Drawing as a programmer

Either way, thanks!

I think it's a good idea for people to learn to construct simple 3d shapes before they tackle the complexities of human anatomy; it creates a framework for thinking about the drawing. I'd agree that there are better ways to learn drawing than from books, but still, a good book is much better than nothing.

These lessons are aimed at getting someone up and running with a solid knowledge of constructing a figure in three dimensions as quickly as possible. You can quite easily stack anatomy on top of this foundation and draw in more complicated styles than "1940s cartoon character"; it's useful to learn construction with those kinds of characters because they're basically little but their construction.

I do not by any means discount the value of anatomy lessons and text, life drawing, sitting out in public doing quick observational sketches, frame-by-frame analysis of video, going to the zoo to draw, or any of the other myriad activities that make up part of a serious art education. I did that, and so did everyone else I knew during my time in animation, no matter how stylized most of their final work was.

But I think these lessons are a great hand up over the huge gap between "I can copy what I see onto paper OK" and "I can draw any damn thing I please in any pose I like, with no reference beyond a few design drawings".

(tangential edit: I'm surprised to find another cartoonist here on HN and curious to see your work, but your website doesn't mention that at all, and Google turns up nothing. Any links? My website[1] is full of my stuff.)

[1]:http://egypt.urnash.com

Reading the description and comments ITT, I was a bit confused and kept thinking, "but I had this other book, and it was mainly about cartooning, not anatomy, and it explained things really well". Then someone here mentioned "lines of action" and I thought "wait a minute ..", clicked the link and it was that book :) :)

Well, I am glad that I had the opportunity to learn from such a classic when I was young. I have to agree, a lot of the ideas, techniques and really fundamentals stuck with me and shaped my cartooning style over the years.

See, anatomy is IMO not the end-all of cartooning. When I hear the word, I think about super realistic sketches of human figures where you can see all the muscles, figuring out how the clothes would wrap and fold around the body, etc. This is important if you want to draw the Silver Surfer or US super hero style comics, but that's never really been my thing.

The importance of "anatomy" in cartooning, for me, is limited to the way human body parts are connected to eachother, how they can move w/respect to eachother, and their relative sizes. As opposed to the almost biological/physiological detail I have in mind when I hear "anatomy" with respect to illustrations ...

For instance, and this is something that is treated in the Preston Blair book very well, which for me immediately sprang to mind as an example why "anatomy" really is not the end-all of cartooning: facial expressions.

Facial expressions in cartoons are nothing like how a human face actually moves. They are caricatured far beyond physical possibility (but not "beyond recognition", as I shall explain). They are NOT based on careful observation of what a human face actually looks like when it experiences a particular emotion. Look at a real crying face, a real hysterical-laughter face, that's not how cartoon characters emote at all[0]. And you can't learn how to do cartoon-emotions by studying actual human faces. Instead, they are based on the biological concept of the "supernormal stimulus"[1]. These don't exist in real life (except where someone else has already drawn/modelled them, advertisements are a good source). You have to figure them out by experimentation, not observation, because you can't know which attributes can be exaggerated for the psychological/biological supernormal stimulus effect (which can be weird and unexpected). Instead, you just draw hundreds or thousands of quick-sketch cartoon faces, with the eyes and the mouth and the ears and whatnot, just-so, randomly trying out weird configurations, anything, and figure out how it affects the perceived mood/emotion of these faces. Or body language. The other option is to copy and try out styles or ideas you like, or happen to notice (same as when learning typography, you start getting an eye for it). Or perhaps like Robert Crumb, do supernormal stimuli by just drawing whatever's your fetish.

The Preston Blair book only half-covers this, btw (if I remember correctly, it's been 10-15 years or so...), they talk about baby and toddler like configurations of the face and body proportions. Maybe also the sexual "Jessica Rabbit" type of supernormal stimuli, I forget. These are powerful, but not the only ones that exist. In particular for facial expressions, like chords and scales in music, some very powerful and useful tricks are very weird and unorthodox (or maybe I've just not figured out the reason behind the quirky sequency that is the minor Blues scale, which works so well no matter what you play with it).

Either way, my point is these exaggerations are not based on real-life observable phenomena, but on how the human psychology reacts to superstimuli (which you need to create before you can observe the reaction--which, fortunately, is quite easy to do).

Also the lines of action. are these based on anatomy? The Preston Blair book has that beautiful example of an animated character throwing a baseball, frame by frame[2]. That's not at all how a human moves IRL :) It is, however, an exaggeration/caricature of what our brains expect of rubbery bouncy physics. You can't observe that in real-life, because it never really happens like that.

Another example is the famous Pixar desk-lamp animation. It's not even got anatomy. But it moves according to some weird exaggerated physics model, and it has emotions, what, how? Because it plays to our minds, not real-life.

Another note, I'm not a native English speaker, I must have had only a very basic understanding of English when I was 11 or 12. Still, the Preston-Blair book was quite easy to follow, because most of it was explained as illustrations. Just a hint, if any non-English HNer is considering a present for their kids (they have to love drawing first, though) :)

There is one "step by step" part of that book which I didn't really like very much, and felt to me (then) it was imposing a certain style too much. This is the bit where it explains how to build a character made from spheres/ellipsoids and cylinders. I never liked first sketching shapes that you were going to draw over and erase later on anyhow. But then, this is probably exactly a type of technique that you'd learn if you'd start with anatomy as well :) I probably learned from that as well, but at the time it felt a bit restricting.

[0] which is brilliantly subverted by Ren & Stimpy, with their hyper realistic cut-scenes and close-ups, going one step beyond the fictional cartoon world into the surreal, for dramatic emphasis.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superstimulus

[2] thanks to the Internet, you can click and view the cartoon here: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3vhl1_mgm-batty-baseball-1... the jokes are corny, the cartoon-animation is beautiful. take note how almost none of it is realistic.

http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=870

Personally, I don't believe age slows you down but maturity does. I rarely have the time to focus on non-essential tasks and priorities change. It might take me longer to learn something than if I was younger, but I'm okay with that. The thing to watch out for is jumping ahead because you think you know something and never really learn what's going on.

I'm getting the impression that by analogy, DotRSB lets you play music that someone else has written; but to be good at drawing, you need to be able to play music that you've written yourself. And that's a valid criticism, but playing someone else's music is still fun, while writing music isn't going to be much fun if I can't play it well. So it seems reasonable to quickly get good at playing, and then later I can learn to write.

Does this seem like a fair assessment?

Those impressive benefits to a complete beginner are what a complete beginner needs. That they can see there actually has been progress is what will allow them to move on and continue to improve via the needed work.

Those improvements are not superficial to someone who has been told or convinced themselves that they can not draw.

heh. partially that. but there's also:

    - tricks how to cover up an accident
    - recognizing an accident early so it's less to cover up
    - and finally of course, can't deny skill and control

While I probably did learn skill and control that way, I also very much learned about "happy accidents", cover-ups and recognizing an accident early or before it happens :)

Mind you, this was me as a stubborn teen, drawing during boring school classes. Maybe learning techniques for adults are different.

I can still draw. But I do it explicitly with my wrist+hand, not with my arm. I never have. Always rest my hand on the paper and draw with my fingers. Then I don't tremble, I only tremble when I gotta keep my hand still in free space. But on paper my hand's 100% relaxed and only moves as I want it to. Maybe it's because I've drawn things all my life and there's a trust in my hand that allows it to relax in that way.

There's two consequences to this drawing style: I draw best when it's really small, because of the range of motion of my hand and wrist (although there's a few ways I can use a marker and draw nice curves and cartoon faces on larger paper as well). I can't paint :) Because if you rest your hand on the paper you'll smear out all the paint :) This was already a problem in highschool, before I burnt out, it's just not how I want to interact with the medium. It's gotta be up close and personal.

Either way if my movements had to come out of my arm, my fingers would tremble, and it would suck.

BTW I have a similar fear for starting to learn electronics, I really doubt if I can handle a soldering iron and those tiny elements accurately enough to make things without it becoming a hugely frustrating exercise in "accepting one's limitations".

To the GP I say, try it, and really, try to relax about it (if relaxing helps with the tremors--it doesn't for me, 100%, which is why I also need to calmly rest my hand on a surface. but then it's pretty steady).

Dunno. I strongly believe it really depends. I never did that, for exactly the reasons other people lay out in this thread, "but what if I want to draw something else?" (actually "but I want to draw something else, this drawing already exists anyway, why copy it").

Some of my friends did like to copy drawings. A lot of them never progressed past that, and some did. It really depends.

I don't know how I learned colour. I worked in black and white for a long, long time, and only started using colour when I started using the computer/scanner.

(If you like maths and physics, check this out: http://www.scratchapixel.com/lessons/3d-basic-lessons/lesson... esp. lessons 1 and 2 it won't help you one bit about choosing the "right" colours for artistic purposes, but it's super interesting and useful for knowing about how colours are made in print and on the screen)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiro_Dreams_of_Sushi

You see, there is some maxima repeatedly imposed by that book, like "draw what you see" or something like that — you could formulate it by yourself just fine as you've read it I guess. That is an important thing that you should hear once, that's right, because relying too much on technical methods (like perspective) is often impractical and you must learn to draw not relying on it too much. The problem is, that it's just one thing you need to hear after you'll learn perspective and other basic techniques just once, but not a lesson itself.

Because, you see, there are infinite forms in the universe and our imaginary worlds as well, and drawing an elephant isn't about memorizing it, it's about understanding. If you want to understand what I'm talking about, I'd recommend you to read Gottfried Bammes "The Artist's Guide to Animal Anatomy".

Actually, if you'll go to the art school or similar place you'll be strongly discouraged from that "line tracing" thing (however, as I said, remembering that you can draw like that as well is important), which can seem surprising at first (because, really, it's so easy and so natural to just trace it!), but you'll understand why really soon.

By the way, if you are interested, maybe you should check some sketches for famous pictures of famous artists (like Dali) who were professionally drawing for years. That actually impressed me when I first saw that, that really, really good artists who I might have thought would just draw anything from the top of their heads actually do sketches with all these support lines and stuff. Then you understand that drawing isn't just line tracing after all.

So in the end of the day drawing tons of cubes and spheres is way more useful and important than line-tracing your face. Really.

Right now I'm trying to finish an illustration where I've already sketched out everything in detail; the composition is good, the perspective is correct, one of the elements in the drawing is a running person, drawn from imagination, with a good likeness, anatomy, and sense of motion. Still, I struggle A LOT with choosing and simplifying the color scheme and rendering the final drawing in lines that feel spontaneous and alive.

I've been drawing since I was a kid and I had a good handle on the things DotRSotB teaches when I was twelve years old. But there's so much more to learn. A good step after DotRSotB might be learning about shape design, gesture drawing and movement from cartoonists, e.g.:

http://theartcenter.blogspot.se/2010/02/what-is-drawing.html

http://animationresources.org/?p=2091