Despite saying I was basing my approach off of Learn To Draw From 0 To 100 by Draw Like a Sir, I decided to skip his recommendation to move from shapes to simple and rough anatomy until later, and dip my toe into perspective as that would allow me to continue drawing shapes (at least for noe). At the start of the week, I wished to have a baseline drawing based on my vague understanding of the concept so I decided to draw a series of circles moving off into the distance. These circles are also shaded, building upon the shapes I was practicing last week.
After creating a baseline image, I decided to once again use YouTube to learn more about how perspective actually works. Among the videos I watched I found an “Introduction To Perspective” by David Finch, a comic book artist, and found it was a nicely compressed video that displayed the different ways to do perspective with visual examples. After watching this video I did another sketch using some of the perspective tricks I learned to compare to my first image.
Comparing the two images the first one feels inconsistent with how it fades into the background, with some circles being higher than the first one, but I’m not too disappointed. While I do have complaints with my shading work I feel like the perspective portion really improved now that I know how it works. However, at this point I was tired of just watching YouTube videos and copying what I saw done, so I decided to look for an online resource that could help me and give me exercises to do. This is when I stumbled upon Drawabox.com, an online website that has lessons from learning to draw lines, to constructional drawing. Seeing that the lessons were free, I decided to start from lesson one: Lines, Ellipses, and Boxes to see how they were taught. What I found was a very detailed step by step process to improving one’s drawing skills, and explaining why these steps were important for future drawing skills. They went over drawing with the whole arm rather than just the elbow or wrist, why stable smooth lines were important, what shapes should look like from different angles, and most importantly they gave a lot of exercises and “homework” to do to check one’s progress and practice in an effective and intentional manner that develops the basic skills rather than just copy and pasting what I saw on YouTube. The explanation text is accompanied by easy to follow drawings that display what is being talked about, and was overall a very nice resource to find. In future weeks, I will be using this as my main progress check as I can compare my present skills to how I want them to look. One such exercise that I am working on is based on drawing cubes from multiple different perspectives. As I found this resource closer to the end of the week and it goes very in depth, I may end up continuing with perspective for another week.
All of these images were drawn using an app called Sketchbook, a free app that is well regarded based on the research I did. Another well regarded drawing software is Procreate, however Procreate is not available on android devices so I chose sketchbook. Below is a fun video I found while looking for drawing videos about some of the Simpson Animator’s “No-No Sheets”, a collection of papers with the do’s and don’ts of drawing the famous characters. Information includes how many eyeballs tall is Marge’s hair and Lisa’s head, among other random facts. Just a fun video I enjoyed and thought I would share.
Hi Everett! Wow, you have already made so much progress! As someone who draws a lot myself, I find youtube to be a great tool with endless tutorials for drawing. Procreate is a really fun app to play around with! I really enjoy using watercolour brushes (I did purchase a set). My advice for people to learning to draw is to 1. start by using references. It helps develop an understanding of proportion, and 2. draw what you want! If you are really excited to draw something, I find it makes the process so much easier. I can’t wait to see you continue this journey and see what you create!
Thanks for the advice! Though it took me a while to take it, in more recent weeks I have started to make heavy use of reference images and the idea for it came from your comment. References have indeed helped speed up my progress and understanding a lot. The advice to draw what I like also helped me a lot whenever I was low on motivation to practice as it was more fun to draw things I though looked nice and interested me at the moment.