Ask HN: How do I learn drawing?
I have been bad at drawing my whole life, but I think drawing can improve my career as an engineer. I want to be able to illustrate my ideas when writing blog posts and documentation.
Where do I start? I have an IPad and Apple Pencil for digital drawing. I tried to learn how to draw by watching videos on Youtube and by practising a lot on my own, but I feel like I'm missing fundamentals.
I want to learn both raster and vector graphics. As it turned out, drawing complex real life objects using vector graphics is not easier.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 212 ms ] threadhttps://www.amazon.com/Rapid-Viz-Method-Visualization-Ideas/...
learn to maximize what you can do with Powerpoint
take art classes at a local school
artists i know, and even some of the greatest anime artists in the world frequently start with paper and pencil, scan it in and clean it up with raster tools.
Well structured, exercise-based, it takes you all the way from the absolute fundamentals.
https://drawabox.com/lessons
Both are great!
but, if you want to be able to draw as a skill, and be able to use that in both paper/canvas/board and digital media like a tablet
then draw every day, and if it's a diagram, ask someone if what you wanted to convey is understood or not, or if it's a picture (like a portrait or a landscape) draw it several times (can be once a day) until you (and optionally someone else) consider it "good enough" (as in, to improve upon it further, you'd really be gettin on the plateau on the curve of diminishing returns)
I think there was a Show HN where a guy learned to make realistic self-portraits in about a month or so, though maybe the skills needed to do that are not the same as the ones for making diagrams, it might interest you, depending on what you want
site:news.ycombinator.com "How I learned to draw realistic portraits in 30 days"
I want to learn a few styles of drawing. One of them is cartoonish like style. I see such a style pretty often when reading articles from HN.
Many universities and community colleges have adult education programs that offer multi-week courses like this for not too much money, or you can find a local artist community.
Once I got to college I took two drawing courses at two separate institutions. They both ended up being a total "class-version" rip-off of the book. We progressed through the exercises in the exact same order. It makes me incredibly unhappy that my college professors didn't credit Betty Edwards like my private art instructor did.
Inkscape has been huge for me. It's a wonderful tool and there are great tutorials out there. My GIMP skills actually improved just by learning Inkscape, but most importantly I can create basic art for my apps by myself now.
I also got a Wacom tablet that works with Linux and I use it with Krita. Since it can emulate a mouse there are tons of other applications I can use it with, even Miro.
Designing and drawing simple logos and icons has been most rewarding for me. I'll never be able to produce amazing art since I lack the skills and talent for it, but I can handle logos pretty well now!
At the end of the 30 days it was clear I progressed a lot. But it was also clear that I hated doing the challenge. So I gave up with drawing, but still recommend the book
[1] https://www.amazon.fr/You-Can-Draw-30-Days/dp/0738212415
Pick up a pen and draw. After a couple thousand hours, you'll be pretty good at it.
She taught drawing classes and discovered that one reason why people is bad at drawing is that they symbolize what they see before drawing it. For example, when we see a face, we tend to focus about the eyes and mouth and ignore other features like the front. That contributes to a distorted representation that is reflected in the drawing.
She devised a series of exercises to avoid that problem. For example, try to draw a picture upside down, or try to draw an object shape using negative space (you focus on the shapes outside the object).
PS: I found that book in The Last Psychiatrist blog: https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/10/how_to_draw_not_abou...
It’s sooo realistic sooo much fun. And just $25 on Win, Mac or IPad
Ultimately if you want to be good at drawing, I suspect you have to be prepared to invest a fair amount of time - if you enjoy it won't feel like that, but if you don't then there are probably diminishing returns.
[1] https://www.alphonsodunn.com/book
There are other related books by the same author too. I especially enjoyed: Draw to Win
The only right answer, unless you enjoy drawing for its own sake and don't mind learning for at least 6 months before you're any good, is to hire someone from fiverr or some other similar service.
Creative work has plummeted in price and gone up 10x in quality over the past 15 years. You can find someone to do illustrations for you for as low as 10-20$/piece. That's insane value. Good illustrators are like good pianists - it requires daily practice. Spend a little cash and focus on what you're already good at :)
People on Fiverr won't be able to express my ideas. I need to sketch them first.
Also, drawing is a good way to understand my own ideas better. Same for writing.
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: The Definitive, 4th Edition
https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B005GSYXU4&preview=new...
This is probably the best book I have come across and it took me from stick figures to what my family considers awesome in about a year.
I can't open that link.
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: The Definitive, 4th Edition
Get this book, go through it, then look into drawabox if you are looking to draw from life.
For constructivist illustrations or styles like manga, I'm still learning.
https://www.drawright.com/before-after
Incredible results for only six days.
[Edit]. Also, drawing people is a really good test. If you draw a house or a tree, say, you can get the shapes / proportions wrong but the thing might still look plausible. Draw a head out of proportion, though, and it will immediately look wrong.
First is the exercise of drawing the "column / two-faces" drawing. You can REALLY feel your two brain sides fighting while drawing that.
The second is the "upside down" drawing. After I finished that I was amazed that I actually had drawn that (I cannot draw a cup or a house or whatever).
The premise is that a lot of people who have the "left" side of the brain developed draw the "concepts" of what they see and they don't really draw what they see. So if someone tells me to "draw that house", I will be drawing "a roof", "a door" , "the walls" etc. Instead someone using the "right" side of the brain will actually see the house and draw what they see.
Pretty clever.
For constructing energetic characters, I like the Marvel/stick figure approach of "How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way," by Stan Lee and John Buscema (also John Romita's book "Draw the Marvel Comics Super Heroes", which is sadly out of print but not hard to track down.)
Note that these books concentrate mainly on line drawing. Shading (or inking and coloring on the comic side) is of primary importance for turning line art into three dimensional art, and I don't have a great reference off the top of my head.
I think drawing programs with perspective grids can help as well. And lots of people use 3D software as a composition aid or to actually draw on top of. Some consider it "cheating" but remember that the old masters used optical devices like the camera obscura and wire grids (known in antiquity) as well as Renaissance optics like lenses and mirrors. I believe David Hockney tried to replicate some of these techniques with much success.
It is easy to lose focus when drawing. Hang in there. Look more closely. Focus on the details. Try to copy as much details as you can.
The quote "Good artist copy great artist steal" is true in the sense that the more we focus our attention on the details of the drawing the closer we get to copy/literally steal the feel of object we're drawing.
there is a core skill of spatial relations modeling required for drawing in general and this needs to be developed.
blueprints or architectural plans attempt to convey; where and how objects exist in space relative to reference. such as with a frontside rightside top drawing or a cavalier [2.5 dimension] orthographic drawing.
visual artist like sketch artists are attempting to create extradimensional information to evoke 3D associations with a 2D object, so abstracting spatial relations across different dimensions along with the physical technique and media is required.
Tldw: Do an extreme version of agile for getting better. E.g, do 1 minute sketches of a cup 12 times, trying different variations, and understand WHY some variations worked and some didn't. After experimenting, see how other people did it. And do it again.
I used to hate drawing, but after trying this approach for months I think I love it. I do not regret the time I spent learning to draw, and after putting in the hours it changed the way I see the world.
It didn't change their worldview; it changed the way they see the world.
Also: don't take it seriously. At all :) Just do a bunch of drawing and it's all good :)
my IG https://www.instagram.com/johnlmitchell/