Graphite Sketch...Learn to draw!

[london2010]

HB pencil from bust of Michelangelo's David, London 2003. Rough gradient writing paper.

Pencil. Paper. Mistakes. Improvement. It takes YEARS, people, YEARS.

Carry an A5 pad, a putty eraser, a 2B and a HB pencil everywhere you go.

The sketch below took me about half an hour tops but the important factor is that what went into allowing me to be able to draw this prep sketch in under an hour was about 15-20 years of scribbling, observing, doodling, and reading the fundamentals of human anatomy.

If you aren't studying value, proportion, cross hatching, perspective AND doing your own studies from life (at work, on the train/bus, in a cafe) then you should be :)

[london2010]

I try to fill a page of my A4 book rather than waste space. There's a lot of nonsense spoken by sketch artists about grades of paper - if you're life sketching then paper is paper. If you're sketching a commissioned portrait, then it matters.

Otherwise - an HB and a 2B and a sharpener and a putty eraser (not a rubber one).

Apols for bad photo quality - none of the detail is coming out. They're only doodles anyway.

[london2010]

This took a thousand years.

Charcoal and 2H pencil. Mostly the pencil.

Kneaded putty rubber was invaluable in this - I'd smudged so many small areas that needed to be white. The skin tone was achieved through simple circling and then randomly smudging small areas. I gave up on the left corner of the beard and decided to make it look like it had caught the light or something.

[loboz]

Pencil. Paper. Mistakes. Improvement. It takes YEARS, people, YEARS.



Tell me about it, there is No shortcut to being an excellent artist and as you proved its worth it in the end. This art is fantastic and I'm hoping in my future my Anatomy is well done so I can work on achieving my dreams and goals.

[xinhai]

what books did you read to improve your anatomy? Oh and how long did the old man (amazingly detailed, with the heavy beard) take you to draw? and do you ever use digital media like photoshop or painter? hope to see more from you ;D

[london2010]

what books did you read to improve your anatomy? Oh and how long did the old man (amazingly detailed, with the heavy beard) take you to draw? and do you ever use digital media like photoshop or painter? hope to see more from you ;D

Funny you should ask about digital stuff as I am very much against it as a tool for learning to draw and am about to make a post about the results I've had.

Old man took about 12 hours or so.

Anything by Giovanni Civardi should be bought asap! There are few people like him in the world as he is both a professional artist AND anatomist in Florence.

You should be able to get his books from Amazons.

[xinhai]

Funny you should ask about digital stuff as I am very much against it as a tool for learning to draw and am about to make a post about the results I've had.

Old man took about 12 hours or so.

Anything by Giovanni Civardi should be bought asap! There are few people like him in the world as he is both a professional artist AND anatomist in Florence.

You should be able to get his books from Amazons.

Hrm, but if you wish to work as a professional concept artist / illustrator, don't you have to eventually turn to digital media in today's environment, as it is so much faster with computer programs? I started out by using traditional media, but I am not trying to train myself in digital media because I have school + work, and it is just so much faster.

[london2010]

So today after years of hearing about graphics pens I borrowed one from my best friend Sam and decided to give it a whirl.

Well....

I really don't know what to make of it. On the one hand I wanted to pick the thing up after twenty minutes and hurl the unit out the window and watch it arc beautifully into the street below and majestically crash to its death, yet on the other hand I was amused by it. It was like wringing a kitten's neck - you know it's depraved but it's kind of entertaining. I jest...

The results (see below) are the worst drawings I've ever produced and of course it looks like the sketchings of a blind child or a mental hospital inmate. Random black would appear, no brush size produced anything like a pencil stroke...I could bore on.

My general feelings about graphics tablets are demonstrated in the bottom right, in case it wasn't clear :-)

What I really hated (apart from just not being able to draw) is that the pressure scales are absurdly intense. I played with all the settings and yet to get just the basic, lightest line required a force that no pencil would require.

My conclusion is this - graphic art is a craft, not an art. It requires skill and it requires knowledge, but it isn't an art in the sense that painting is or sculpture is. Tons will disagree but I don't think "the tons" have read Burckhardt in most cases so I might be ok.

At the end of the day, the pencil and the graphics pen are two different worlds and only one of them entails being able to immediately draw with the other - if a person learns to draw or paint on a graphics tablet they'll never learn to draw with a pencil, whereas the inverse clearly isn't true. Why? Because there is nothing natural about a graphics tablet.

What I found deeply worrying about this thing was that it guessed my movement...I honestly can't explain what I mean but it felt like the software was second-guessing me and filling in micrometers of space I hadn't thought of.

But you wait and see - I'll no doubt catch the bug and be using this thing more often.

[london2010]

Hrm, but if you wish to work as a professional concept artist / illustrator, don't you have to eventually turn to digital media in today's environment, as it is so much faster with computer programs? I started out by using traditional media, but I am not trying to train myself in digital media because I have school + work, and it is just so much faster.

It depends on what you want, I guess. A lot of people who use this site have nothing to do with digital art at all and just post their artwork for others to enjoy. Much of the best stuff one sees on this site is done with a pencil.

If you want to be a graphic designer then clearly you need to know how to use CorelDraw etc, but a professional portraitist clearly isn't going to be using a graphics tablet because he/she knows people want something "real". I've sold a lot of portraits over the years as a hobby and I've never been asked to produce it in a high-spec JPEG using digital software. It's like digital books and those silly SONY book things - look how that idea never caught on. People like paper!

Graphic design is quick, fun, and doesn't lead to any deaths. But if a person can't draw using a pencil then I don't see what $1,500 worth of gear will make.

But as I say - it all depends on what you want....to be able to capture a moment, or to produce a picture for a logo for a company.