The Most Important Rule: Practice

As a sendoff to the blog I want to talk about one more major thing that I get from young artist and people who look at my work.

They see my work say “I wish I could draw like you” or in the worst case “I’ll never be a great artist”. Well most artist will tell you to “Practice, practice, practice!” or “Practice makes perfect” the artist expects you to know how to draw. 

But the best way to put It is that we all become our own mentors. Fixing, correcting and improving our skills.

For me I have been drawing since I was little but it wasn’t till I got to my Commercial Graphics shop in High school where I started to hone in on my skills. Alongside of the technical graphics and advertisements we made we had a sketchbook. My teacher gave us activities and overtime I realized that I had begun using the skills I learned for everyday drawings and I learned that I by practicing my skills helped me find out my flaws with that skill.

To this day I still push myself, and If you never visit this blog ever again remember… practice.

Now Strike a pose: Drawing a pose

As artist, we tend to have to study the body in a multitude of ways. In some of my previous post, I have shown you Gesture and Contour drawing as well as Anatomy. Well taking these teachings I want to explain how all 3 correlate into the posed figure.

Now, there are many ways we can take our pose but like both contour and gesture find a bunch of reference images of people in different poses. This will help you develop a concept of the pose you want.

Representational example

As well as taking anatomy of your figure in to consideration, there is a visual technique that I haven’t talked about before its called Foreshortening. The technique of foreshortening takes perspective and applies it to the body (primarily arms and legs). It can be set up to give the appearance that some parts of the body are closer than other parts of the body. In extreme cases, it can be used to warp the body to give it a bit of dynamic angle.

Here are two examples of posting what foreshortening can do:

I believe if you have followed the blog up to this point I want to see what you have learned from my previous post by trying to create a posed character. Then you can [Share Your Stuff]

Amazing Art Tools: The Light Table

One of the many amazing art tools that are used in multiple art fields is the light table. 

Now before I go on, I just want to pull back the stigma that most people have about tracing. Saying things like “Tracing art is cheating” and “Real artist don’t trace” I want to say that most of the non-mechanical methods of art reproductions are done using light tables and tracing.

For example, Traditional animation is used with a specially made light table that rotates to alleviate the animator’s hand. As well it would be almost impossible to animate with out straining your eyes to see the page behind it this makes it a vital to have this as an animator.

Personally, I have used a light table myself, I was part of a vocational school that offered Commercial Graphics Arts and the light table was one tool that was very vital for the work we did. One project we did with the light table, was taking a black and white photo and applying it to an ad we were to design but without damaging the photo or the original photo for the ad. This takes tremendous amounts of time and effort to put detail into re-drawing the photo but the table makes it easier than having to look at it to draw it from memory or trace it from a solid surface.

Now for some of us we look at these tables like “I have no room for that” or "It's to expensive"where I say that is no problem for there is a solution for anyone.

 That is where I want to introduce you to the light tablet and light box. These light table alternatives are a more portable method of tracing, animating and drawing in general as well as being cheaper and more portable. One friend of mine bought a TRACER light tablet for there animating class on Amazon for only $18. 

Overall the light table is a useful tool for anyone professional, students  or hobbyist. 

Now I hope I enlightened you on this Amazing Art Tool and maybe even made you interested in purchasing one for yourself.