Science of drawing.

[Danioover9000]

   A journal about my progress, and how I use perspective lines and golden ratio, golden sections and camera angles to draw stuff. And other bits about drawing.

 

[Danioover9000]

   Semi realism of Alien.

Edited September 7, 2021 by Danioover9000

[Danioover9000]

   A manga style gesture drawing.

Edited September 7, 2021 by Danioover9000

[Danioover9000]

Here are some examples of gesture drawing, but first a few list of features that make gesture drawing gesture drawing:

1. Draw loosely, depending in posture, draw more from elbow or shoulder. Draw also from wrist, and if you need to, from fingers. However, me mindful of too much tension. Relax.

2. Draw quickly. The reason why is because the faster it is, the mor3 visually dynamic the object is. For example, pick one hand, at arm length, stare at it and keep it still. Take the other and move it around in your field of vision. Notice the duality between the stability of the still hand versus the dynamism of the moving hand.

3. Line of action is emphasized, and what action the object, or multiple objects in gesture drawing are doing is the focus.

4. While gesture drawing is more associated with figures posing or moving, it can be done with still life and simple forms, and other compositions.

5. Because of the speed and relaxation, there's also the benefit of gessture drawing being a warm up before starting or continuing a bigger art project. As a practice, gesture drawing has the highest volume of work compared to other forms of art done by hand.

   Now here are some examples:

Squares( in 4B for photo)

[Danioover9000]

   Hello all, I've been very busy for the past month, with life events, and with getting some new drawing materials and building familiarity with them in the meantime. I'll be posting about the materials and what I've discovered from using them myself.

   In the meantime, below is a photo of what I ate, fish and chips. But if you look closly, you'll see in this one image contains all the art fundamentals most people have learned, and more intrestingly all the basic shapes for any drawing ever done. I'll list some art fundamentals in the photo and the basic shapes. I'll later explain each one in detail

1. Perspective.

2. Proportions.

3. Form.

4. Value scale.

5. Colour.

6. Light perspective.

7. Different types of shadows.

   As hard as it is to imagine, when I remember past events I've been through, my memory is almost like the photo below. It's just sometimes when I draw, it's sometimes not as exact as that, which is a part of my dream, to be able to actually draw what I see. You know, like what some master artists say 'draw what you see, not what you know'? Well, I want to draw what I see, not just the real life contained in a photo, or what my eye sees, but what I see in my mind, and to be able to draw that to near perfection. A close second is finding my style, but if I can, drawing to perfection is the first I'd work to.

 

Edited December 9, 2021 by Danioover9000

[Danioover9000]

   To give you some idea of what I've been up to drawing wise, here are some images I'll elaborate on later:

 

   The two images above come from me using a set of dual nib brush pens, one broad and the other end fine. The colour I had were two jet blacks, one light azure blue, one dark azure, one darkish grey and the other was light grey. They are not bad brush pens and did really well considering that the paper I'm drawing on isn't the best medium to handle markers, water colouring and paint.

The above jmage is me drawing many eye shapes, by first quickly sketching them, and adding some details, and making another eye. I did around 20 + eyes for each hand, and on this one the majority above was HB pencil from a German company, and the last two rows were 3b pencil from a Canadian company.

Edited December 9, 2021 by Danioover9000

[Danioover9000]

   Hello all, how are you? Along with the fish and chips photo, here's a photo of sunday roast.

   As you can see, a lot of information to unpqck here visually, but the maun art fundamental dominant here is both perspective, colour, value and light/shadow contrasts.

[Danioover9000]

   Hello all! Yesterday I have gained some new materials to draw with. Today I share with you one of them, called willow charcoal. I tried the willow charcoal, and this what it looks like:

   The package of Willow charcoal,  from a company called BOLDMERE, contains small, medium and large sized pieces (2 to 4 mm, 20pcs. 5 to 6 mm, 7pcs. 7 ti 8 mm, 3pcs. All together 30pcs). Product is made from specifically selected willow twigs. Prone to breakage, but each piece is usable. Perfect for sketching, outlining and block colouring, and suitable to be blended with paint and pastels to create a unique finish( gonna give this a try with my acrylic paint, watercolour paint and pastels).

   Typically charcoal is messy to work with, and willow charcoal is quite soft and a bit fragile to draw with. Also, willow charcoal is similar to the length of a pencil, but the difference is that the writing end is circular and flat rather than pointy like a pencil. Because  of the shaping, I felt I needed to adjust my grips. I used over hand and under hand grips and modified tripod grips to negotiate with the flat circular end. The surface is loose, and when rubbed with the fingers or drawn on the paper, has a pleasant hollowed scratchy sound. The texture is soft and powdery to the touch, in fact when one uses a tortilion(rolled paper for smudging) or the finger to smudge, the willow charcoal is so soft and loose the smudging can easily erase not just the tone, but the outline of your drawing. I suggest using both a finger and tortilion to smudge, and to smudge while being in a drawing mindset, not a blending mindset, while being careful. The smudging really does erase some of the drawing!

   As you can see, in the right page, tbe middle to upper right section, is the darkest lines and areas I can go. I mainly did it by layering, hatching over lines, and increasing pressure, but I was careful not to go very firm with the pressure. As you can see, the material is so soft it can transfer the image of your drawing to another page, as you can see on the left page of my scetch book, that page was me doing a bunch of faces and eyes. When I saw how easily it can transfer, I thought about some ways of transferring sketches I did of previous works to other papers using willow charcoal.

   Overall, I suggest not to go in with a perfectionist mind, as creating fine lines is a bit difficult, and sometimes smudging can erase some lines. My thinking and feeling when going in perfectionistic was less happiness, security, confidence and creativity, and more negative feelings like feeling  judgemental with my drawing,  annoyed, frustrated and worried about ruining the drawing. Go in with a beginner mindset, similarly to using pencil, and instead look forward to creating a mess.

   Personally, my mood and feelings were effected when I see and experience grey colours, and overall I didn't feel as excited as I thought I'd be, and sometimes the grey tones make me feel slightly bored, lazy, just slightly apathy, however I was using a new material which did make me feel excited enough to draw with. Unless you international want this, I don't think that drawing willow charcoal only from start to finished image is enough,  it's doable, but I think mixing willow charcoal with different mediums can be very exciting, which is what my intuition is saying to me.

   I also have two other materials I have purchased and am practicing with, trying to understand through practice. Hopefully you feel motivated enough to give willow charcoal a try. See you next time.

 

[Danioover9000]

[Danioover9000]

   Hello all. As I mentioned, I had two other materials I would cover. Here I'm covering compressed charcoal, and some soft pastels. With the compressed charcoal it's the same company, and in it is a set of 6 charcoals, 2 hard, 2 medium and 2 soft. Here is the image below:

   On the left page is compressed charcoal. From top is hard charcoal, the middle is medium charcoal and the bottom is soft charcoal. Each piece has a length of about 1 inch, a width of 1 centimetre and a height of about half a centimetre. Each piece looks almost jet black, and has a weak shine from the compressed nature of it. They also feel very solid and smooth in the surface. Each piece, because of it's rectangular prism shape, is held not using the tripod grip like a pencil, but is modified grips, from overhand to underhand, with some modified tripod grip at the far end of the piece. Also, there's still charcoal pigments left on my fingers from holdingthe pieces,  but not as much as willow charcoal, and is cold to the touch. On the left column was me doing a few lines, using the corners and the short edges at the end, to see hear and feel what the tools is capable of. I learnt that for most grips, if you want to use the corners for details is doable, but if you want to use the edge to construct a line, like a horizontal line, then placing the index finger on the end being drawn from does keep a consistent pressure for the line, but even there I still apply lighter pressure and pay attention to how my drawing implement is rubbing against the paper here. The feeliing of the friction between the paper and charcoal tells me a lot, and I sometimes get into a meditative state from that. In the middle column was me using the edhe not parallel, but perpendicular to the direction, which produced the broad strokes you see. When I was using overhand grip, after a few strokes I tested the degree of smudging using my middle finger pad, which was quicker with that grip, and it has an oily greased feel. It smudges better with the medium  to soft charcoal. The right columm is a partial construction of faces, to see how the materials do when I create lines, shade in, render and smudge for values.

[Danioover9000]

   I would define drawing as 1. the ability to use penmanship to depict anything in 3d on a flat surface, and 2. The capacity of using the power of God to create illusions on a flat surface (the second definition is referring to spirituality, non-duality and god realization). Here's another take on drawing:

 

   Now imagine the shock on his face, and the audiences, if they ever find out they are using God's powers to create illusions.

[Danioover9000]

   This is a good video about an artist who took a year to finish his sketch book. I'll be analyzing this later tomorrow.

https://youtu.be/OaEcJFvb4h4 

[Danioover9000]

   This is a good video, an illustration of one of the league of legends characters, total time is roughly 9 hours, either the artist put extra effort into shortening that or not. It's sped up, but shows what drawing using digital software looks like:

 

[Danioover9000]

   Nice drawing of a person on a cliff, I think the artist is using graphite. Despite the sped-up video, you can observe that he is drawing literally, that kind of drawing style similar to drawing from observation, or what masterful artists in the past would say: 'draw what you see, not what you know.'. I will be breaking this quote down as it's too simplistic to me, and I can see many misunderstandings from this quote, one misinterpretation would be that it would be bad to draw from what you know, instead from what you're seeing, or experiencing. This isn't that case, requiring more context to be built to understand this quote properly, because for me I can draw both what I'm observing in the external world, and in my memories, or in my internal world.