Podcasts, videos, and iPad art
Theme of the week: Questions
Questions are powerful and we discuss questions we use that have been helpful in life.
Spoiler: “What would this look like if it were easy?” makes the cut.
Things we mention:
Bullets
How’s your week?
Minimalism
Essentialism
This morning I used a pose-able figure that I got from Flying Tiger. I think it was something like $4.
I set it up in a few different poses and drew for 8-10 minutes each. I’ll try setting a 5-minute timer next time.
Why the shorter time?
It might be good to approach it similar to how I try to approach writing: focusing on small things. (Which I wrote about here.) Getting the reps right now will help me improve more than trying to increase the quality in one drawing.
As an example, if I have 25 minutes, I could:
Each has its purpose. I’ll have to actually try each of them to see if their helpful.
Just checked my watch, it’s GIF time.
It feels like this figure has really long limbs but maybe it’s just that I don’t know anatomy that well at all.
There are some figures on Amazon that are shaped like dudes that are JACKED so maybe I can get one of those to try and live out my childhood comic book drawing dreams.
I used to love drawing Cyclops but making it’d mostly be drawing an enormous red rectangle based on his Children of the Atom special:
I made an adjustment on the last one to make it look a little more like it was a guy running. The posed figure looked sort of like someone doing Dhalsim’s celebration.
I tried to put some clothes on. They look pretty stiff. Like how they made that stiff flag so that it looks like it’s waving on the moon.
Last I had one that I tried to pose as a person walking. It also looks like he might be looking at a phone while walking. Which I do more often than I should.
Timing how long I’ve been doing creative work has been pretty helpful so I’ll keep doing it.
This post has taken closer to 40 minutes than the 20 minutes I planned. (Ten minutes were looking for a Cyclops video to grab that frame of his special.)
That’s that for Day 5.
Today I continued with Draw a Box lesson 1. I will now draw a box.
When you look for drawing lessons you’ll pretty quickly see 2-point perspective mentioned. If you play around in Procreate you’ll see the perspective setting.
And if you’re like me, you think you’ll never ever touch it.
After today’s exercise, I have a basic understanding of how perspective guides might work. In any case, today’s lesson was to set up perspective points, connect dots, and build boxes.
And more and more boxes.
I drew some faces around the page to practice making a face look in the direction I want it to look. Mostly just following Sinix Design’s “Drawing Faces From Any Angle”.
And then I spent too much time chopping up the Procreate time lapse to make this animated grid.
Anyway, that’s that for today.
I’m starting to see the value in documenting the learning process. If I stick this out through the 30 days (which I’m pretty sure I’ll do) that will be a lot worth sharing.
If I stick it out for 30 weeks that’d be even more worth sharing. I’m less sure I’d stick it out that long but hey, one day at a time.
I started this post thinking I’d make some bad connections between drawing fundamentals and life. But even bad connections can take time to think of. Actually here are some quick ones:
Anyway, instead of elaborating on those here are some thoughts going through some of the lessons from Draw a Box.
Draw a line (then draw more)
It doesn’t get more fundamental than drawing a line. It was also a point in the video to practice ‘ghosting’ the line. Where you don’t actually draw the line you just practice the motion a little bit.
Hey okay this does actually remind me of something: golf. Now, I haven’t played golf all that much, but my friends got pretty into par 3 courses for about a year. (Some of them kept playing beyond that, but I didn’t.)
I quickly learned to appreciate pros that can sink things from, say, 5-10 feet consistently. But you pretty much ghost the stroke you’re going to take. You do the motion and then you shimmy up like a quarter step so that the same motion strikes the ball this time.
Ghost that line and begin with the end in mind.
To draw an airplane, first draw a plane
Next up, planes. Welcome to the third dimension. The practice exercise continues on with ghosting.
This time you’re ghosting planes, which means it’ll be a bunch of lines. First you draw the dots for the plane and then you connect them with lines.
Draw a grid and fill it in with ellipses
The last exercise is drawing ellipses.
It’s a good reminder that how you do anything is how you do everything. These fundamental exercises will always be valuable because they can serve as warm ups down the road.
Anyway, you start by drawing your own lines and then drawing ellipses with at least two strokes around. The first rotation lays down the ellipses then the second one should go over the same path. It’s a way to practice being deliberate with your strokes.
(ALSO… just learned that ‘ellipses’ is plural for ‘ellipsis’. I thought they were just different ways to spell dot-dot-dot. If you have a dot-dot-dot it’s one ellipsis but if you have two dot-dot-dots then it’s ellipses.)
That’s that.