10 seconds, or as long as 5 minutes. Gesture drawing is often performed as a warm-up for a life drawing session, but is a skill that must be cultivated for its own sake.
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HOW TO SUGGEST FORM
How to draw forms from your imagination and design objects
There are many different ways to suggest form and space in a line drawing. Axonometry (Isometric and Oblique) and perspective are two options you can consider whenever you need to draw or design an object in space. If axonometry is based on a system of parallel lines, perspective let lines converge to one, two or three vanishing points set according to the position of the viewer.
Several tutorial on how to visualize forms in space are available on Youtube. Mark Kistler's drawing method is a practical combination of axonometry and perspective. You can see some easy application of his method: here and here.
Tinkercad and Google Sketchup are two free 3D design software available online.
Tinkercad and Google Sketchup are two free 3D design software available online.
Vector Graphics
There are two categories of digital graphics: vector graphics and raster (or bitmap) graphics.
Vector graphics use mathematical equations to draw out your designs. These mathematical equations are translated into points that are connected by either lines or curves, also known as vector paths, and they make up all the different shapes you see in a vector graphic. This allows vector graphics to be scaled to any size without sacrificing image quality as well as maintain a small file size. Common vector file formats are .svg, .cgm, .odg, .eps, and .xml.
Vector graphics use mathematical equations to draw out your designs. These mathematical equations are translated into points that are connected by either lines or curves, also known as vector paths, and they make up all the different shapes you see in a vector graphic. This allows vector graphics to be scaled to any size without sacrificing image quality as well as maintain a small file size. Common vector file formats are .svg, .cgm, .odg, .eps, and .xml.
Raster (or bitmap) graphics are made up of tiny squares called pixels. Once a raster graphic is created at a certain size (i.e. a fixed number of pixels), it can’t be scaled up without losing image quality. The larger the amount of pixels in an image, the larger the file size – they are positively correlated since the computer needs to store information on every single pixel. Widely used raster file formats are .jpg, .png, .gif, .bmp, and .tiff. An excellent raster graphic and photo editing program is Photopea
*Cool bunny graphic originally created by the Taipei Government and licensed under licensed under Taipei OpenData license. Then, re-built with Vectr by @yurenju
The best vector graphic program is Adobe Illustrator, but it is complex and maybe too expensive for a beginner. For some good and cheaper alternative options you can consider using Method Draw. In case you need to convert a bitmap image into vector, you can use Vector Magic.