Where do I start if i want to draw these one day?
Let's say I want to draw/paint things like this: 1 2
Think black/death metal album covers, medieval renaissance, dark/sci fi scenarios.
I know this takes years of practice and I just want to do these as a hobby.
I am just lost to where I start. Just pen and paper and focus learn how to draw people first? Is there any online courses/resources?
The second thing is I don't want to spend money so I won't learn to do these with oil or any real world material. If I do commit to the hobby with pen and paper, I will go to digital (drawing tablet + Linux/krita) and stay on that forever.
It's the same with guitar. I play guitar for years and I'm settled for life with a nice guitar + mid priced digital pedalboard with nice effects/simulations (ampero II stomp) and a 1x12 flat speaker cabinet. No more purchases.
Could you clarify one point:
I'm not sure if it's a typo, or just my misunderstanding. Are you indicating that you want to learn to draw with pen and paper, or that you'd prefer digital drawing?
Also, you mentioned at the start of the post wanting to paint, but then mentioned you didn't want to spend money on any materials (and mentioned oil). Are you ok with only sticking to graphite pencil, or pens (maybe something like pigma micron pens? That is completely ok, of course, just trying to clarify.
I could see some crosshatching look interesting for art like that. (I am not affiliated with that website).
If you do want to stick to graphite, I would still recommend getting a decent set of graphite pencils. You can get them very cheap. At some point, you would likely want different thicknesses as it will help you attain different shades of darkness. Couple recommends
Castell 9000. These remain my favorite all time set of graphite pencils. These last me forever. I'm on the same set for years
staedtler lumograph. I have both sets and prefer the castell's, but it could be just because I'm used to these.
That said: No need to do this just starting out. Just pick up any old pencil and some printer paper and go for it.
CAUTION: Be weary of purchasing art supplies on Amazon. Lots of fakes, very poor shipping that results in lots of breakagegs, and in general they tend to be overpriced. I would recommend Blick, if only because they take a lot of care in shipping. Ebay, surprisingly, can find excellent deals on art supplies. Vet sellers, of course.
CAUTION2: If you do ever decide to get some art supplies, be warned that art supplies are one area where cheaping out really can make a dramatic difference. Getting the no name bottom of the barrel cheapest you can find pencil / paint / brushes / paper, whatever, can be a complete waste and would be better off having not gotten it at all. One of few things in life where I'd advise against cheaping out :)
Learning
This is such a huge topic. Yes, there are of course many resources to teach yourself to draw, and many approaches. Do understand that it's a large undertaking. It's difficult to say "this is how you learn to draw", because art is so subjective, and what one person might consider valuable to learn, might not be so for the next person, as they have different end goals.
Given that, I'd still recommend you have a look at a couple different concepts (I will recommend some books below):
Value (how light or dark a particular color / hue is). Why this might be important to you: it's often natural for people to look at objects they want to draw and think "what shape is this thing" or sort of imagine it as an outline that they need to fill in. A different way of thinking about things, is to simply see relative values of light and darkness. You can do this now - look at your hand, notice all the shadows on it. Notice the highlights. There is no "outline" to your hand - there are just colors (which are nothing but different wavelengths of light bouncing off your hand and hitting your eye), and different values of those colors based on how much light is hitting them. What I'm getting at, is just understanding how light works, how it creates different shadows, and to see things in this way. Light, Shade, and Shadow is a nice, simple book on this topic.
This concept of value will come in handy when drawing people, because understanding these concepts will allow you to add depth to your drawings, which can become important (again, depending on what you want to do) when drawing faces in particular (as our faces have so many peaks and valleys to them).
Perspective: This concept you might find useful as well. Perspective Made Easy by Norling is a very famous, and easy to work through book.
I imagine many such books might be available on openlibrary.
I don't know if anything here is useful, it might be more than what you are looking for. Also, I might be away from tildes for a while, so I apologize if you respond to this and it appears I'm ignoring you. Best of luck in your endeavors.
One more recommend to this. I know you said you don't want to go all out on art supplies - totally understandable.. but if you do decide to go the graphite pencil route (still not clear if that's your goal), a couple other things to add to your toolbox:
blending stumps. they are dirt cheap and will change your life :)
Understand different types of erasers and get some. Again, cheap, couple bucks, but probably different from what you're used to
Also:
I want to reiterate - that if you are just looking to draw with a pencil, none of these supplies are even necessary to start out. Again, grab a #2 pencil from your junk drawer, some random printer paper, and start drawing. Those things I mentioned (graphite pencil set with varying thicknesses, blending stumps, erasers), are just nice things to add on, which can elevate your drawing (and make it much easier as well).
At some point, you might be interested to learn about different types of paper. That is a complete rabbithole, believe it or not. But again, starting out, just grab printer paper or the cheapest sketchbook you can find. That said, luckily for graphite, you don't need to be as restrictive with paper, and there's lots more options open to you (than say watercolor where you really are limited to watercolor paper.) Experimenting with papers of different "tooth" (i.e. roughness) can be a lot of fun, and you might be able to achieve different techniques. Personally, I enjoy using cheap soft press watercolor paper for graphite pencil.
P.S. I promise I'm not shilling for blick with my multiple links to them. They are my goto, but there are plenty of reputable art supply stores. Again, ebay can be useful too.
Thanks for the reply! I'm at work right now so I'll just clarify this part and come back later.
I want to start cheap with pen and paper just to see if I stick to the hobby (Let's say It's been 8 months and I'm still drawing every day and enjoying it). I could probably stay with pen and paper, but the preference is going digital because after buying the drawing tablet I don't need to buy anything else if I want to draw/paint with other style/materials. I just use the digital equivalent.
I just don't want to buy the tablet now and risk not using because I didn't like drawing.
That's a smart approach (figuring out if you like something and giving yourself time, before going all in.)
I understand you better now. With regards to digital, to be honest, I'm not even sure how much a person needs to understand about drawing in order to do digital drawing. Maybe someone else can chime in here? I have never done digital stuff like krita. What I mean to say is, these might be vastly different undertakings, and if you enjoy or dislike drawing by hand, might have no bearing on if you enjoy or dislike digital drawing (I have no clue, just see this as a possibility). Hopefully someone on tildes with experience in both can shed some light.
The points mentioned under learning might still be useful to you in that regards - understanding how light works, value, perspective, these are concepts that could be applied to both mediums (graphite and pen, as well as digital drawing.)
Well it seems a lot of what I wrote probably doesn't apply to you, so I do apologize about that. I will keep it up, in case someone else finds it useful
I use Krita daily as part of my freelance illustration. Krita is more than equipped to produce the example images.
You can either get a tablet with a screen, or a tablet where you look up at your monitor. The latter is much cheaper, and takes some practice. Some refuse because of the 'disconnect' between where you're looking and what your hands are doing. It's what I use - and I think if you're willing to learn it's the better way to go in the long term. I still go back to physical artwork very comfortably.
There's going to be a large overlap of learning when it comes to the fundamentals of drawing. Digital art allows you to undo and transform your work, a luxury that physical media is more punishing on. There's definitely value in learning art without those tools, but I'm somewhat convinced you'll learn quicker with them, as you're able to move much more quickly through the loop of identifying an issue and addressing it.
Use your pencil and paper to churn out some figure practice (intuitive stuff, work quickly), and then use digital to figure out composition and shading. My two cents!
OP, this sounds like solid advice!
cc-louis I would love to understand one thing, as someone who has never ventured into digital drawing... So with hand drawing, there is motor movement (moving your hands, your fingers, your arm), so much of that probably becomes ingrained, and the familiarity of those movements ends up being key to how some people work. When you move to digital, it seems like in some ways you'd be relearning how to draw because you lose all that "muscle memory" of how you move your hands (and I guess you'd need to learn a whole new set of movements). How long did it take you to adapt?
Sorry for veering off topic, this is just something that has intrigued me for a long time. At the same time, I wonder if this question is useful to OP because again, the two mediums just seem so different. Like you said there's fundamental concepts that can be used in both, but the actual execution of those concepts seems so vastly different, I don't even understand if the experience is even remotely the same (so for example say OP starts drawing by hand and says "god i hate this", i wouldn't want them to give up on their undertaking, because they might still love digital drawing.)
I'm not who you asked but I wanted to chip in!
I do both traditional and digital art and learned them both at about the same time. So that might colour my perception a bit. I also only started learning both of them at 17.
I don't actually find the two to be very different. Everything you need to learn about Art and drawing is the same. It's only a different medium. Learning to draw digitally to me was like learning how to watercolour the first time, or how to use acrylic or colour pencils.
What new thing I had to learn was the hardware and not really the fundamentals of what made good art.
That being said, I do understand that the hand movements will be different. But I've always felt like that helped me learn better. Every time I switched between digital and traditional and had to recalibrate my brain and hands, It felt like it helped to see things differently and improve.
There were also times where I was just doing digital most of the time and then switched to watercolour for a significant time and then back to digital and realised I've improved because I'm applying what I've learned from traditional to digital. It works the same the other way too.
There were also days where I felt stuck and couldn't draw on my sketchbook and switched to digital and that was suddenly fine. And days where I'm my pc and everything feels awkward and wrong and I switch to my sketchbook and it's all fine.
But! After saying all that, I think Digital is easier to get a handle on than Traditional. I think my problem is I get distracted by all the different mediums that I'm not particularly masterful in any one.
Sorry I rambled again!
thanks a lot for this. Not rambling at all, and this actually gave me a different way of thinking about it. Your example with watercolor is actually perfect, and interesting to me that this never dawned on me until your comment. I also paint watercolor (though admittedly I am horrific at it); I realize now that when I first wanted to learn watercolor (or any other traditional medium), I never even gave a second thought to the idea of having to learn different movements, yet this has always kept me away from digital drawing. Perhaps I just have some weird bias about digital art (or more likely, maybe the concept still seems so foreign to me that I just never thought about it the same way I might think about something like painting.)
The cool thing about digital drawing you're not dealing with limited-life art supplies. That's one thing that severely holds me back with art (especially things like watercolor, as paper is so expensive) - i get so hesitant to make art because I am thinking "damn how much will this cost me", and it hinders me from improving. I love the idea of digital drawing because you don't deal with that limitation.
Anyway, I am the one rambling now, but just wanted to say a special thanks for this, completely changed my perspective on it tbh
Thank you!
But like you said before it really is preference sometimes. I've had friends who said they prefer digital and don't want traditional and the other way around. It's quite common.
But there was a guy I worked with who did digital and oil. He told me he used to hate traditional and thought that maybe traditional didn't work for his brain. It wasn't wired to understand it.
But then he took an oil painting class and all of the sudden that made sense to him and he loves it. Then he realised it wasn't traditional art that he didn't like, he just really hated Watercolour.
So I think people just tend to group all of the different traditional mediums together vs digital. When it's more like they're all individual mediums.
But that could also mean you could try digital and absolutely still not like it in any way and that's okay. It's just a preference for another medium.
I started drawing with a tablet when I was 10, so it's been a long long time since I had to learn that muscle memory. I do remember struggling to draw as well on the tablet for a time (I was big doodler as a kid), but I do think you're brain clicks. I can't vouch for how long that first 'click' takes (again, been far too long).
When I've used tablets of different sizes, or even sometimes if I knock my tablet to a different angle, I can genuinely feel my brain recalculating how to move my hand to match the screen. But - it quickly settles.
At no point have I gone back to physical media and felt I had unlearnt anything , muscle memory or otherwise. Every technique I've learnt digital I've been immediately able to apply to physical. My only frustration is that I feel like my hand is in the way, and my neck hurts.
Interesting. Thanks a lot for this insight. I'll bet the fact that you started when your 10 was also supremely helpful. What a great skill you have. Really cool to know that when you go from the table to physical media, you never feel you have to re-learn any movements.
That's a good point. If drawing in "real life" and digital is so alien to each other (let's say compared to playing acoustic and electric guitar which is different, specially if you like metal, but there is a lot of overlap) I might go after a used tablet and start there.
First off, I actually think your idea of starting with pen and paper is the smartest move: you can learn some fundamentals, and it won't cost you anything. To me, that's a win.
With regards to what I said in that post - I don't want to mislead you; I'm not sure if what I suggested is accurate (again, I've never done digital art). I asked this question to @cc-louis (the poster who works in krita, that gave you advice on using the tablet), to see what their thoughts were. They responded here. Not sure if that insight is useful to you at all.
I am not suggesting to skip the drawing or anything and go straight to the tablet, I just more wanted to encourage you, that if you start drawing (by hand) and for some reason find out you don't like it, don't throw your hands up in the air and say "this isn't for me!"; you might still really enjoy the digital process. If you don't enjoy hand drawing, it could well be your reason for not enjoying it is specific to the hand drawing process, and maybe digital drawing wouldn't have that limitation for you. Of course, this is all me speculating about some random possibility - just wanted to throw it out there.
Additionally, I want to reiterate what cc-louis also mentioned: learning/understanding the "fundamentals". I can not speak for them, but I'm assuming they're referring to things such as, understanding some basic anatomy, understanding perspective, understanding how light works (shadow, value, etc.), understanding some figure drawing techniques, mastering body proportions. The point here is that these concepts will serve you well regardless if you are drawing by hand or digitally; you can always use pen and paper to practice/understand these techniques, and then later once you get a table, you can implement them there. There are scores of books available on all of these topics. You might even enjoy some subreddits like /r/learnart. It probably seems overwhelming and muddy at this moment, but if you look at a few wikis you will get a better idea of what some of the overarching topics are that can help you.
Finally, as an aside - I want to say that I don't think there's any one way to do things, especially with art. I don't think a person has to learn art fundamentals or anything, and I'm not pushing that. It all depends on what you want to do, and what is important to you. These fundamentals that are being talked about, I think are super useful, but I don't want to make it sound like you have to do that in order to learn to draw or make art.
Thanks! I started today following the drawabox.com lessons and I found it particularly engaging and simple to do.
I ordered two 0.5mm pens and that's all the website asks to start. I'll keep following the course. It says that it should take 6+ months to finish so by the end I'll see if it's time to go digital or keep using the pen.
That's fantastic! I'm checking it out, and that looks like a very cool website.
Yup, honestly I will tell you, any old pencil and notebook paper will do to learn to draw. You do not need any fancy equipment. That's one of the beautiful things about it - it is so accessible to anyone. The supplies i suggested in my earlier post (the set of graphite pencils of various thicknesses, blending stumps, etc.) were just tools that can help add (really cool) effects to your drawings; I suggested that as I was initially under the impression that you wanted to stay with hand drawing. If that is not your long term plan, you really don't need that at all.
Thanks!
What tablet do you use? Asking because since you use Krita probably the one you use is fully compatible with Linux out of the box.
I use an almost decade old Wacom Intuos that refuses to die. Wacom has pretty much always been friendly on Linux while I've used it (to be fair I've used three tablets in my lifetime and they've all been Wacom). I reckon you could get an old Intuos or Bamboo on eBay for under $40 and see how you get on with it.
I too am using a decade old Wacom intuos that refuses to die! When people ask me to recommend tablets to them, I tell them I'm out of touch and know nothing.
I heard even the newer Wacom models aren't as good or immortal anymore.
Dang :( Not looking forward to when it's day finally comes, it does everything I need it to do and nothing else, and has worked with anything I've plugged it in to. Bought a sack of nibs from China that have kept me trucking.
It does feel as though the market has moved towards touchscreens, and the old intuos style tablet is now just a budget option.
Edit: Just did a google and I'm glad to see that my Krita hero David Revoy is still using an Intuos that was sent to him late last year. A lot of good reasons to still go screenless (imo).
Yeah. =( It's kind of sad because I actually prefer the old style tablet to touchscreens. My body is breaking down and I feel like the old tablets without screens are actually more ergonomic. Basically I'm using a standing desk with my monitors eye level, and my tablet,mouse and keyboard at a comfortable height to rest.
With the Wacom Cintiq, you kind of have to hunch over, kind of. Although I just googled and there are people discussing ways of trying to get the Cintiq to be more ergonomic with their pc set ups. Apparently you can set up your Cintiq so that it works like an Intuos. So that's not too bad I guess.
I work in higher Ed in a digital arts department at an art institute and have been working with our faculty to try to improve ergonomics for our students.
One of the things faculty recommend are arms and mounts for the cintiqs, set up to support neutral head and neck angles.
One of the books we circulate for students is "Draw Stronger" by Kriota Willberg. I haven't read it yet but the faculty I spoke with found it very good.
On a personal level, it's funny, I thought digital art wasn't for me for decades. My mom is a graphic designer and she had an early Wacom in the early/mid 90s. I could never make my brain work with that and kind of gave up on digital art. A few years ago I got an iPad Pro with the apple pencil and my artistic practice has just exploded - I never imagined I would consider myself a visual artist when drawing digitally! It has also given me new perspective on my physical art mediums. I do hear from a lot of students though that they have strong preferences for the display tablets or for the regular older screenless wacoms. In the end it comes down to individual preference.
(Also, as someone whose body is also breaking down, I VERY much feel your comment :( losing ability to do creative pursuits can hit even harder than losing other abilities. I will edit my post after I check and see what support hardware we use in my department - not sure that any specific thing will ever definitely help someone but it could be a good starting point. So much of disability/accessibility for individuals ends up being a costly, long, and often frustrating process of trial and error. I'm glad it sounds like you have workflows that you make work for you!)
Edit: a letter
Thank you for the book recommendation! I'll look into it. I'm looking into more ways to make working healthier on the body so this would definitely help.
But it is frustrating sometimes when you have to pick between learning a new instrument or learning a new painting medium not because of general time but because you know your fingers have a limit before they start hurting these days!
But it's okay! We learn how to stand better, sit better, work better. Hold things better and mitigate these things and hopefully get to pursue creative things as long as we can.
I think it's great the the iPad pro helped you! Yeah. It really is a preference thing. I tend to take a while to get used to drawing on procreate, but I tend to "forget" it very quickly once I stop drawing it. It's a familiarity thing. I'm sure I could get back into it if it drew on the iPad for longer.
Edit: But also wow. Your mother had a mid 90s Wacom. That's very cool.
Could you expand on this?
Sorry for missing this - I think the benefits are
To me, the fundamentals are very important for anything. In order to do the style you want, you'd need the basics that works for everything.
https://drawabox.com/ is a great resource to learn the fundamentals of drawing. It's also mostly free.
https://drawabox.com/lessons basically has a list of the free stuff. They're basically things like drawing lines and boxes, and how to construct things.
The risk with drawabox.com is that's it's basically one drawing exercise after another. Which is great, but it can get boring and kill your enthusiasm for a while.
So I would recommend just drawing whatever you do feel like drawing for fun inbetween doing drawing exercises. Sometimes just copying existing characters or anything is fun.
In terms of understanding colour, you would want to look into colour theory. If you look up that term, you'd probably get something.
I also happen to like the Colour and Light book by James Gurney. It's also basically a book that explains how light works. It's the same theory whether you do digital or traditional. If you don't want to get his book, he has a YouTube channel. But, his YouTube channel seems to focus a lot more on traditional painting instead. If I had to choose to buy only one book, it would be this one. Even for anyone who doesn't paint and is just interested in how colour and light works.
But I do both traditional and digital painting and I feel like anything you need to learn fundamental wise is the same for both. The only difference is learning the medium. Like choosing between oil or watercolour. Or choosing between digital or oil.
The other thing you'd probably want to learn is Human Anatomy. You pretty much can just look up Human Anatomy or Figure Drawing basics online or on YouTube. There's a lot out there.
I learned through Andrew Loomis' Figure Drawing books. I think those books are so old they're free now. I THINK? I'm not sure. The PDF is very easy to find. I googled it and it's the second result for me.
Edit: It's on the Internet Archive! But this link is better than the one on the Internet Archive.
The problem with Andrew Loomis though is that it really is quite a bit of a text book and can get dry. So you could flip through it quickly to find certain concepts and terms and then look up YouTube videos or Google things where people explain similar things in more digestable ways.
If you don't mind paying for courses, there's Gumroad and Schoolism. I think James Gurney has a Gumroad. Schoolism is primarily digital art but they can be quite expensive.
There's something else you can think about but maybe not at the start, is composition. You could look up the principles of composition for the really fundamental stuff.
But for the fun stuff you could look up Framed Ink. It's a book about visual storytelling. The best way to compose an image to get the emotion across. I know it goes into making compositions for comic books, but it has a lot of fundamentals in there that applies to just illustrations too.
I realize I've rambled. But, in summary, you would want to look into the fundamentals. And there's a lot of fundamentals. So just pick one at a time or just go with the flow and so whatever you want. But the things to learn for me are:
There's of course a lot more but I think these are already a lot. They are things that you should know regardless of whether you're doing digital or traditional.
They are also things you need to know to be able eventually do the style you want.
But, if all this seems too overwhelming and you just want to draw fun stuff. Just draw and have fun. Ignore rules and lessons for a bit. There's no point in doing this if you don't enjoy it.
Edit: Also, in terms of traditional art. If you ever get curious about it. It doesn't actually have to be expensive. If you understand fundamentals well enough, you can make even the cheapest things work. I have cheap and expensive paints, and the ones I sketch with is cheap student grade stuff and pretty much use the same 2 brushes for everything. I also draw on cheap basic paper stolen from the printer to expensive sketchbooks.
Even with colour pencils, I bought Derwent and then barely used it because I was too used to my cheap ones. But I'm not very good with colour pencils, so I probably just need to learn.
And at some point, my favourite pen to draw with was a cheap ballpoint pen just because it was less stressful and it also felt so good. Although my favourite drawing pencils are pretty expensive. It's the Blackwing. I use that pencil sparingly. I can't afford too much of it. So I actually mostly draw with a Pilot mechanical pencil.
Sorry. I've rambled on again.
Thanks. Just bought two Sakura 0.5mm pens and started the drawabox course! I'm liking it so far.
That's great! I hope you have fun exploring art.
Remember, drawabox can get quite boring for some, so if you get tired of it, you can abandon it and do fun drawing stuff for a bit and that's okay.
Drawabox encourages this. It says that for every minute/hour you spend on lessons, spend the same amount just drawing for fun.
Yes! I only read that after I went to the website again after replying to your comment. I've been using drawabox for a very long time now and they didn't have that statement in the beginning!
In addition to the advice others are giving about learning the fundementals, one of the most important keys to getting better is simply producing a lot of work.
It's going to be bad at first, and you're going to go through many stages where you really feel a "plateau", that's the part where many people get frustrated and stressed, but know that these stages happen even for very accomplished artists; it's just part of the process and if you can learn to anticipate that it gets far less stressful.
Don't let the plateaus stop you, just keep making sketches and studying the world, the more hours you put in the more you'll improve.
And when you are doing these sketches and studies, always ask yourself if you're being observant. That's the whole point -- to train your brain to observe in a way that it's not used to, to percieve detail it normally ignores, to consciously breakdown proportional relationships between the things you're looking at in a way most people naturally don't.
If you hit a plateau, it's often because you've stopped observing closely, refocusing on that can help a lot. Also, looking back at older drawings and seeing how much you've improved can help.
As you draw and observe from real life, you'll build up what many describe as a "visual library", which is essentially an accumulation of tiny little bits of visual knowledge, whether it's some very specific shape relationship you picked up from drawing human faces, or something you learned about overlapping shapes by drawing a bunch of armadillos, it all gets dumped into the same well from which you can consciously or unconsciously draw.
This and the study of the fundementals (perspective, lighting, line quality, color theory etc.) is what enables you to draw more from imagination.
Best of luck, it's a very rewarding skill if you stick with it.
Human and animal forms seem to be common subjects for this aesthetic. In addition to the Drawabox courses you've started, I recommend drawing along to figure drawing tutorials. You can find free lessons on YouTube such as this channel. (I bookmarked it for myself, just never got around to practicing. 😅) Eventually, you'll probably do the same with anatomy tutorials.