Re:Bicycles from Sketches (2016)
by egypturnash on Friday June 12, 2020 @10:45AM
(#23499714)
I am a professional artist; drawing stuff from out of my head and making it look plausible, if not actually correct, is literally my day job.
I have spent multiple decades practicing to be able to do this. Everything that I can draw out of my head and make look plausible rests on top of a solid foundation of spending time looking at real-world examples of the thing, or photos of the thing, and working from them.
There is a huge hump that artists almost inevitably have to get over somewhere in the transition from "amateur" to "pro": amateurs almost inevitably convince themselves that they need to be able to draw anything with zero reference, and if they can't somehow magically do it they are a failure; pros will happily draw a lot of stuff with no reference, but the instant they realize they don't know what a thing looks like, they will put down their pencil and go find something to work from.
Part of being a pro artist used to be maintaining a "morgue" - you would be constantly on the lookout for photos of things you thought you'd have to draw someday, and you'd clip and file them. The advent of image search has made this less necessary, but I certainly still have a few shelves full of coffee table books full of really nice photos of distinctive stuff - I have an entire book that is nothing but photographs of staircases.
How does the human body work? How do all its muscles sheath the bones and organs, how do you break it down into basic shapes that you can quickly put on the canvas and then flesh out into a realistic drawing? Which parts should you exaggerate when you want to caricature a particular pose? Which parts should you not bother with more than a basic rendering of to best serve the needs of the drawing at hand? That alone is a body of knowledge that artists have to spend years cramming into their head before they can be a pro. We regularly circulate little tip sheets[1] that talk about the ways we have found to simplify these things.
How much of your day-to-day work as a programmer comes out of your head? How much of it is looking through documentation and searching Stack Overflow?
I have spent multiple decades practicing to be able to do this. Everything that I can draw out of my head and make look plausible rests on top of a solid foundation of spending time looking at real-world examples of the thing, or photos of the thing, and working from them.
There is a huge hump that artists almost inevitably have to get over somewhere in the transition from "amateur" to "pro": amateurs almost inevitably convince themselves that they need to be able to draw anything with zero reference, and if they can't somehow magically do it they are a failure; pros will happily draw a lot of stuff with no reference, but the instant they realize they don't know what a thing looks like, they will put down their pencil and go find something to work from.
Part of being a pro artist used to be maintaining a "morgue" - you would be constantly on the lookout for photos of things you thought you'd have to draw someday, and you'd clip and file them. The advent of image search has made this less necessary, but I certainly still have a few shelves full of coffee table books full of really nice photos of distinctive stuff - I have an entire book that is nothing but photographs of staircases.
How does the human body work? How do all its muscles sheath the bones and organs, how do you break it down into basic shapes that you can quickly put on the canvas and then flesh out into a realistic drawing? Which parts should you exaggerate when you want to caricature a particular pose? Which parts should you not bother with more than a basic rendering of to best serve the needs of the drawing at hand? That alone is a body of knowledge that artists have to spend years cramming into their head before they can be a pro. We regularly circulate little tip sheets[1] that talk about the ways we have found to simplify these things.
How much of your day-to-day work as a programmer comes out of your head? How much of it is looking through documentation and searching Stack Overflow?
1: https://theetheringtonbrothers.blogspot.com/p/every-how-to-t...