Seeking Drawing Advice/Sympathy

Just sitting here working on my homework for my college drawing class and wondering if anyone else here struggled with drawing from sight. I've always been an artist, but this is the first actual structured art class I've taken. I love the challenge, but for some reason while I love to draw, I find drawing from sight/life incredibly difficult. Anyone have any suggestions/tips/books/etc they can pass on?

Practice

I am no expert, nor artist. I took courses *ages* ago, just as electives, and remember what I was told about it. Essentially this:

It's a lot easier to draw melancholy light, for instance, from reality than trying to conjure it up mentally. A clenched fist, a blush on the cheek - very hard things to get 'right' from memory. The little details in such things convey a lot.

The issue was not drawing everything that you see as precisely as a photograph, but seeing *those things* that conveyed your feeling, and drawing those. Capturing the moment more deeply than perhaps a photograph could that way - otherwise, why art at all?

Perhaps the proportions of your subject aren't quite right, or aren't lining up. Not a big deal (at least not to my instructor). His issue was communication through art.


I would be very interested in hearing what a true artist would say also; I am certainly not one myself so take what I say for what it's worth.

Thanks, I'll let you know if I ever need advice on being an arrogant bastard.

Saying "Practice" is not being arrogant. It is just giving good advice. Struggle through a thousand drawings that all go into the trash, the next thousand drawings should be better.

Draw what you see, not what you think the objects look like. Draw a bunch of really quick sketches, just for proportions, don't stop to think much, and throw them away. Draw just shading, using the side of the pencil or charcoal or pastels, making no outline, real fast. Throw them away. The trash can is a real important tool. Draw lots of different things, just get objects from around the house and draw them. Buy some vegetables and draw them for organic shapes. Get a clipboard or some such portable drawing surface, go outside and draw the place you live, draw cars, draw trees, and landscapes outside. Go to pet stores or the zoo and draw some animals.

Draw contour drawings where you don't look at the paper at all while you draw. Don't cheat and look to make the lines continue from where you left off if you lift the pencil.

Find some old rotten wood with fungus on it, draw that. Get something with old weathered, peeled, cracked, multilayered paint, draw little sectoins of that, too small a section to tell that it is a part of an object. Draw fabric, being careful to draw the weave as you see it and not how it seems like it should look.

Find victims, make them sit still long enough to do figure studies, for unpaid volunteers, the super fast sketches work good, they don't have to stay in one position very long.

Good luck.

Yeah, a friend of mine had a class where they just drew stick figures for hours on end in order to get the hang of doing proportions and poses.

Good advice. I have a theory that one reason it's tricky to draw what's actually there is because the brain "translates" what you see into words and categories. Let's say I'm drawing a dog. To make an accurate duplication on paper, I need to copy each curve and feature and shadow onto the paper. Here's where the brain interferes- trying to arrange the picture into some kind of detailed chart or heighroglyphic by "telling" me stuff like "The head goes in the front, eyes are on the head and make them oval and the nose goes way at the tip and the nose is round and the ears go on the top..." and so on, so instead of drawing the shapes that are there, I end up drawing what I think is there, resulting in a klunky picture.

SuezanneC is right about the disposable drawings too. Sometimes the expense drawing materials is intimidating. When I do practice sketches, I often do 'em on cheap paper with ballpoint pens. That way, there's no pressure to create a masterpiece and no tragedy if I toss them.

Good luck!

Hee. You're a little late for him.

The biggest problem beginning artists have, in my opinion, is that the difficulty of translating something that is 3D (or 4D for your sticklers) into something that is 2D. Slight head movements and even the distance between the eyes (do pirates draw better?) alter what you're looking at. When I first started drawing real things, I found that I drew much better from photos than from real life for that very reason. It's a good trick if you have a deadline to meet too.

I've never considered myself 'good' at life drawing... in fact I gave up 'drawing' 7 or 8 years ago in favour of 'quick sketches' and working pretty much directly on the computer.
However, I have some tips to impart that greatly helped me.

1. disposable drawings is a great method... but dont throw them away immediately.
Instead, save them for a few weeks. Keep them in a box of folder so you can look back at them at a later date... you'll be suprised how much you can learn by looking back over rough work.
Personally, I would wite the date and a short description of the subject, including the lighting of it, on 5 or 6 sheets of paper before i started.

2. dissasemble the subject, in as many ways as you can. Think of separating the form, texture, lighting, tone/color, and 'presence' of the subject. Here's some of my methods.

Form:
Squint. When you squint you reduce the detail of the subject, and can get a better idea of the overall form. Make a couple of quick line sketches, using the lightest and darkest areas of the subject to describe the overall form. This technique is handy for both the start of a drawing project, and for those times you 'get lost' in the detail, and helps pull back and reasses what to spend your time working on.

Lightng:
Okay, this sounds wacky, but try it and you will be suprised. (this only works for studio work by the way, not outdoor drawing).
Get a bright torch (flashlight) and shine it on the subject for a few seconds at a time.
It helps you notice the highlights and shadows on the subject by 'taking them away and putting them back'. The brain is great at finding differences in patterns, and this is a good technique to make use of that inate ability.

Tone/Color:
Again, this sounds odd but works a treat. Find some really thin tissue paper (the thinnest tracing paper you can find in your local art store).
Hold it up in front of you, fairly close to your eyes. It will blur out the image, accenting the tone and color of the subject.
Think of it as defining the overal tones of the drawing-to-be. You'll be suprised how this technique makes your drawings lighter or darker than you would otherwise make them.

Presence:
This one is purely a mind technique.
What I do is mentally take each element of the subject out of context, and imagine it in my minds eye as separate from the rest.
For example... a bowl of fruit next to some empty bottle on a table.
Separate out the bowl, the bottles, and the table. Even the fruit if you can. Each separate element has its own 'presence' which it adds to the whole scene. By pulling them 'out of the picture' you gain a better insight into the relationships between them as a whole.

This might seem like a load of shit... but consider this: The whole is more than the sum of its parts...

The bottles have more 'mass' when they are together... you notice the gaps between them more by trying to pull them out of the overall picture, the lighting makes more sense... etc.

And lastly,
3. Practice:
Heh, yup... its not arrogance, its more a case of training your mind to work in a new way. Some people are gifted at being able to mentaly manipulate and deconstruct what they are seeing, but most need to practice doing it to become fluent at it and make it a subconcious act.

I hope my wacky suggestions help you in your work, and that i havent come across as 'preachy'

I am not artistic at all but an Australian friend of mine used to go to art classes where they were taught to draw an item upside down. Then they were drawing an abstract shape rather than the object.

Don't know if that helps.

Alexa

Hi Kazuo:

Whenever I've taught life drawing classes, the two books I usually recommend are "The Natural Way to Draw" by Kimon Nicolaides,
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0395530075/qid=1130607627/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-7614420-3755228?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
and "Drawing from the Right Side of the Brain" by Betty Edwards,
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0874774241/qid=1130607715/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-7614420-3755228?v=glance&s=books

If you can get only one, get the Edwards book since it tends to be much less intimidating to new students, and it rightfully encourages the idea that drawing from life is an skill accessible to all people. All of the exercises make good basic drill. You could/should practice them regularly for the rest of your life -- you can never outgrow them. Every 3 or 4 years, I drop whatever else I'm doing, and devote about a thousand hours to reviewing such fundamentals. A master is someone who's mastered fundamentals.

If you're in a figure drawing class, look for books by George Bridgeman -- in particular "Bridgeman's Life Drawing", "Complete Guide to Drawing from Life", and/or "Constructive Anatomy".
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0844600385/qid=1130607768/sr=2-3/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_3/002-7614420-3755228?v=glance&s=books
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0486211045/qid=1130607768/sr=2-2/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_2/002-7614420-3755228?v=glance&s=books
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0806930152/qid=1130607768/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/002-7614420-3755228?v=glance&s=books
The advantage of Bridgeman's books over others is that he places all of his emphasis on depicting solid 3D form on a 2D surface, and he approaches artist's anatomy as a study of mechanics. Most other art anatomy books simply give an inventory of bones and muscles alongside slick detailed illustrations without saying much of how any of them work.

In any drawing from life -- be it still life or figure -- pay particular attention to proportion and angle measuring (i.e. holding a pencil at arms length and sighting the relative size of the component parts of the object you're drawing).
http://drawsketch.about.com/cs/figuredrawing/a/fig_proportion_2.htm
In my experience (teaching beginning life drawing on and off over the past 25 years), proportion is the most consistent headache for the new art student. Most people can get a decent feel for the other basics -- contour, value patterns, gesture, etc -- with a hundred or so hours at each. Getting a good eye for measurement usually takes as much time as all other life drawing exercises combined.

As to practice, milage is everything. The author of "Natural Way to Draw" writes that if you spend a couple thousand hours drawing, there's nothing he could do to *prevent* you from learning how to draw. If your instructor babbled nonsense to you all year, but you were simultaneously filling up two or three sketchbooks a week from life, you'd end up learning how to draw.

Don't be afraid, and don't let drawing intimidate you. You're correct: drawing from life *is* incredibly difficult. Most things worth a damn are. You have to really want it badly. Expect to spend a lot of time frustrated and disliking much of what you've made. You can allow that frustration to discourage you, or you can *use* it to drive you to doing better. It's a choice which anyone who's learning this skill need make.

Because it *is* an inherently frustrating skill to acquire, it would do no harm to find some motivating reading which reminds you why you're putting yourself through the hassle of learning it.
My personal favorite is a charming old book from the 1940s, "Painting for Beginners" by Jan Gordon, which also contains much pragmatic drawing advice:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000ANGDUI/qid=1130610275/sr=8-2/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i2_xgl14/002-7614420-3755228?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
More typical, accessible, and worthy recommendations for motivating thoughts are "The Art Spirit" by Robert Henri,
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0064301389/qid=1130610799/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-7614420-3755228?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
and "The Shape of Content" by Ben Shahn
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0674805704/qid=1130610914/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/002-7614420-3755228?v=glance&s=books

-- Limner