Drawing & Other Artistic Stuff

[February Eve]

Got a question for you artistic types. Well, more than one, but to start with, this is just an invitation to ramble about yourself. What kind of mediums do you use, how long have you been doing it, what are your favorite things to draw/paint/depict, etc? Anything that relates to your own personal art history, really.

The reason I am asking is because I am going to try my hand at some basic drawing, and if there were rankings, I'd probably be in the bottom 1% of people with artistic ability. Right now my only project is doing flashcards, but I'm having fun with them. I thought that hearing about some of your experiences would be interesting since I grew up barely even doodling in the margins.

Also, if you draw, do you remember anything you did when you first started out drawing? It can be obvious, like using guidelines. One of my friends advised me to use my pencil as a kind of measure to compare proportions in different parts of the picture. I am so basic that little things like that don't even occur to me.

(Again, people who don't draw but do anything artistic such as using graphics, etc, are also welcome to post in the thread. This is mostly an 'autobiography of an artist' topic - I just figured I may try to get help in the process at the same time. )

 

[Zeruda]

Yay, an artsy topic!

{ MEDIUMS
For mediums... well, I'm not very talented with the usual mediums. I can't use paint or pastels to save my life. I can use colored pencils to an extent, but I can never get them dark enough. I'm pretty good with sidewalk chalk, though. XP

I do well with pen or pencil. I prefer thick-ink pens because I like thick outlines. Plus, if you use a pen, you learn to force yourself to not make mistakes. If I use pencil, I HAVE to have one of those mechanical pencil erasers that make it so your stuff doesn't smudge. I like to use makeup (eyeshadow) when I color skies because the colors blend so nicely...

I also like scratch board stuff. It's this black paper, and you scratch off the top layer with a sharp tool... it's like drawing in negative. But for coloring, I really like digital coloring. I dunno, I feel more comfortable, and it's more of a challenge for me. On top of that, I don't have to worry about ruining my work. I usually always spill SOMETHING on my drawings... But yeah, I like Photoshop to color.

Lately, though, I've been really into using my oekaki board. There aren't as many options as something like Photoshop.... it's just for doodling, really, but I like just doodling. I don't have to spend a lot of time on it. What's good though is that you can watch the animation of your drawing and other peoples' drawings so you can learn from your mistakes and the techniques of other people. It's WONDERFUL!

{ STARTING OUT
I am not one of those people who decided to start practicing. In 8th grade, my best friend and I were hanging out one day before class. I was all, "I'm booooooored..." and she told me to draw something. So I did. And I was like, "Whoa, I can draw?" Turns out my brother has the same ability.

But the first thing I drew was a person. When I attempted drawing a horse, it turned out looking like a giraffe-donkey hybrid. I got better with practice, but I still have a lot of trouble drawing animals. I learned to draw people better and better by making my brother pose, lol. I made him flap a sheet in the wind when I was teaching myself to do folds in fabric (that time it was for a cape).

One thing that I really focused on was types of fabrics. For instance, Link's tunic in TP is a thicker material than Link's tunic in OoT. So, if the wind blows, there aren't going to be as many creases and folds in it. Princess Zelda's dress in OoT is a thinner fabric, whereas in TP, it's thicker and formed (think starch). OoT!Zelda's dress drapes around her figure and would look flowy in the wind, while TP!Zelda's dress has a shaped flare to it and wouldn't fold around as much in the wind.

It wasn't until recently that I've finally learned how to draw males. I still kinda suck, though. Men have blocky figures that I despise, so I have a lot of practice to do.

{ FAVORITE THINGS & HABITS
I have this love of (or habit) drawing fine details. When I draw Link, I'll sit and draw every ring in his ringmail. When I draw Zelda, I draw the tiniest details in her armor. I've been forcing myself to focus less on the details and more on the big picture lately, because that's what's important.

I also loooove to draw metal. It looks hard, but it's the easiest thing ever. You just throw random lines of shading and highlighting and VOILA! Looks metallic.

I also really dislike the way many people try to teach drawing proportions.... I never understood using the "frame" thing. I've even watched people draw a circle for the head, whatever shape for the body, and then build on that, but it drives me nuts. I simply draw whatever it is I want to draw. I never had to use any sort of measurement to tell if a leg or arm is long or short enough because I can tell by looking at it. I mean.. I'm a human, so I can tell if a human body doesn't look right.

I also like to work with various styles. Big-eye anime is nice and that's what I started with, but I prefer a more mixed style of realism and anime. I practice the typical anime style, I practice my own anime style, I practice cartoonism, etc. I can't do realism for my life though. DX




aaaand yeah that was a wall of text. Sorry. I get excited about artwork. :<

 

[Xinnamin]

I feel a wall of text coming on...

Learning to draw and developing a style:
I seem to remember getting into art and stuff back in first grade or something; for some reason I distinctly remember being fond of drawing all the way back then. Of course, back then I was terrible, but I was a first grader so that was to be expected. Anyways, I remember starting out with those step-by-step drawing books teaches you how to draw a certain image. I did it with animals and birds and all sorts of other cute little things. Looking back on it, I think those books gave me a really good foundation for learning to draw by imitation.

For a while I did nothing but Pokemon art, oddly enough. I would take these big ol' game guides, go to the pokedex pages in back, and try to draw the Sugimori art of the Pokemon I liked. Eventually I tried to draw humans based off of Sugimori's style, so all my people looked like they came out of the Pokemon anime, only really distorted since I had no sense of anatomy. But studying the Pokemon style was the first step for me; I started developing a sense of anatomy.

Practice makes perfect I guess. I for one used to draw on everything, margins on my homework, empty spaces on my school notes, random pieces of scratch paper, everything. If there was a pencil in my hand, I was very likely drawing. I remember for a whole month I spend so much time making funny poses with my hands and trying to draw it. Goodness knows that helped me learn to draw hands.

I suppose I've always learned from imitation and use of references; it really is helpful to try emulating other artists' styles to get the basics down. Eventually I started branching off on my own style, mixing anime elements with realism in proportions and clothing and the like. My style is still evolving, and looking back on my works from the last few years, I'm hardly consistent with the way I draw anything. The way I draw elements of the face changes monthly almost.

Mediums:
Digital painting is my current forte. Ever since my dad bought me a tablet a few years back, Photoshop has been my bread and butter for art. It's mostly because I can't color using traditional mediums for the life of me. It's also really fun to play around with textures and filters and brushes and layers and all that other fun stuff to create effects that would take forever to do on traditional canvases.

That's not to say I can't do traditional art. Pencil and paper was how I started, and I can't stray from my roots. In a way, pencil line art is easier that digital line art for me, it feels smoother and softer and more comfortable. But traditional coloring is a mess for me since I'm always so paranoid about mistakes, which also explains why I cannot for the life of me ink my lineart with a pen. Using paints and pastels and all that other fun stuff in art classes is nice and all, but it's not the stuff I do well.

Tips and habits:
I never seem to be able to start my drawings consistently. Often, I draw some sort of frame, a variation of what one of my art teachers called a "sausage figure", to determine a pose. It's basically a stick figure, only with shoulders and hips (why do most stick figures lack shoulders and hips? D= ), but since I always screw up with the proportions I tend to just draw a bunch of action lines these days. But using these frames does help me position the limbs and stuff, and it's also helpful to take a reference picture and make a bunch of action lines on that to see where the lines go.

Not much else to say, I'm pretty spontaneous with my art. I love to experiment, probably why I'm so inconsistent, but inconsistent in a good way =D

 

[Vanessa28]

That's okay Zeruda It is a good thing you took us with you in your drawing kitchen!

Well I'm not good at drawing etc but I started to draw when I was like 10 years old. My classmates always complimented me I was very good at drawing comicbook characters and details. I even have a couple of drawings left I made when I was 13 years old.

I prefer pencils and then medium brushes. I don't like too soft brushes because they smudge the paper but that's my opinion of course. I always thought it was strange in many comics or cartoons the necks were so thin so I made them bigger. More human like.

Recently I started to pick up drawing again. Mainly because I love to work on digital art etc but am crazy about my tablet so I want to use the tablet to regain my drawing qualities.

 

[Hylian Pants]

Now this is my kind of topic! This should be fun, I've never done a self-evaluation of my artistry before. Hmmmmm.......

Beginnings

Personally, I've been into drawing and art for as long as I can remember. I definitely consider it to be my niche in life. I guess I could say that the interest is also familial, since my sister is also extremely artistic and my father is a musician. When I was really little, my favorite thing was to paint little "egg-people" in crayola paint. Meaning a big smiley face with little stick arms and legs. I also vividly remember drawing a big comic book, at the age of 6 or 7, about a family of horses lol.

I never really sought out the help of "how-to" books until I was about 13, when I became interested in depicting the human form. Up until then, I had stuck to animals, plants, and pokemon. Oddly enough, I liked to be very methodical when drawing pokemon (my own original pokes or pre-existing ones), as in I would draw them as if they were in a pokedex and then fill the next half of the page with a paragraph about their attack style and temperment This trend dissipated in my teenage years when I turned more to drawing people. I also strayed away from scratching boat loads of text next to my drawings, which, in retrospect, I probably should've tried to keep doing. (Hey, Da Vinci did it too!) One thing that stands out to me about my younger school days is that EVERYTHING was covered in doodles. And on top of that, I carried around a folder of loose leaf drawings. I really think doodling helped me grow as an artist immensely, even if it was at the cost of my grades XD

I started becoming interested in graphic design and digital art when I discovered that I really admired the crisp, clean, bright lines and colors seen in a lot of vector and digital work. Being a sketchy artist, I figured to myself that it must take a complete mastery of form and line to produce something so sharp. In the kinds of pieces I was looking at, there seemed to be very little allowance for stray lines or mistakes, erasures, ect., and it became a kind of style that I wanted to emulate. I received a tablet and Photoshop as gifts one year and when the reality of college became pressing, I chose a major in graphic design. Currently, I take figure drawing classes quite a bit, which help immensely in making proportional forms. I'm also finding work in doing Photoshop editing and other digital work. All in all, I try to balance my nostalgic love for traditional mediums with my relatively new found love for digital art

Mediums and Styles

My favorite medium will always be pencil drawing. I don't exactly know why this is, but I think it has something to do with the ease at which I can start the drawing and the ease at which I can edit it. Doing pencil drawings almost gives me an "at home" cozy feel, as cheesy as that sounds. I even find it difficult to draw on nice paper! I'll go out an buy a nice pad of thick bristol paper, but my best work will end up on lined paper in one of my notebooks. A super sketchy drawing on computer paper that I consider finished may look like a rough draft to others. As for coloring, I do well with colored pencils and I'm just starting to get comfortable with markers like copics... Paint has always been a love/hate relationship for me... I started warming up to it this year, but I'm still not much of a fan, due to the lack of control. (grooves in the canvas, blending, stray brush hairs, paper warping... blech) But the pieces that turn out good are some of my favorites, oddly enough. If the drawing can be lined easily, I'll spend the time to do a good coloring in Photoshop, usually in a soft cel shade.

Ugh. Style. For years, I've sweated the fact that I don't have a truly, wholly distinct style. At least when it comes to drawing people. Seriously, I've tried every style under the sun in hopes of developing my own and I'm still searching high and low. At this point, I've come to believe that one can have different style for the different subject matter that they draw. For example, I don't consider myself to have any style in particular when it comes to drawing people, except for the fact that I prefer to draw them realistically. (In my preteens I was really obsessed with the anime style like a bajillion others at that age.. It was a dark age in my personal art history, a time of copied works and zero character creativity. But as dismal as it was, it really helped me nail proportions, expressions, and lines of motions for realism now.) I do, however, think I have a distinct style in terms of animals, dragons, and tattoo designs. This especially true for the surrealist work I do. About 3 years ago, I developed an affinity towards the style of psychedelic art when I fell in love with artists Salvador Dali and Peter Max. If the piece I'm doing is intentionally surrealistic or psychedelic, I have a very bold, bubbly, amorphous style and warped human forms, much like that of 60's concert posters.

In terms of what I like to depict... I guess fanart aside, I either depict very dreamy, indirect scenes like those mentioned just above, or very realistic, human, sometimes very literal depictions of life (or death). I like to draw little humorous things too, mostly with animals.

Artistic Quirks and Methods

Oh boy. I have a big desk chock full of supplies and big open space... Yet I'm still the most comfortable drawing when I curl up in bed with a piece of loose leaf and a mechanical pencil. Instead of bound sketchbooks, I carry folders of papers, even though its probably not the best idea for keeping organized :\

When drawing, I'll sketch a frame if the drawing is particularly complicated, but at this point, I think I'm pretty good at just setting down lines from the get go. They help a lot with proportion and fluidity, imo though.

I have plenty of doodling quirks. I'll draw a single, really detailed eye, but I'll hardly ever draw a pair unless I have a drawing idea in mind. I'll draw elaborate curls, spirals and tribal designs in sharpie, and for some reason I have a thing for doodling slightly parted lips with swirls and rainbow colors coming out. Mind you, these are only in my school notebooks for whatever reason XD

I also really enjoy looking back on years old drawings and doing newer, more improved renditions if I really liked them. And yes, that even goes for those pokemon spreadsheets I mentioned earlier, hurr :B

That was one hell of an art ramble...
gawd.

 

[DisappearingMist]

I am not an artist by any means (well, except with photography, but I think that is an entirely different topic!) but I did love to draw growing up. I mainly used pastels and pencil/pens.

I was never good at following drawing book's. They have you draw shapes, and then slowly expand and erase until the subject is much more defined. I try to start off with the subject defined right away. I find it easy to draw inspiration and make the drawing more accurate if I have something to reference. Not to copy, by any means, but to get an idea of how the subject looks in real life.

 

[Jellarine]

I can't really remember when I started drawing because I was so young. I've pretty much been drawing since I could pick up a pencil, and my parents encouraged me a lot.
But even when I was 6, I was so obsessed with making my drawings perfect (Much like today). I'm pretty sure it took me a few months to finally get a drawing of Blossom from the Power Puff Girls the way I wanted it, but I was so proud of myself when I finally did it.

When I started school I would also complimented on my work a lot, and I also doodle on my papers constantly, which both seemed to help a lot. Things like neopets and deviantart also helped me develop a sense of anatomy. I drew nothing but neopets for a few years (Which I am embarrassed about) but that period really helped improve my work, by an incredible amount.


I mainly use pencil and paper, mainly because I am so used to it, and I lose my tablet pen all the time. I really love the freedom I get with pencil and paper. Though I do want to improve my skills with a tablet, I like having the thing I'm drawing right in front of me. Also, since switching to a mac, I don't have Photoshop or Corel. I normally leave my drawings completely pencil, too. I love sketchy drawings, so most of the time my drawings are all smudged. My scanner always seems to wash out the parts of the drawing I want, and emphasize the smudges.
I really like to draw fanart, so I'm always doodling the Triforce and Link in my science notebook. My sketchbooks also consist of mostly fanart. I enjoy drawing animals and landscapes.


I'll normally start by sketching the guidelines for the head and just going off from there. Once I get the head the way I want, I'll draw the body and then tweak that until it's proportional. It's an odd method, but it's the best one for me. I don't really use my eraser or thumb for finding proportions, because it seems to come out the same as when I just draw. This also ends up as me crumpling the paper and throwing it away. I always use just one pencil too. It's just easier for me to lighten my grip than get a completely different pencil.

Not as long as the others, but I hoped it helped! C:

 

[shan-tastic]

Yes! Art people! Hey! This is going to be a hellah long post, so I apologize if I end up boring you to death.


I think I had my first artistic revelation when I was in either fifth or sixth grade. I was a Zelda fan back then, too, and I would always draw Link fighting some giant monstrous thing that I guess was supposed to be Ganon, even though it wasn't really pig like. I got into anime around that time, too, and I became fascinated with it and idolized basically anyone who could draw it. Of course, it never ended up turning out exactly how the original picture looked and I ended up getting a lot of smack for my failed attempts. It was annoying, considering I was eleven-ish and had never legitimately drawn anything before. I got mediocre art grades in Elementary school and the first part of middle school, mainly because I refused to listen to the teachers and how to draw things "properly" and what not. Wasn't my thing, and still isn't. I started taking private lessons when I was in ninth grade, and I've stuck with them ever since. From there, I developed my own anime-meets-surrealism-meets-whatever comes to mind. I tried digital painting for a while, and was pretty successful with only a mouse, but since then I've stopped even though I have a tablet. Perhaps I'll give it another go, but right now, I'm content with traditional media and photography (which is a whole other story).

I take into consideration guidelines and techniques, but I usually end up resorting to my trial and error/if it looks good, it doesn't matter approach, which really annoyed my art teacher at school (not the private lessons one). She loved my work, but she constantly criticized me for the most trivial things and made me do extensive studies and sketches, even though I personally thought the work looked pretty good. I have no problem with criticism (in fact, I embrace it!), but I'm a visual learner, and someone simply telling me "Oh, go draw a hand a few million times" or "Hmmm, are you positive that highlight should be THERE?" isn't helpful at all. If you can't show me, then be as specific as possible as to what I need to improve on, and also let me know of what's good so I can figure out what works and what doesn't! I have, however, taken some extra time to do a few preliminary sketches before starting a major piece, but if I do more than only a few, then the initial sketch turns out so much better than the final piece.

I've worked in a variety of media, but I LOVE working with markers. I want to focus in either graphic design or illustration once I get some of required classes taken care of, and I love making really bold and stylized subjects. Mainly portraits, but I like drawing insects, dragons/fantasy creatures and trees as well. I'm also fond of charcoal, graphite (I'm so excited for my awesome new set of pencils to come in...you have no idea), colored pencil (set of 72 50% off yay), pen and ink, and silver point, which is a really cool media that used in the Renaissance and serves a really technique for outlining before an oil painting. I'm not so great at 3D art...In fact, I royally suck at it. The best sculpture I've made was this 5in panda I made out of pine tree twigs, but since then I haven't been able to make even a slightly decent looking sculpture. I've done a few good paintings, but I have to be in the mood for it. Especially since there was a point in my senior year of high school where I literally had to make five paintings that were all due within a few days of each other. Not. Cool.

I also took AP art history during my senior year. It was probably one of the most enlightening experiences I've ever had, despite the fact that it was a very dry online course with no art projects and there was an essay on the exam with a topic we had never covered at all. I get my results in sometime in August. Ehhh. Even if I didn't do so well, I learned that I love Ancient Greek (Classical and Helenistic if we want to be specific) Renaissance (including Venetian art and Mannerism), Baroque and Impressionist art and Gothic architecture.

Right now, my sketch book consists of some spontaneous 4AM skyscape water color doodles, Zelda fan art, some random curly, Tim Burton-esque trees and a few swatches for future reference. If I get an idea, I act on it immediately. Most of my inspiration comes from my collection of Japanese visual-kei magazines, musical theater costumes/makeup and my love for mythology. I hate extensively planning things out, and if I do, I always make sure I have a few sheets of tracing paper on hand so I can do a graphite transfer of the sketch on to the final paper/canvas/whatever. My floor is littered with scraps of notebook paper from particularly boring class days. Most of my school note books have tiny doodles of stars, flowers, Triforces, vines and eyes. I think I have an eye fetish or something, haha. I always make sure I emphasize them if I'm doing a portraiture, and since I fail at placing them symmetrically, I always have the face cropped or have a shadow or hair covering one of them.

Right now, I'm finishing up a Greek sculpture inspired silver point on gessoed panel, and then I'm going to learn how to paint with oils. I'll probably end up posting it on here at some point, since it's Zelda related and all, and my best work always happens when I'm at my private lesson in a tiny and focused studio with three of my friends. High school art was terrible. So much energy, most of it negative, and really, REALLY unfocused. Not to mention, my teacher was the flightiest person in the universe and spent most of her time trying to get the slackers to paint instead of helping me improve my (and all of the other students who were serious about the class) art.


I'm really experimental and I love trying out new things with my art, but for the most part my overall drawing style has stayed consistent for the last year and a half or so. It'll probably change soon once college starts, but I'm okay with that.


LONG RAMBLE IS LONG!

 

[Beeker]

Hooray for artsy peoplez!
It's interesting to see how some of you guys have started out. I pretty much call myself a noob at art/drawing skills.

Beginning:
At about 7 or 8 I used to be sorta like you Xinnamin, I used to ALWAYS draw Pokemon out of guidebooks/pokedexes(even now I sometimes do). After a while I started to draw them myself, and I believe they were decent. After that time, and throughout elementary school I would doodle on everything; my schoolbooks, papers, that kind of stuff. Around grade 7/8, I noticed that I liked doing these random doodles and that I liked drawing, so when I got to high school in grade 9, I decided to take Art. I got a decent grade then and I still plan on taking it throughout highschool.

Medium/Style

There's nothing better for me than pencil and paper. More like lined paper, considering it's all I ever draw on. And I stil have a way's to go with shading, too. I'm just getting into digital art and am still trying to work out Photoshop. I'm ok with a mouse, but am planning to get a tablet soon. Don't paint too often, though I have a few small canvases available.

As for my own style, I'm not so sure about it yet. I doubt I could do realism if my life depended on it!:xd: Most of the things I draw have a cartoonish look towards them, so I'd have to say maybe that. I draw freehand a lot of the time(that's why my drawings look a little messed up), but I'm starting to use basic frames a lot more than I used to.

Right now, I've been drawing a lot of people and Zelda fanart. Usually I draw whatever's on the top of my head, which is usually some kind of video game/ movie /something i've been interested in lately. I think I've been drawing people lately so I can get practice with them. Same goes with Zelda.

All I can say for myself is practice makes perfect.But I'm nowhere near perfct yet. Guess I need more practice.:xd:

WOW. LONG POST. I think this is the longest I've done(so far).

 

[TreeHuggerPanda]

Hooray for a drawing topic!

And I'm more of a drawer than a painter, but I do love to paint with water colors!

Mediums:

I usually just use loose leaf paper or just scratch paper, since I don't bother to get professional drawing equipment.

History of Drawing:

I used to be the worst drawer ever when I was like 5, I didn't have a steady hand or the patients to draw. Then about in 4th grade, I started to notice the improvement in my hand and I was able to draw a few animals (dogs, pandas, cats, ect) and I grew more patient with myself and I'm now the drawer I am today.

Favorite things to draw:

My favorite things to draw are animals, (pandas, birds, dogs, cats, ect.) anime, and realistic people, currently. It usually changes every year, but at one point, I used to draw a ton of fan art for my writing.

My ranking currently:

About maybe a 6 or something. I'm not as good as other people here.

Preferred materials:

One sharp pencil and one dull pencil is all I need to draw something awesome!

 

[SheikahWarrior]

im a really odd drawer, the less effort i put in. the better it turns out, i tend to just use a regular ink writing pen and plain paper for my drawings, but my drawings are mainly Zelda characters i used to do a wierd simpson-ish style cartoon but now i do a cartoony-chibi type thing, also most of the time i can't be bothered to colour because my coloured pencils are rubbish, i would give myself maybe a 3, tops