I’m going to let you all in on a little secret–sometimes, even people who are in the industry kinda think their art sucks. Actually, strike “sometimes” and replace it with “most of the time.” There are reasons for this. For one thing, most 3-d artists don’t get to do a lot of 2-d art at work, other than making textures, and texture painting is different from just sitting down and making a painting of a person or a scene. The other reason is because once you make it to the industry, you should have developed a critical eye for art and using it on your own. If a person is unable to critique their own work, that person has no place in the industry.
This is all a lead-in for what this post (and Saturday posts in the future) will discuss: My own drawing practice. While I’m a much better artist than I was in college, I still have some serious issues that I want to work on. To that end, I’m going to be trying out various classical and contemporary techniques to find one that works for me. Today’s technique is from the book The Artist’s Complete Guide to Figure Drawing: A Contemporary Perspective on the Classical Tradition by Anthony Ryder. This is an amazing book detailing a sight-size technique that anyone can do, and I mean that. The technique works its way in from the largest shapes to the smallest shapes in straight lines, and once you have a base of straight lines to work on you begin the actual outline and the shading. I’m not going to describe it all in detail, but I highly recommend the book.
On Thursday, I gave it a shot.
This was maybe 45 minutes worth of work. I’m sure Mr. Ryder would be scandalized to know that I drew from a photo instead of from a real model, and that I worked quite a bit smaller than he does, and that I only had a slightly dull 6B pencil to work with (aside: Where did all my art pencils go? I know I used to have a lot more of them, but my art box only has charcoal and graphite sticks. I don’t even like charcoal, where did all of it come from?), and that due to having a slightly dull 6B pencil to work with I went directly from the second round of straight lines to the shading without ever doing a proper contour… So let’s hope he never sees this post. Overall, though, I’m fairly happy with this. The technique is intuitive and useful. I’m definitely going to practice it further.