
A Quick Beginner's Guide to Drawing - sus_007
https://medium.com/personal-growth/a-quick-beginners-guide-to-drawing-58213877715e
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npgatech
This article doesn't teach the _most_ fundamental aspect of drawing, i.e. to
internalize a 3-dimensional object and being able to express it on a 2d plane.
In order to efficiently and quickly learn this, you need to be able to
accurately draw basic 3D objects (such as a cube, cone, cylinder, etc.) from
any viewpoint. You don't need to focus on perspective and foreshortening just
yet, an isometric view is fine.

Now, glue these basic objects together and make something slightly more
complex. If you can draw it from any viewpoint (not just orthographic views),
you have successfully learned the most fundamental and crucial part of the art
of drawing.

Ideas of chiaroscuro are simply the tools to express depth on a 2D plane. They
are not to be learned until you can master the whole internalization part.

This bothers me so much. No one knows how to teach this well except for a few
YouTubers and college professors. Check out Sycra's drawing tutorials on YT.

~~~
Pinus
I have only studied the subject of drawing very superficially, but it is easy
to find people who say "the trick is drawing what you see, not what you know
is there". Then there are other people who seem to agree with you, and break
everything down into basic shapes, which seems to contradict the previous
statement. Different schools? Different approaches to suit different persons?
A fundamental divide in the drawing community? :-)

~~~
angus-prune
I think the two stances are consistent, and the drawing of shapes actually
enforces the "draw what you see".

Breaking an object down into its constituent shapes, is based on what you see,
rather than the image in your mind. It turns out the mind is really bad at
retaining the shape of something, even when we're looking at it.

We "know" what a bicycle looks like, and our mind often skirts over the
detail. When asked to draw a bicycle from memory, people are terrible at
it[1]. Drawing from memory is like a slightly different task, but when people
draw "what they know is there", they look at a scene and remember the objects
in it, then look down at the paper and draw them from memory. Not a memory of
what the scene _looked_ like, but what it _was_. Each object in the scene
becomes the butchered, bike form memory version of itself.

If you're building the scene out of basic shapes, then you first have to look
at what the scene looks like, rather than what it is.

There are some shortcuts and techniques which might seem to go against the
purist version of "draw what you see". Knowing the ratios between the eyes,
mouth, nose etc. But actually these are based on previous practice in "drawing
what you see" (or received practice) and are still taking you away from
drawing a "face" and instead drawing a set of shapes - ie "what you see".

[1] [https://www.wired.com/2016/04/can-draw-bikes-memory-
definite...](https://www.wired.com/2016/04/can-draw-bikes-memory-definitely-
cant/)

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Rainymood
Most beginner guides are "look at what I know about drawing and you ought to
but don't." I feel like this one falls into this category, but that's just my
opinion. Sorry for the harsh words.

The best drawing guide for ULTIMATE beginners is one that (1) lets them
believe they can draw (2) lets them actually draw stuff (3) lets them draw
NICE stuff such that they think "wow I can draw!" and become motivated to draw
more.

[https://i.imgur.com/Ch2zqF7.png](https://i.imgur.com/Ch2zqF7.png)

[https://i.imgur.com/qOHOwK0.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/qOHOwK0.jpg)

[https://i.imgur.com/spGlWE5.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/spGlWE5.jpg)

I made these three drawings upside down.

This technique comes from "Drawing with the right side of the brain" and
although the science is a bit dated you have one part of your brain (say the
left side) that really enjoys naming things, recognizing things, putting
things in boxes. This part of the brain causes people to draw eyes like an
elipse with a circle in it while this is almost NEVER truly the case. On the
other hand, there is the right side of the brain that does mathematics, is
rational, etc. etc. This part of the brain is only concerned with shapes,
lines, form, direction, etc.

When you turn the reference upside down your left side of the brain shuts down
(i.e. it doesn't make any sense anymore) and the only thing you see is lines,
forms, directions, proportions. Drawing this way people, who think they can't
draw, create really really beautiful drawings!

~~~
kayfox
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain takes a lot of its guidance from a book
called The Natural Way to Draw by Kimon Nicolaïdes. The latter is more of a
textbook with practice schedules and the like, but is a very good guide to go
from nothing to decent in 6 months.

