Yes, I started learning drawing as an adult with zero natural talent. For me, it wasn't about becoming exceptionally good but about exploring and finding pleasure in the process. I took drawing classes following the "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" method, which I highly recommend.
Another vote for this book. Took me from objectively terrible at drawing, to objectively mediocre. I think if I'd put more time into practice it could have got me to the point of good. While this doesn't exactly sound like a ringing endorsement, it's literally the only thing that moved the needle for me.
I never made it through the book (I know, bad habit of mine) but she said _one_ thing in that book that opened my eyes; paraphrased "you're not drawing the object; you're drawing lines". The first time I drew a crumpled-up blanket blew my mind.
Since then, I just find techniques[1] and ideas[2] that I implement for fun. The reaction from people is joyous.
Yes. Yet, in my mind, for some peoples and/or subjects (drawing buildings, interiors where perspective is important, etc.), it may be easier to do the exact opposite. Meaning, to learn instead¹ how to construct an accurate perspective view from descriptive geometry, until it becomes second nature and one can then skip the geometric construction (or at least make it less exact and time consuming, closer to what's described in Robertson's "How to Draw" for instance).
¹: I wrote "instead", but of course both ways complement each other.
If you want to be good, you won't do it. Because learning == endless process of doing something badly relative against adult standards. Not being able to play blues guitar as well as B.B. King don't mean you ain't got the blues.
If you want to do draw, I can give you permission. Nothing will change until you give yourself permission to draw badly. Until you give yourself permission to draw for the sake of drawing. Until permission to take your drawing seriously. Until you accept the technical flaws of your technique. Accept that your flaws are what makes your art your art. Good luck.
Define "adult". I got my undergrad degree in Fine Arts, walking in at 18 with very little in the way of skills, but learning along the way. 4 years of classes and practice can do wonders for just about any skill set.
I am relearning. I doodled a lot in school and practically stopped after graduating high school. A few years ago I met someone who sketches and it made me feel bad for giving up on that hobby.
It’s also when I heard about a book called the art of noticing. The book isn’t worth it but the term stuck. Sketching makes you stop and notice what you are sketching. Making art makes you stop and notice other artists and their techniques. It made museums come to life for me.
I filled a notebook or two, then got myself an iPad with Procreate and Notability. The undo button is nice. I made a few hundred drawings since 2019.
Art has the benefit of being very cheap. Just a decent pencil or pen is enough. You can take classes, learn online, practice a lot or just stumble forward. There is no wrong approach.
My wife. She began on a bet that there was no such thing as talent, she could learn the thing she was worst at. Wound up with everyone telling her how much talent she had. Annoyed the heck out of her.
She did it by being willing to throw herself into whatever she did full force, and by believing that any subject she tried to learn could be structured in a hierarchical way.
I wish I could say more, but I met her after she did this. (She's back to being a software developer these days - it pays more.)
I've always thought of this as the discovery of an aspect of talent, that people who'd be described as talented simply discovered by chance earlier, and isn't mutually exclusive with the act of learning it deliberately.
As in, if you have some innate predisposition towards creative thought, it'll be a Schrödinger's cat until you find some way to explore it. Someone with innately great coordination and the right build might have a higher rate of success in learning to climb or play billiards, but if they've never tried to get good at either, then until that time comes they're evidently not good or bad at either. Likewise someone who is a virtuoso violinist may or may not also succeed at swimming because some aspect of how they got good at violin carries over, but if they have no interest or exposure they'd never discover that or care if they did.
For example, I know a pro _____ who also happens to be incredibly good at aiming a frisbee. He almost certainly practiced it—since he got a dog—but his disposition was toward coordination and aim oriented things, which likely helped reduce the amount of practice needed to reach a higher ceiling than someone who's deeply clumsy might. Incidentally, he's also very good at illustration, which again he practiced before it became a medium of expression, and maybe shared an aspect of relentless determination and creativity that also came through in his sport of choice.
The skills that you are treating as innate may be a lot more learnable than you think. The first time I did micro-soldering (soldering things on the scale of 1 mm) when I was an EE, my hands shook a lot, and I basically just tried to figure out how to catch the soldering iron in the right place while it waved around. After doing more micro-soldering, people later complimented my "very steady hands" when soldering small things, and they were very steady. Since then, being able to aim things precisely has carried over. I walked on to the NCAA fencing team at school and was good enough to go to several meets largely because I am 6'3" and left-handed, and could accurately aim the point of an epee at small targets. I also later have been target shooting a bit, and was told I did a lot better than most new shooters.
I have fantastic fine motor control thanks to piano playing, but I am very clumsy otherwise. I regularly run into doorways and have near-misses with static objects. The fencing coach found this hilarious. I assume the fine motor control comes from practice (while most people learned to not run into doors, I studied the blade).
Certain aspects of this stuff are innate, but I think a lot less of it is than most people do. Those innate things do seem to include "speed at which you learn new stuff," as well as very basic parameters of your body like reflexes, bone density, and body shape.
Ya, I agree, but would clarify that I was mainly exploring a few real examples to illustrate my take on it, rather than intending to state those abilities were concretely innate, which I don't think they are.
The superficial difference between someone who may be "talented" and "highly skilled" seems to me to be indistinguishable without more context about how the skills came to be, and for most people who just aren't as pedantic, the term talented is just synonymous with skilled, imho.
In situations where two people of the same age, interest, and approximately similar exposure, resources, and build, are compared, it would come down to progress made between start and end of engaging in an activity without prior deliberate practice that to me would indicate some innate predisposition to do whatever it is that's advantaged by it. I watched two people my age grow up skateboarding into adulthood. Both came out highly skilled and with some amateur/pro success, but one had to grind much harder and took more damage in the process, while the other took a non-zero amount of serious damage, and seemingly picked new abilities up within a few goes. I think this accumulation of prerequisites has an aggregate cost that potentially detracts at at varying rates from each subsequent opportunity to pock something else up.
Something like microsoldering could teach you those skills, but if it took you 6 months to get good at it instead of 4 years, you'd have 3.5 more years at your new baseline of fine motor skills to train fencing without also impairing your academics. Doing it later for fun over an arbitrarily long time might be neat, but irrelevant, especially if you have no specific project to work on.
I noticed for a lot of people it is excuse for their laziness or actually lack of interest in the topic.
As a dev I had troves of people "wanting" to learn how to program. Usually after I give them pointers and resources they fizzle out after a week or two.
It is easier to say "I don't have talent for that" than "I have better things to do, like binge watching new series".
Don't get me wrong, I am "want to learn more math"/"want to learn more electronics" person but never get to really spend time on it and no time to use all the RaspberryPis eating dust in my drawers.
In the end I believe there is talent but that is something like being Linus Torvalds or Michael Jordan, you don't need talent to play basketball or develop software, but to do that on highest levels there is something definitely.
Yeah, I was a kid who was always told I was no good at drawing, that I should focus on stuff I'm good at
In my early 30s I sat down with a sketchbook and a mechanical pencil and watched YouTube videos on figure drawing, practiced a bunch and I'm actually decent at it now.
I wanted to be able to draw and design characters. I can draw figures and gestures decently now but I'm really stuck learning the stuff like hair, eyes, faces in general, clothes, costumes, props like weapons... It's a lot of stuff
But I can draw nude faceless figures, even hands and feet, decently
I'm learning how to paint. I started when I was about 30 and I'm now 41. I started with abstract colours, the kind of thing you might do as a kid. I mean, I started by doing it with my kids, and that was very enjoyable. I was OK at drawing already and I felt I could get a lot better with practice but I don't find the end result that compelling... I guess I like my colours.
To begin with I was really doing it as a way to get away from depression/anxiety. I found it was distracting enough. Now I do it for enjoyment. I like the process from start to finish. I don't rush, takes me a long time to produce a painting - a month for a small one, more for a large one, although I have done a portrait in a 2 hour sitting.
There's tons of learning material, just find someone you like on youtube. However, there's a a large part of it that you only learn by doing - colour theory and mixing, layering, tinting, those all require experimentation. Brush technique just takes time. Videos can help with tooling though, canvas prep is harder than it looks, and more worthwhile than you think... but it's also OK to not bother, I mean you're in control in the end.
I've got a few paintings now that I really like. I haven't put my stuff "out" there, or tried to put it in the local gallery, even though I think it's good enough to do so. Partly as I don't want the attention or don't want to have to try marketing myself, and also because if you put a piece up there you have to sell it.
I've thought of doing prints. I did one for my mother to buy https://fineartamerica.com/featured/crane-bird-jeremy-wells.... but it's probably not worth it for the money (not much), I didn't like the colour reproduction by those print sites, its pricey to do it with the local graphics company, and I mostly like to paint on large canvases now, which would require a photographer as they don't fit in a scanner, and that's a lot of money in one go to digitize.
I'll echo another thing others have commented - since doing this I really look at other art a lot more, think about how it was made, give it more appreciation. Or I'll be about in the world and will see something and think "that'll make a nice painting, how would I make that work?"
I learnt to draw long ago but I started dancing at the age of 45 and got decent. It helped a lot that I'd learnt a few things about how to learn:
* give yourself permission to suck, you don't know a goddamn thing yet and you know this
* if you notice that you're terrible at doing some part of the work, don't keep making excuses to avoid it - dive into it, embrace the suck, watch closely to see what you're doing wrong and try to not make the same mistake the next time
* keep doing it, find a way to make it a regular thing
specific to drawing:
* you have a few major tasks: install a simple 3d renderer on your brain, learn to break things you see down into simple shapes and build them back up on the paper, and learn to move your body so as to control your favorite mark-making device (pen, brush, stylus, sponge, spray can, etc)
* the first two tasks carry over to any medium but the last one may not - I've been experimenting with paint lately (after 25y of working in Illustrator) and I have absolutely no real idea of how to efficiently use brushes and other objects to put paint where I want it, so right now I have a few canvases that I'm much more concerned with experimenting with different ways to make marks on then I am concerned with making a nice image on. that said, pencil/pen on paper is a great medium to start with, it's easy to get a decent array of marks out of them without much practice, plus you can easily carry it around in your bag and take it out wherever you go with very little hassle
* study masters, think about what they're doing, copy/work over their stuff - trying to make your hand move the same way as someone much more skilled than you is very powerful, if you know enough to make some guesses about how they made the marks you can see. "How would [master artist you love] handle this image?" is a great question to be able to ask yourself when you're stuck on something.
I hear drawabox is pretty good for the "install a simple 3d renderer and some basic models on your brain" part of this task list. Me, I mostly learnt from the Preston Blair book on Animation, Bridgman's Constructive Anatomy, Loomis' Figure Drawing for All It's Worth, and a life drawing class with a teacher who was largely following Glenn Vilppu's Drawing Manual. That last took me from "you seriously want us to start with 10-20 second poses to start each class?" to "noting down enough of a pose in 10s to turn it into a full drawing later is a blast".
also, take care about ergonomics, you can fuck your wrist up badly, learn to "draw from your arm" instead of "drawing from your wrist", once you do it will let you draw faster and larger, and it will help you keep the Carpal Tunnel Fairy away from your wrist.
I think you've hinted at it, but years ago I was interested in learning how to draw and was given the advice of drawing poses on a timer (I think it was 120s but the goal is to eventually get it down to 30s or less).
There were websites back then which would automatically flip to the next pose once the timer ran out, you'd have to start a new page and sketch it out again.
If you do this for even 10-15 minutes a day every day, you eventually start to see an improvement on your ability to draw poses (starting with picking up on which lines are the most important to convey a silhouette, eventually moving into things like muscles, bone structure, etc.). You can even refer back to your earlier drawings to see the progression.
I never got any good because I didn't stick with it, but I did get a lot better than how I was when I started.
Yes, when I was taking life drawing classes in animation school, every class opened with about 15 minutes of 10-60sec poses, followed by some longer poses, as well as chunks of lecture from the teacher on how various body parts are put together and how to think about that on the page. Those short poses seemed impossible at first but very quickly became pretty good.
Later on a regular exercise at one of the studios I worked at was "cartoon life drawing", we'd pause a video tape on a good frame from an old WB cartoon, and draw. There was a built-in timer since the VCR would only hold a single frame for so long before saying "okay we're playing again now".
I started learning violin about 4 years ago. I used to play saxophone, but always loved classical.
To say that the beginning was rough is an understatement. Violin (and any string instrument, really) is just difficult, plain and simple.
But daily practice, private lessons, and I’m able to play pieces that I’ve only heard recordings of. Sure, it’s not professional, but it brings me immense joy to be able to have my hands and fingers know what to do on instinct now.
Private lessons for me were the key: accountability and expertise at every step. Self-learning would have been so much slower.
The more you learn, and I’m sure it’s like this with any art, the more you realize there’s so much nuance to it and that there’s always room to improve.
I tried pencil at first but with ink I liked that I can’t erase and can’t shade by using pressure.
So every mistake has to be transformed into something agreeable.
It is very productive to think about drawing in a logical way, e.g. how can I achieve what I want to achieve in a part of my picture. What also helps is knowing that a perfect drawing is a photo and I don’t want to produce a photo. And I try drawing what I actually see, not what my mind abstracts and thinks the picture should look like.
This is me five or so years back. It was very calming and therapeutic for me. Same goes for the pen versus pencil thing. There is that charm of living with your mistakes and finding something new out of those mistakes.
I don't actually draw though, more like doodle and make something substantial (for me) out of it. It can be anything - an object, letters, shapes, anything which can dance in some harmony.
I mostly use fineliners too.
Even when I draw models posing "live" (actually on Zoom, most of the time) I do the preliminary sketches with thin, light gray pens, and then when I have the proportions mostly right (or at right as I can) I go in with a dark pen.
How long does a fineliner typically last? During the pandemic I tried doing Draw A Box, which demands fineliners. It seemed like they’d die on me extremely fast, and was a big reason I stopped. I don’t know if I got a bad batch or that’s just how they are.
My main problems with fineliners is not their "autonomy" but their durability.
I work on small scale drawings most of the time (A5) and I use small size tips.
I surely throw away more pens due a damaged tip than due to ink.
I am also using Japanese roller pens in very small sizes and these are sturdier, and last "long enough", in my experience
This could have been the issue. Maybe there was still ink in it, but the tip couldn’t deliver it.
I always had a bad time with them as a kid and ignored them for a couple decades. I only tried again after they were so highly recommended for this program. They wouldn’t accept work for review without using them. But they were exactly as I remembered, if not worse.
It’s possible I got unlucky at the start, but with it confirming my past memories, I was that interested in investing further in a program that required I use my least favorite implement.
I have been learning classical singing (opera, oratorios, etc) with no previous voice training. I think I am fine, and I can get low-paying gigs, but nothing big. I also did the process of becoming an ok composer a while ago (a few public performances of my work, etc), and the same advice applies.
I do have significant musical training and experience. The prior music training does help, but it mostly just helps me figure out when something is wrong, not how to fix it.
I have three tips:
1. Find a teacher or group you click with. Music instruction is 1:1 because it doesn't scale well, but visual arts you can do with a studio. A teacher will really help since most forms of art are subjective enough that you may not know what you are doing well or poorly and that feedback is very valuable.
2. Do your art every day, even for 15-30 min. Inspiration starts with doing, not the other way around.
3. Try to be better than you were yesterday. Practice things you are bad at, and consciously do projects to improve yourself. There is no competition here except with yourself yesterday.
A final one:
IMO the notion of "talent" for the arts is just how people cope with the fact that the best and brightest in that field did more work than them. I had several friends who were "talented" pianists growing up, several of whom are concert artists now. All of them worked their asses off 5-6 hours a day to become "talented." It took me a while longer, but I eventually became a "talented" harpsichord player in my early 20s. Go at your own pace and don't give up and you will also eventually be "talented."
I spent 3 years taking voice lessons with a few different teachers and I was really surprised just how little progress I made, even with regular practice. I'm very curious about your experience learning to sing. How long did it take you? What was your starting point?
I found the whole thing to be a real head scratcher, to the point that I find it hard to imagine learning to sing is even possible (obviously it is, but what is actually going on in the process?).
Here's my starting point: I sang in choruses for a few years as a child and I also generally like to sing stuff. I also did a lot of theory and ear training, which involved sight-singing contrived exercises. I am also a pretty good pianist/harpsichordist and an ok composer/arranger. I have also spent some time tuning harpsichords professionally. So I started with the ability to read music fluently and a really good ear (relative pitch only, but better at hearing exact intervals than many people with perfect pitch).
That is all to say that I don't have to learn many "musicianship" skills during the process, I vaguely knew that vowels are important, and I have a pretty good idea of how to generically practice music (and as a former pianist, I have a very high tolerance for things most singing teachers call "boring"). I will also say that aside from piano, I have done a lot of things that need fine motor control in the past, and that seems to extend to your face muscles.
That means that my voice teacher and I can focus mostly on vocal technique and honing my ear to listen to my own voice (which is surprisingly hard). I also picked a teacher who was a locally-well-known soloist, and she was a very good fit because she herself focuses a lot on the biomechanics of singing.
I have been working for a year and have a decent tone (several times louder than when I started, too) and a decent voice quality with vibrato if I focus on it. Vocal placement, "support," and other similar things are not unconscious for me but I can control them. I can also sing several arias and art songs at a decent quality. I am still working a lot on agility, pronunciation and exact vowel sounds, picking the right ways to produce sounds, and working on controlling my tongue and my abs/diaphragm to produce a good tone that is expressive and can pierce an orchestra.
FWIW I have heard that if you switch voice teachers a lot, it's actually bad for your voice because teaching methods are so "fluffy." Also, I have never done this, but I am sort of convinced that developing a good pop voice is probably as hard as developing a classical voice. In contrast, learning to play keys for a band is supposedly much easier than classical piano of the same level.
>IMO the notion of "talent" for the arts is just how people cope with the fact that the best and brightest in that field did more work than them.
Maybe the notion of “hard work” is just an attempt by talented people to justify their winning the genetic lottery to themselves and to appear humble?
Nowadays, success in the classical music industry very often depends on looks and conventional physical attractiveness. Here, too, luck is more important than hard work.
> Nowadays, success in the classical music industry very often depends on looks and conventional physical attractiveness. Here, too, luck is more important than hard work.
Really? My sister was a professional violist for a while and did all her auditions behind a screen. There are lots of efforts taken to remove biases of exactly the type you are citing from your career path.
Several soloists I know are relatively ugly people, but everyone who is a serious musician is in pretty good shape. Playing concert music is a light-to-moderate full-body workout, and doing that for 5 hours a day takes stamina. They usually also have clothing that fits them perfectly and they will often use some makeup to fix blemishes. So if you're just looking at a soloist on stage or on a video recording, that is about as attractive as the person you are seeing will possibly look, and they are selected from a pool of people that work out about as much as a full-time yoga instructor.
An example that stands out to me here is Yuja Wang, who is known for wearing very short dresses on stage. This happened much to the consternation of conductors and orchestras, and may have actually hurt her early career. She was more than good enough to overcome that, though, and I can't say that it was a bad marketing tactic for attracting youtube views.
as an engineer, Drawing Ideas: a hand-generated approach for better design has changed my life. My girlfriend is an artist but I never tried drawing until this book caught my eye on the shelf of a book store. I love having some basic sketching skills to help make my thoughts come to life. When I write blog posts, I try to throw in a sketch or two now.
Not me but my mother. I don't recall her making any art when I was younger (although she is an amazing cook which is a type of art). However, over the last 10 years or so she's taken several courses and workshops in a wide range of art, painting, sculpture, sign writing and more. I guess she started around age 65, and the courses are a great source of social interactions for her. She is especially taken by mandalas and has drawn and painted some very beautiful ones. Her house and garden has a nice selection of her work.
Yes. I can without reservation, recommend Brent Eviston's "art and science of drawing" series. Best taken via skillshare (grab a discount code from some YouTuber if you are trying it for the first time) . I didn't take his drawing laboratory series since it hadn't been released at the time. That said, just follow his courses in order:
- Basic Skills / Getting Started with Drawing
- Dynamic Mark Making / Drawing with Expression & Creativity
- Form & Space / 3D Drawing & Perspective
- Measuring & Proportion / Drawing with Accuracy & Precision
- Contours / Drawing with Compelling Contours & Foreshortening
At this point, I recommend picking up drawabox.com as well to engage with practice a little differently. It draws from a school of thought that is present in the book "How to Draw" by Scott Robertson. That book is a little more advanced and I'd recommend it only if you are deep enough into understanding drawabox.com (PS: recommend trying but then moving on from the texturing chapter if it feels too hard to understand. It sticks out like a sore thumb because it requires understanding of light tbh. Texture doesn't just exist. We perceive most of it because of light and shadow)
Brent's work continues though while you do drawabox:
- Shading Fundamentals / Drawing with Dramatic Light and Shadow
- Shading Beyond the Basics / Shade Any Subject No Matter How Complex
Once you are done with this, it really depends on where you want to go. You should be far along in drawabox where you doing constructional drawing. This is actually a good point to see if you can also do the texture challenge.
At this point you can decide on your thing. Maybe drawing figures is your thing (Again, Brent's art and science of figure drawing is the best resource out there). Maybe only a bit. Maybe you want to paint digitally? Meds map by Ahmed Aldoori is the best resource there is. If you manage to finish that, anything from Marco Bucci on skillshare is brilliant. If you have more specific desires on physical mediums, check out proko, but also double check the courses since some of the instructors sell the courses on proko at higher prices than they do on udemy or gumroad. If you don't care for the community aspect of proko, you can buy it cheaper sometimes from elsewhere. Lastly, on anything related to animals, Aaron Blaise's creatureartteacher website is a gold mine. Wait for sales though since you can get an all access pass for a huge discount during those times.
Good luck! Feel free to mail me if you want to discuss more :)
I mention it in passing in the first page: I have always liked to express myself visually, so for example in a meeting at work I tend to move to the nearest whiteboard.
[15 years ago I started practicing Shodo (Japanese Calligraphy) which was already a step in the same direction.]
But apart from the little drawing I did at school (as a child) I never really took any class, not even a video class on Internet.
As I explain in the first page, I just decided to try drawing from random photos setting a timer. Then two things happened:
1) I found out I liked it a lot, even if the first results were nothing to write home about.
2) COVID (9 months later).
Also, as a person I tend to stick to hobbies so if I decide to start something new I try to sort out how much time I can devote to this new activity considering everything else I have already on my plate. If it sticks, it tends to go on forever (e.g.: Aikido - 35 years and counting, Shodo 15 and counting, TTRPG... 40 and counting, IT/Tech, 45 and counting...).
I just started pencil sketching again - I never managed to make anything that didn't look like it was part of a horrible nightmare before. I think it was a question of finding the right tutorials - if you look for art of wei on YouTube, his explanations click for me, and maybe they'll make sense to you too. I haven't drawn a whole face yet, but the one eye I did draw looked very convincing. you'd need to start with shading a cube, cylinder, sphere first - it's what I did first (using other tutorials, but there's a couple from wei too). you really need to understand the sphere before moving on to interesting shapes. also a keyword for getting the face right is the Loomis method.
I started doodling in class at the start of tertiary education and I eventually learned how to draw there out of sheer boredom.
Like any other skill, it takes practice to master. While you can brute-force drawing from scratch, reading up on some techniques and anatomy will help a lot.
Started doodling the same way, been on and off at it for some years and I must say prolongued, boredom-driven brute force works better than expected
I've had some troubles with reading up on tech&Co. as that always seems to get my expectations higher than what I can achieve, which ends up being somewhat discouraging even if I'm visibly improving at the thing, which is far less of a problem with doodle art as I'm mostly having some stupid fun
I learned painting and guitar to an intermediate level in my 40s, after never taking art or music listens since junior high.
Everyone can get up to 80th percentile in pretty much everything if they try. The reason it's the 80th percentile isn't because it's that hard, but because most people aren't focusing on this one niche skill, whatever it is you choose to develop.
Drop $20 or $50 on a lesson once a week in something that interests you, and see where you are in a year from now. I bet people will be saying, "hey, that's not bad!" Or just teach yourself from youtube videos.
It only takes two steps to get from zero to "not bad": show some courage, and then show some commitment.
My grandmother learned it at 70. Just keep drawing things and remember that drawing is as much about being able to see things as they present themselves as it is about being able to draw lines where you want to draw it.
You have a model of all things you want to draw in your head, e.g. you know how many fingers are one one hand, how the thumb goes into another direction — these models can distract you from drawing what is really seen from a certain perspective.
So my advice is to just draw regularily. Don't hessitate to do things in isolation, e.g. as a designer I had to draw straight lines for half a year. That is boring as fuck, but afterwards you have much more control.
Yes, I started about 4 years ago (in my mid 40s) just putting watercolour onto paper - like stick trees, really the absolute basics. I moved on to reproducing patterns in pencil (Islamic tiling designs, celtic knots, etc) as something to put paint into.
After a few years of reproducing all sorts of patterns - mainly Islamic patterns using compass and straightedge, but honestly also tracing paper - I now can convert an image I like of a tile or similar into a neat, symmetric painted-on-paper example in a weekend.
Along the way I've learned how to use various types of paint (watercolour, gouache, acrylic) and mediums (gum arabic, gloss) and varnishes. Also brushes - current favourite being an angled shader and types of paper.
Most importantly, learning about how to use colours - mixing them, and choosing a palette that looks good. Also what I consider the 'finish' of a work: inking outlines, bordering, just making it look good.
I initially put stuff on Etsy, just to put it out in the world. However - not particularly surprisingly, that's not something want to buy - so I now use cara.app as a way to show it to other people, which is what I actually want :) I worry though that cara is unsustainable.
It's been fun, just trying out what seems interesting and striving to get output that you can be proud of and is visually pleasing in whatever way.
Another book (!) by Eric Broug - 'Islamic Geometric Patterns' that has step-by-step instructions for 22 patterns.
In general, I use a good compass (although I have also used the cheapest one, it's fine for getting something on paper!) and a mechanical pencil. A transparent ruler with a bevel (so that you can flip it over and draw along the edge) is good. You get used to how to precisely draw a line between points and how to adjust a drawing to get it as symmetric as possible.
The two practical ones are Arabic Geometrical Pattern and Design by J. Bourgoin (a pattern book), and Ruler and Compass by Andrew Sutton, which is a small general guide to building shapes.
I've never gotten particularly far in doing my own and have honestly spent more time just cheerfully leafing through Islamic Art in Cairo by Prisse d'Avennes and L'Art de L'Islam by Titus Bruckhardt.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] threadHere's a preview: https://books.google.com/books/about/Drawing_on_the_Right_Si...
I never made it through the book (I know, bad habit of mine) but she said _one_ thing in that book that opened my eyes; paraphrased "you're not drawing the object; you're drawing lines". The first time I drew a crumpled-up blanket blew my mind.
Since then, I just find techniques[1] and ideas[2] that I implement for fun. The reaction from people is joyous.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TXEZ4tP06c [2] Unfortunately, I can't find depictions of Sergio Aragones' MAD magazine marginalia to link to here
¹: I wrote "instead", but of course both ways complement each other.
If you want to be good, you won't do it. Because learning == endless process of doing something badly relative against adult standards. Not being able to play blues guitar as well as B.B. King don't mean you ain't got the blues.
If you want to do draw, I can give you permission. Nothing will change until you give yourself permission to draw badly. Until you give yourself permission to draw for the sake of drawing. Until permission to take your drawing seriously. Until you accept the technical flaws of your technique. Accept that your flaws are what makes your art your art. Good luck.
It’s also when I heard about a book called the art of noticing. The book isn’t worth it but the term stuck. Sketching makes you stop and notice what you are sketching. Making art makes you stop and notice other artists and their techniques. It made museums come to life for me.
I filled a notebook or two, then got myself an iPad with Procreate and Notability. The undo button is nice. I made a few hundred drawings since 2019.
Art has the benefit of being very cheap. Just a decent pencil or pen is enough. You can take classes, learn online, practice a lot or just stumble forward. There is no wrong approach.
She did it by being willing to throw herself into whatever she did full force, and by believing that any subject she tried to learn could be structured in a hierarchical way.
I wish I could say more, but I met her after she did this. (She's back to being a software developer these days - it pays more.)
As in, if you have some innate predisposition towards creative thought, it'll be a Schrödinger's cat until you find some way to explore it. Someone with innately great coordination and the right build might have a higher rate of success in learning to climb or play billiards, but if they've never tried to get good at either, then until that time comes they're evidently not good or bad at either. Likewise someone who is a virtuoso violinist may or may not also succeed at swimming because some aspect of how they got good at violin carries over, but if they have no interest or exposure they'd never discover that or care if they did.
For example, I know a pro _____ who also happens to be incredibly good at aiming a frisbee. He almost certainly practiced it—since he got a dog—but his disposition was toward coordination and aim oriented things, which likely helped reduce the amount of practice needed to reach a higher ceiling than someone who's deeply clumsy might. Incidentally, he's also very good at illustration, which again he practiced before it became a medium of expression, and maybe shared an aspect of relentless determination and creativity that also came through in his sport of choice.
I have fantastic fine motor control thanks to piano playing, but I am very clumsy otherwise. I regularly run into doorways and have near-misses with static objects. The fencing coach found this hilarious. I assume the fine motor control comes from practice (while most people learned to not run into doors, I studied the blade).
Certain aspects of this stuff are innate, but I think a lot less of it is than most people do. Those innate things do seem to include "speed at which you learn new stuff," as well as very basic parameters of your body like reflexes, bone density, and body shape.
The superficial difference between someone who may be "talented" and "highly skilled" seems to me to be indistinguishable without more context about how the skills came to be, and for most people who just aren't as pedantic, the term talented is just synonymous with skilled, imho.
In situations where two people of the same age, interest, and approximately similar exposure, resources, and build, are compared, it would come down to progress made between start and end of engaging in an activity without prior deliberate practice that to me would indicate some innate predisposition to do whatever it is that's advantaged by it. I watched two people my age grow up skateboarding into adulthood. Both came out highly skilled and with some amateur/pro success, but one had to grind much harder and took more damage in the process, while the other took a non-zero amount of serious damage, and seemingly picked new abilities up within a few goes. I think this accumulation of prerequisites has an aggregate cost that potentially detracts at at varying rates from each subsequent opportunity to pock something else up.
Something like microsoldering could teach you those skills, but if it took you 6 months to get good at it instead of 4 years, you'd have 3.5 more years at your new baseline of fine motor skills to train fencing without also impairing your academics. Doing it later for fun over an arbitrarily long time might be neat, but irrelevant, especially if you have no specific project to work on.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5771014-the-talent-code
As a dev I had troves of people "wanting" to learn how to program. Usually after I give them pointers and resources they fizzle out after a week or two.
It is easier to say "I don't have talent for that" than "I have better things to do, like binge watching new series". Don't get me wrong, I am "want to learn more math"/"want to learn more electronics" person but never get to really spend time on it and no time to use all the RaspberryPis eating dust in my drawers.
In the end I believe there is talent but that is something like being Linus Torvalds or Michael Jordan, you don't need talent to play basketball or develop software, but to do that on highest levels there is something definitely.
"Steve Jobs on Taking a Calligraphy Class"
https://www.leemunroe.com/steve-jobs-calligraphy/
In my early 30s I sat down with a sketchbook and a mechanical pencil and watched YouTube videos on figure drawing, practiced a bunch and I'm actually decent at it now.
I wanted to be able to draw and design characters. I can draw figures and gestures decently now but I'm really stuck learning the stuff like hair, eyes, faces in general, clothes, costumes, props like weapons... It's a lot of stuff
But I can draw nude faceless figures, even hands and feet, decently
I think its really a matter of practice and study
To begin with I was really doing it as a way to get away from depression/anxiety. I found it was distracting enough. Now I do it for enjoyment. I like the process from start to finish. I don't rush, takes me a long time to produce a painting - a month for a small one, more for a large one, although I have done a portrait in a 2 hour sitting.
There's tons of learning material, just find someone you like on youtube. However, there's a a large part of it that you only learn by doing - colour theory and mixing, layering, tinting, those all require experimentation. Brush technique just takes time. Videos can help with tooling though, canvas prep is harder than it looks, and more worthwhile than you think... but it's also OK to not bother, I mean you're in control in the end.
I've got a few paintings now that I really like. I haven't put my stuff "out" there, or tried to put it in the local gallery, even though I think it's good enough to do so. Partly as I don't want the attention or don't want to have to try marketing myself, and also because if you put a piece up there you have to sell it.
I've thought of doing prints. I did one for my mother to buy https://fineartamerica.com/featured/crane-bird-jeremy-wells.... but it's probably not worth it for the money (not much), I didn't like the colour reproduction by those print sites, its pricey to do it with the local graphics company, and I mostly like to paint on large canvases now, which would require a photographer as they don't fit in a scanner, and that's a lot of money in one go to digitize.
I'll echo another thing others have commented - since doing this I really look at other art a lot more, think about how it was made, give it more appreciation. Or I'll be about in the world and will see something and think "that'll make a nice painting, how would I make that work?"
[1] https://drawabox.com/
* give yourself permission to suck, you don't know a goddamn thing yet and you know this
* if you notice that you're terrible at doing some part of the work, don't keep making excuses to avoid it - dive into it, embrace the suck, watch closely to see what you're doing wrong and try to not make the same mistake the next time
* keep doing it, find a way to make it a regular thing
specific to drawing:
* you have a few major tasks: install a simple 3d renderer on your brain, learn to break things you see down into simple shapes and build them back up on the paper, and learn to move your body so as to control your favorite mark-making device (pen, brush, stylus, sponge, spray can, etc)
* the first two tasks carry over to any medium but the last one may not - I've been experimenting with paint lately (after 25y of working in Illustrator) and I have absolutely no real idea of how to efficiently use brushes and other objects to put paint where I want it, so right now I have a few canvases that I'm much more concerned with experimenting with different ways to make marks on then I am concerned with making a nice image on. that said, pencil/pen on paper is a great medium to start with, it's easy to get a decent array of marks out of them without much practice, plus you can easily carry it around in your bag and take it out wherever you go with very little hassle
* study masters, think about what they're doing, copy/work over their stuff - trying to make your hand move the same way as someone much more skilled than you is very powerful, if you know enough to make some guesses about how they made the marks you can see. "How would [master artist you love] handle this image?" is a great question to be able to ask yourself when you're stuck on something.
I hear drawabox is pretty good for the "install a simple 3d renderer and some basic models on your brain" part of this task list. Me, I mostly learnt from the Preston Blair book on Animation, Bridgman's Constructive Anatomy, Loomis' Figure Drawing for All It's Worth, and a life drawing class with a teacher who was largely following Glenn Vilppu's Drawing Manual. That last took me from "you seriously want us to start with 10-20 second poses to start each class?" to "noting down enough of a pose in 10s to turn it into a full drawing later is a blast".
also, take care about ergonomics, you can fuck your wrist up badly, learn to "draw from your arm" instead of "drawing from your wrist", once you do it will let you draw faster and larger, and it will help you keep the Carpal Tunnel Fairy away from your wrist.
There were websites back then which would automatically flip to the next pose once the timer ran out, you'd have to start a new page and sketch it out again.
If you do this for even 10-15 minutes a day every day, you eventually start to see an improvement on your ability to draw poses (starting with picking up on which lines are the most important to convey a silhouette, eventually moving into things like muscles, bone structure, etc.). You can even refer back to your earlier drawings to see the progression.
I never got any good because I didn't stick with it, but I did get a lot better than how I was when I started.
Later on a regular exercise at one of the studios I worked at was "cartoon life drawing", we'd pause a video tape on a good frame from an old WB cartoon, and draw. There was a built-in timer since the VCR would only hold a single frame for so long before saying "okay we're playing again now".
To say that the beginning was rough is an understatement. Violin (and any string instrument, really) is just difficult, plain and simple.
But daily practice, private lessons, and I’m able to play pieces that I’ve only heard recordings of. Sure, it’s not professional, but it brings me immense joy to be able to have my hands and fingers know what to do on instinct now.
Private lessons for me were the key: accountability and expertise at every step. Self-learning would have been so much slower.
The more you learn, and I’m sure it’s like this with any art, the more you realize there’s so much nuance to it and that there’s always room to improve.
I tried pencil at first but with ink I liked that I can’t erase and can’t shade by using pressure.
So every mistake has to be transformed into something agreeable.
It is very productive to think about drawing in a logical way, e.g. how can I achieve what I want to achieve in a part of my picture. What also helps is knowing that a perfect drawing is a photo and I don’t want to produce a photo. And I try drawing what I actually see, not what my mind abstracts and thinks the picture should look like.
I don't actually draw though, more like doodle and make something substantial (for me) out of it. It can be anything - an object, letters, shapes, anything which can dance in some harmony.
Example: (NSFW) https://www.instagram.com/p/C_C5VQZOYVF/?img_index=8
I still have a bunch. I bought a whole back. But after the first one became useless I quickly I wasn’t so interested in continuing to use them.
I am also using Japanese roller pens in very small sizes and these are sturdier, and last "long enough", in my experience
I always had a bad time with them as a kid and ignored them for a couple decades. I only tried again after they were so highly recommended for this program. They wouldn’t accept work for review without using them. But they were exactly as I remembered, if not worse.
It’s possible I got unlucky at the start, but with it confirming my past memories, I was that interested in investing further in a program that required I use my least favorite implement.
I do have significant musical training and experience. The prior music training does help, but it mostly just helps me figure out when something is wrong, not how to fix it.
I have three tips:
1. Find a teacher or group you click with. Music instruction is 1:1 because it doesn't scale well, but visual arts you can do with a studio. A teacher will really help since most forms of art are subjective enough that you may not know what you are doing well or poorly and that feedback is very valuable.
2. Do your art every day, even for 15-30 min. Inspiration starts with doing, not the other way around.
3. Try to be better than you were yesterday. Practice things you are bad at, and consciously do projects to improve yourself. There is no competition here except with yourself yesterday.
A final one:
IMO the notion of "talent" for the arts is just how people cope with the fact that the best and brightest in that field did more work than them. I had several friends who were "talented" pianists growing up, several of whom are concert artists now. All of them worked their asses off 5-6 hours a day to become "talented." It took me a while longer, but I eventually became a "talented" harpsichord player in my early 20s. Go at your own pace and don't give up and you will also eventually be "talented."
I found the whole thing to be a real head scratcher, to the point that I find it hard to imagine learning to sing is even possible (obviously it is, but what is actually going on in the process?).
That is all to say that I don't have to learn many "musicianship" skills during the process, I vaguely knew that vowels are important, and I have a pretty good idea of how to generically practice music (and as a former pianist, I have a very high tolerance for things most singing teachers call "boring"). I will also say that aside from piano, I have done a lot of things that need fine motor control in the past, and that seems to extend to your face muscles.
That means that my voice teacher and I can focus mostly on vocal technique and honing my ear to listen to my own voice (which is surprisingly hard). I also picked a teacher who was a locally-well-known soloist, and she was a very good fit because she herself focuses a lot on the biomechanics of singing.
I have been working for a year and have a decent tone (several times louder than when I started, too) and a decent voice quality with vibrato if I focus on it. Vocal placement, "support," and other similar things are not unconscious for me but I can control them. I can also sing several arias and art songs at a decent quality. I am still working a lot on agility, pronunciation and exact vowel sounds, picking the right ways to produce sounds, and working on controlling my tongue and my abs/diaphragm to produce a good tone that is expressive and can pierce an orchestra.
FWIW I have heard that if you switch voice teachers a lot, it's actually bad for your voice because teaching methods are so "fluffy." Also, I have never done this, but I am sort of convinced that developing a good pop voice is probably as hard as developing a classical voice. In contrast, learning to play keys for a band is supposedly much easier than classical piano of the same level.
Maybe the notion of “hard work” is just an attempt by talented people to justify their winning the genetic lottery to themselves and to appear humble?
Nowadays, success in the classical music industry very often depends on looks and conventional physical attractiveness. Here, too, luck is more important than hard work.
Really? My sister was a professional violist for a while and did all her auditions behind a screen. There are lots of efforts taken to remove biases of exactly the type you are citing from your career path.
Several soloists I know are relatively ugly people, but everyone who is a serious musician is in pretty good shape. Playing concert music is a light-to-moderate full-body workout, and doing that for 5 hours a day takes stamina. They usually also have clothing that fits them perfectly and they will often use some makeup to fix blemishes. So if you're just looking at a soloist on stage or on a video recording, that is about as attractive as the person you are seeing will possibly look, and they are selected from a pool of people that work out about as much as a full-time yoga instructor.
An example that stands out to me here is Yuja Wang, who is known for wearing very short dresses on stage. This happened much to the consternation of conductors and orchestras, and may have actually hurt her early career. She was more than good enough to overcome that, though, and I can't say that it was a bad marketing tactic for attracting youtube views.
http://www.drawingideasbook.com/book.html https://breadchris.com/blog/the-figma-plugin-system/
- Basic Skills / Getting Started with Drawing
- Dynamic Mark Making / Drawing with Expression & Creativity
- Form & Space / 3D Drawing & Perspective
- Measuring & Proportion / Drawing with Accuracy & Precision
- Contours / Drawing with Compelling Contours & Foreshortening
At this point, I recommend picking up drawabox.com as well to engage with practice a little differently. It draws from a school of thought that is present in the book "How to Draw" by Scott Robertson. That book is a little more advanced and I'd recommend it only if you are deep enough into understanding drawabox.com (PS: recommend trying but then moving on from the texturing chapter if it feels too hard to understand. It sticks out like a sore thumb because it requires understanding of light tbh. Texture doesn't just exist. We perceive most of it because of light and shadow)
Brent's work continues though while you do drawabox:
- Shading Fundamentals / Drawing with Dramatic Light and Shadow
- Shading Beyond the Basics / Shade Any Subject No Matter How Complex
Once you are done with this, it really depends on where you want to go. You should be far along in drawabox where you doing constructional drawing. This is actually a good point to see if you can also do the texture challenge.
At this point you can decide on your thing. Maybe drawing figures is your thing (Again, Brent's art and science of figure drawing is the best resource out there). Maybe only a bit. Maybe you want to paint digitally? Meds map by Ahmed Aldoori is the best resource there is. If you manage to finish that, anything from Marco Bucci on skillshare is brilliant. If you have more specific desires on physical mediums, check out proko, but also double check the courses since some of the instructors sell the courses on proko at higher prices than they do on udemy or gumroad. If you don't care for the community aspect of proko, you can buy it cheaper sometimes from elsewhere. Lastly, on anything related to animals, Aaron Blaise's creatureartteacher website is a gold mine. Wait for sales though since you can get an all access pass for a huge discount during those times.
Good luck! Feel free to mail me if you want to discuss more :)
Here is a short introduction about how it went for me: http://pa-mar.net/Hobbies/Drawing.html
[Warning NSFW !!!]
And this are the results: https://www.instagram.com/pamar
My "best of" (still mostly NSFW) https://pa-mar.net/Hobbies/DrawingBestOf.html
[15 years ago I started practicing Shodo (Japanese Calligraphy) which was already a step in the same direction.]
But apart from the little drawing I did at school (as a child) I never really took any class, not even a video class on Internet.
As I explain in the first page, I just decided to try drawing from random photos setting a timer. Then two things happened:
1) I found out I liked it a lot, even if the first results were nothing to write home about.
2) COVID (9 months later).
Also, as a person I tend to stick to hobbies so if I decide to start something new I try to sort out how much time I can devote to this new activity considering everything else I have already on my plate. If it sticks, it tends to go on forever (e.g.: Aikido - 35 years and counting, Shodo 15 and counting, TTRPG... 40 and counting, IT/Tech, 45 and counting...).
Like any other skill, it takes practice to master. While you can brute-force drawing from scratch, reading up on some techniques and anatomy will help a lot.
I've had some troubles with reading up on tech&Co. as that always seems to get my expectations higher than what I can achieve, which ends up being somewhat discouraging even if I'm visibly improving at the thing, which is far less of a problem with doodle art as I'm mostly having some stupid fun
Curse you, expectations!
Everyone can get up to 80th percentile in pretty much everything if they try. The reason it's the 80th percentile isn't because it's that hard, but because most people aren't focusing on this one niche skill, whatever it is you choose to develop.
Drop $20 or $50 on a lesson once a week in something that interests you, and see where you are in a year from now. I bet people will be saying, "hey, that's not bad!" Or just teach yourself from youtube videos.
It only takes two steps to get from zero to "not bad": show some courage, and then show some commitment.
You have a model of all things you want to draw in your head, e.g. you know how many fingers are one one hand, how the thumb goes into another direction — these models can distract you from drawing what is really seen from a certain perspective.
So my advice is to just draw regularily. Don't hessitate to do things in isolation, e.g. as a designer I had to draw straight lines for half a year. That is boring as fuck, but afterwards you have much more control.
After a few years of reproducing all sorts of patterns - mainly Islamic patterns using compass and straightedge, but honestly also tracing paper - I now can convert an image I like of a tile or similar into a neat, symmetric painted-on-paper example in a weekend.
Along the way I've learned how to use various types of paint (watercolour, gouache, acrylic) and mediums (gum arabic, gloss) and varnishes. Also brushes - current favourite being an angled shader and types of paper.
Most importantly, learning about how to use colours - mixing them, and choosing a palette that looks good. Also what I consider the 'finish' of a work: inking outlines, bordering, just making it look good.
I initially put stuff on Etsy, just to put it out in the world. However - not particularly surprisingly, that's not something want to buy - so I now use cara.app as a way to show it to other people, which is what I actually want :) I worry though that cara is unsustainable.
It's been fun, just trying out what seems interesting and striving to get output that you can be proud of and is visually pleasing in whatever way.
Hope to take this as inspiration!
Samira Mian, her youtube channel is: https://www.youtube.com/user/samiramian
Another book (!) by Eric Broug - 'Islamic Geometric Patterns' that has step-by-step instructions for 22 patterns.
In general, I use a good compass (although I have also used the cheapest one, it's fine for getting something on paper!) and a mechanical pencil. A transparent ruler with a bevel (so that you can flip it over and draw along the edge) is good. You get used to how to precisely draw a line between points and how to adjust a drawing to get it as symmetric as possible.
Go for it! It's fun :)
I've never gotten particularly far in doing my own and have honestly spent more time just cheerfully leafing through Islamic Art in Cairo by Prisse d'Avennes and L'Art de L'Islam by Titus Bruckhardt.