#source: kimon nicolaides

[incorrectlooneytunesquotes]

The sooner you make your first five thousand mistakes the sooner you will be able to correct them.

Wile E. Coyote 

#wile e coyote #source: kimon nicolaides

[thatfunkyopossum]

drawing advice nonnie here! i guess,,,specifically the faces? your clones are so lovely and expressive and mine end up looking like eldritch monsters ajksdjfkl

Well, there’s no quick thing to being able to draw well, all you can do is study and practice! Without seeing your work there’s nothing specific I can help you with (and I’m not sure I have the time or energy these days to give specific critique) but where most people struggle with faces (including myself) is Anatomy and Volume.

So here’s what I recommend for learning those.

First, your supplementary online resources are going to be https://line-of-action.com/ which you can use in lieu of an in person drawing class (i recommend class mode settings) and the youtube channel Proko. I recommend studying with the use of a large pad of cheap paper, preferably newsprint, and willow charcoal if you don’t mind the texture.

The materials are not important, but I recommend large paper for studies like this because you can really let your body get into it. It’s completely fine not to have an easel to work on, in which case you can either prop up a large pad of paper on something with the use of a board, or you can have a smaller pad of paper. Anything works better than nothing, but if you can get large cheap paper, you absolutely should.

1. Look at Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards, [PDF here]

     -I recommend checking this one out first. It teaches you the bare bones of drawing from observation and is absolutely invaluable to learning to see the way an artist does. The science in it is bunk, but its methods are sound.

2. Check out The Natural Way to Draw by Kimon Nicolaides [PDF here]

     - Read the section on gesture drawing and practice it using Line-of-action, which you can set to do an endless stream of 30 second poses. I found it very helpful to do these studies in ball point pen (forces you to commit) or willow charcoal (difficult to erase and very soft), which was very freeing to me.

     -The Gesture exercises can ABSOLUTELY be applied to just faces if thats what you want to draw. Faces are complicated and if that’s what you want to study, go for it.      -I can’t vouch for most of the book as, tbh, i havent read it because i feel bad not committing to what the author asks of you. These specific beginning passages though on gesture and contour are very good!

3. Also get your hands on Drawing The Head and Hands by Andrew Loomis [PDF here]

I’m not going to lie to you. Andrew loomis might be one of the most boring authors in existence. I was reading his book aloud in a car once and it put my friend (who cannot sleep in vehicles!!!) to bed. His prose is boring as fuck. That said... he was an incredible artist! And may artists for decades have found his instructional books supremely helpful. I am very happy to have them on hand.

    -For each section of the book, draw along with the examples. Copy Loomis’s art. Use line of action from the beginning, either for anatomy traces or from observation studies. Even in the planes of the face section, you can trace the planes over the photos either on paper held up to your computer, or directly onto the photo through use of a digital drawing program.

   -Use Proko to supplement your learning with Loomis. It can be extremely helpful to get input from multiple sources, especially because IMO Loomis is honestly not the best teacher in his books, even if his methods work very well. The Anatomy and Structure videos in the Proko Facial Features playlist should be most helpful.

Please note, the sources on anatomy that I’ve provided here will only teach you how to draw the “ideal”, white face. They’re the sources that I learned from, which is why I’m recommending them to you. Which is why I want to outline right now what you SHOULD be trying to learn from these sources.

1. Underlying anatomy

Luckily, human beings from every race and national origin have the same exact bones and cartilage and fat and muscle, just in different places and attached at different points. What you are doing when you are learning anatomy, especially from biased sources, is not how the anatomy should be shaped, but rather what it is. If you get a deep understanding of anatomy, you should be able to problem solve and figure out by drawing from observation exactly what the underlying structures look like on anyone. The nose of a white person will, most likely, be pretty different from the nose of an east asian person, or a māori person, or a black person. That said, the cartilage and muscle attachments and bones are still all the same. What changes is the shapes.

2. Drawing from Observation

Honestly, learning to draw from observation is one of the most important things that an aspiring artist can learn. If you can’t draw from observation, learning will be an uphill struggle. If you can’t put aside your notions of what things should look like according to what you know, and instead start drawing them as they are, your growth as an individual artist will only ever come in switching out the symbols you use to represent different things.

As a last parting word related to that last thing: Imo, artists should not use symbols to represent reality, the way flash puppet animation does. What you should be doing, is you should be striving to understand the real, actual world, and then simplifying and streamlining and nudging it about into art. Symbol based art is, of course, still art, but its limited, and until we can break from these limits then our art can never reach its full potential. Draw as often as you can, draw with your shoulder and not your wrist or fingers if you can help it, do art warmups, and happy drawing :)

#long post