Drawing For Dummies (eBook)

Jamie Platt (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 3. Auflage
352 Seiten
Wiley (Verlag)
978-1-394-19921-1 (ISBN)

Infos

Anyone can learn to draw with these easy instructions and fun practice ideas

Drawing For Dummies makes it easy to learn the basics of drawing and even master advanced techniques. With a little instruction and practice, there's no such thing as 'I just can't draw.' Drawing can help you relieve stress, express your emotions and creativity, communicate across cultures, improve memory, and develop and strengthen fine motor skills. This user-friendly Dummies resource will teach you how to see the world through the eyes of an artist, explore your inner visions, and open up your creativity through drawing exercises. Step-by-step illustrations and images, newly enlarged in this edition, will show you exactly how to achieve the results you want. It might be time to invest in some picture frames, because you're about to make art you can be proud of.

• Learn the fundamentals of drawing, including the essential supplies you'll need
• Practice drawing techniques, get your creativity flowing, and explore your own mind with fun drawing exercises
• Get step-by-step instructions on how to draw anything in a range of styles
• Improve your abilities with tips and ideas for making your drawings better

Complete beginners and more advanced artists alike will have fun developing their skills with Drawing For Dummies.

Jamie Platt is an artist and director of the art galleries at the University of Central Missouri where she sees her role as helping to bring people together over art. Jamie has an MFA in painting from Indiana University, in Bloomington Indiana and a BFA in painting from Kendall College of Art & Design in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She has exhibited her work widely including recent exhibitions at Manifest in Cincinnati, Ohio, the Huntington Museum of Art in Huntington, West Virginia and Blue Mountain Gallery in New York City.

Inhalt

Introduction 1

Part 1: Discovering What It Takes to Draw 5

Chapter 1: Gearing Up to Start (and Continue) Drawing 7

Chapter 2: A New Kind of Seeing: Getting Familiar with the Artist's Perspective 19

Chapter 3: Gathering What You Need to Get Started 37

Chapter 4: Working through the Developmental Stages of Drawing 63

Part 2: Developing Basic Skills 77

Chapter 5: Planning Your Drawings 79

Chapter 6: Seeing and Drawing Lines and Shapes 107

Chapter 7: Exploring the Third Dimension 131

Chapter 8: Adding Life to Your Drawings with Shading 165

Chapter 9: Identifying and Rendering Textures 193

Part 3: Experimenting with Subject Matter 207

Chapter 10: Making Meaningful Still Life Drawings 209

Chapter 11: Representing the Natural World in Your Drawings 225

Chapter 12: Bringing Animals to Life on Paper 251

Chapter 13: Drawing People 275

Part 4: The Part of Tens 305

Chapter 14: Ten Tips for Drawing Cartoons 307

Chapter 15: Ten Ways to Grow as an Artist 315

Chapter 16: Answering Ten Common Copyright Questions 325

Index 331

Textauszug

Chapter 1

Gearing Up to Start (and Continue) Drawing

IN THIS CHAPTER

Taking the plunge to see if you have what it takes to start drawing

Discovering what drawing is

Finding the motivation, supplies, and style you need to keep drawing

Developing drawing habits that’ll get you through the rough patches

Drawing is primal. I bet you’ve been drawing since before you could talk. It is common to all and deeply personal at once. Whether you choose to draw a tree or just a looping spiral, by putting marks on paper, you connect the inner workings of your mind to the world outside it.

So, are you ready to take a serious step toward sharpening your drawing skills? Well, you’ve come to the right place! This chapter is an introduction to drawing as a subject of study. Along with a quick summary of the materials and skills you need to get started, you find useful information about historical and contemporary approaches to drawing. In case you want to know more about any of the topics I touch briefly on here, I’ve peppered this chapter with references to other chapters where you can find in-depth coverage. As a bonus, I’ve included some information right at the beginning about how to tell whether drawing is for you. (Spoiler alert: Drawing is for you!)

Testing the Waters: Do You Have What It Takes to Draw?

For many burgeoning artists who have a nagging, tickling idea that they may have what it takes to draw, testing out the dream feels like a real risk. After all, if they fail, the dream will be gone — just like that. If you’re afraid to risk losing your dream of becoming an artist, I hear you and am here to say you can stop worrying. Go ahead and take the risk; you may be surprised to discover that it isn’t really a risk after all for one simple reason: Anyone who wants to learn to draw can do it.

Debunking the talent myth

Every elementary school has at least one kid who can draw an amazing unicorn (or some other detailed animal or object) without looking at any books or photos for inspiration. All the teachers and students look at that kid and say, “That kid’s got real talent.” Maybe you were that kid in your school. Or maybe you only wished you could draw like that kid. Either way, you can learn to draw well today as long as you’re ready to put your mind (and pencil) to work.

What’s called talent in drawing is actually a heightened sensitivity to visual facts. (Lucky for you, this is something anyone can develop!) To draw well, you must be able to see the physical facts of things, such as size, shape, value, texture, and color and to make comparisons. Familiar objects are often hard to draw because, when you look things you know well, your brain doesn’t take time to carefully analyze the way they look. To see things as they actually are, you need to practice looking deeply. When you’re really tuned in to the facts of what something looks like, that particular something becomes much easier to draw. (See Chapters 2 and 6 for some great tips on how to increase your visual sensitivity.)

Talent on its own doesn’t make an artist. Yes, the ability to see like an artist and make visual comparisons is a necessary condition for drawing well, but they don’t matter at all if you don’t also have a passion for drawing. Even if you feel like you have no artistic talent whatsoever, if you have a desire to draw in your bones, you can master the other stuff with determination and practice. After all, the bulk of getting better at drawing is practice — not talent. No matter how talented you are, you won’t grow as an artist if you don’t practice. Passion is what gives you the motivation and courage to do that work.

Embracing your individuality

A great way to learn how to draw is to lean into learning about your idols and trying to make work like theirs. Copying is a great way to practice and develop your drawing skills. Just know that you can’t claim any copied work as your own. (Check out Chapters 3, 5, and 15 for details on how to develop as an artist by using other artists’ works as inspiration, and refer to Chapter 16 for more details on copyright.)

Eventually, you will want to let go of your influences so you can develop who you are as an artist, but you’ll probably always see some of your idols’ influence in your work. Even the most well-known and accomplished artists are influenced by the work of others. For example, you can see traces of Cezanne in Picasso, but Picasso was still unarguably unique.

Even as you copy the works and styles of your idols, don’t forget to embrace your individuality as an artist. Don’t try to purge the things about your drawings that make you unique. Your idols had time to discover who they are as artists; now it’s your turn! The things that make you different are important clues about who you are as an artist.

Defining Drawing

Essentially, drawing is the act of applying marks to a surface. A drawing is usually made up of lines and tones on paper, but it hasn’t always been that way and it isn’t always that way today (see the following sections for more details).

However you define drawing, it’s important to keep in mind that drawing is a verb; it’s an action that you do. No matter what tools you use to draw, the act of drawing is the same: You move your hand/arm/whole body while holding a mark-making tool and leave traces of your movement on your drawing surface.

Looking back at the first drawings

The earliest known drawings are the ancient pictures of animals and figures made with natural pigments on the rocky walls of caves, as shown in Figure 1-1.

These drawings predate written history and are some of the oldest records of what human life was like as many as 30,000 years ago. The Egyptians used drawings to create the pictograms that later became one of the first systems of writing (called hieroglyphics). See Figure 1-2.

Adobe Stock Images

FIGURE 1-1: Ancient cow drawing from Lascaux caves in France.

Adobe Stock Images

FIGURE 1-2: Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.

For hundreds of years, drawing has been a functional craft as well as an artistic practice. People have long used drawing to communicate, tell stories, plan paintings, design architecture, and a whole lot more. The resulting drawings have become beautiful artifacts of the human experience over time.

Surveying current drawing trends

Take a look around. Drawing is everywhere and it takes many forms. As with any other art form, drawing reflects the life and times of the culture. Art critics and historians are people whose job it is to take the pulse of the art of a particular place and time. It’s easier in some ways to do this when you're looking at the art of the past. Just as it might seem like a safe choice to focus on trying to draw like Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci — artists whose greatness has already been sanctioned by the art world — it’s exciting to look at the art that’s being made now too. Doing so gives you a lens for learning something about what it means to be a person in your time. It just might be even better to see yourself and the way you draw as part of the fabric of your time, too. It’s a risk to go your own way but if you stay open and receptive to riding the waves of the present, who knows what wonderful places you’ll get to go in your work?

Anais Nin said, “Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.” (Check out Chapter 2 for details on how to see the world as an artist and Part 3 for lots of info on the different subject matter you can draw.)

Examining the Motivation behind Drawing

The desire to draw comes with being human. Children are voracious drawers, and although most people draw less often after childhood, they still encounter drawing occasionally when they’re doodling in the margins of a notepad during a long lecture or plotting out their gardens for the year. You know instinctively how to connect your hand and brain to make marks on a drawing surface. Add a little motivation to that instinct, and you have everything you need to be great at drawing. So where do you find this motivation? The following sections show you some different ways you can use drawing and a few important benefits you can get from it.

Finding uses for drawing

As you probably already know, the act of drawing is great for planning things out, but you can also use it to create portraits, landscapes, cartoons, and still life drawings. No matter what you choose to create through drawing, it’s important to remember that drawing doesn’t have to be a super-serious process that leads to a product worthy of the history books. Something about the act of drawing just feels good — even if the product you make is whimsical, temporary, or just plain silly.

If you ever feel overwhelmed by the seriousness of your drawing endeavors, give yourself a break and make some playful drawings. The following is a list of alternative, playful uses for drawing, just in case you...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 23.8.2023
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Allgemeines / Lexika
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Malerei / Plastik
• Schlagworte: ART • Kunst • lifestyle • lifestyles • Zeichnen
• ISBN-10: 1-394-19921-X / 139419921X
• ISBN-13: 978-1-394-19921-1 / 9781394199211