Learning how to draw from no experience

I honestly had no idea that after a month I could finally do this! I started with some preliminary sketches and tried to fix the mistakes in my final version. Some people said that I learned really quickly and I think that the 3-4 hours I put in every day drawing the most mundane things had much more of an effect. For every drawing I posted here there were about a dozen attempts filled with wobbly circles and things terribly out of proportion. While I did push myself and began to burn out by the end I think that it’s really cool i improved so much. I find myself enjoying art more and more and overall am surprised at how much I was scared at art. I’m definitely going to continue to draw everyday from now on!

I think I might have figured out bodies a little bit better. I spent all day drawing shardplate from the artwork in Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson. Some of the proportions are bit off but I was really happy with the result. Tomorrow I’m going to try and draw something even better to end this month in a bang but overall I’m extremely surprised how much I’ve been able to draw within a month and a half. I always assumed art was spontaneous but tackling it at a technical perspective has helped a lot. My pen control from calligraphy and shape understanding from my experience doing origami and 3D printing really accelerated my learning I felt.

I got fustrated with human bodies and decided to go back to animals but I also didn’t really understand animals either so Andrey suggested doing dinosaur bones. They were really hard to draw but I think space wise and maybe proportion wise it was easier to observe and draw.

I finally found a bunch of time to do some drawing. I learned anime head proportions from Andrey, and followed along a MikeyMegaMega tutorial on anime bodies. Finally I drew the head of an anime character named Miku. I realized that I drew the headphones really flat. I need to remember to think of everything as 3D. It was also easier than I thought once I learned how to measure the proportions and look at my reference image often.

Because i’m doing my senior research project I haven’t found the time to draw animals. I have been drawing boxes everyday to keep my line quality up and fresh but no drawing of yet. I also am meeting with my friend tormorrow so maybe I will learn to draw anime girls instead.

I’m really really happy about this one. I was having the hardest time with arachnids and spent a lot of time attempting scorpions and decided to commit to this one and add in more detail than usual. It was surprisingly less time consuming than I thought and it’s a little surreal I can’t believe I was able to draw it.

I studied wasps in school so I was pretty happy with these drawings. I think they are a little too flat though.

Did some anatomy studies for bugs.

Drew some more plants. I tried doing a rose on the side but it was really difficult so I’ll keep trying.

I forgot to post yesterday but I did some branches (which were basically tubes). It was actually super difficult to get it smooth, so maybe I’ll go back and practice some more later. I also did a first try at the sample plants and let my sister color one haha. I also just got a tan sketchbook so that combined with a white color pencil might look cool. Andrey showed me some examples so I may take a stab sometime this week with highlights. I’ll definitely find some way to mess it up.

Today I started exploring leaves as flexible arrow like things and then draw another page and tried to texture it. I have no idea what I’m doing.

Today I worked a ton on 3D forms, from shape intersections (which hurt my head so much I had to stop drawing), to textures, which were extremely time consuming.

Did some arrows to explore space. Messed up on a couple of them, it looks like they are twisting. I also figured out that curls, like the way hair curls can be drawn this way instead of loopy loops (which doesn’t work) which blew my mind.

Today I did some rotated boxes. It turned out a lot better than the first time I did it. There are some issues with wobbly lines, but most of the boxes are turning (there’s a few where the vanishing point wasn’t moved oops) so I’m happy enough to move on. I’m going to skip redoing organic boxes because quite frankly I’m sick of drawing boxes since that’s all I’ve been doing the past few weeks. Next up is redoing organic forms.

In drawabox you are supposed to do this with a ruler but I freehanded it and was pretty happy with the result. Most of the lines converged to the same area so the illusion that they are all parallel is maintained.

Practiced some more one point perspective. My accuracy to the vanishing point was not that great, but most of the lines converged which is the important part. Also continuing to try to draw the lines slowly as an extra challenge.

Worked on some circles today. Again trying to draw them slowly the first time and then drawing over fast. My accuracy suffered a bit.

So I just finished Lesson 1 and 2, and being the perfectionist that I am I really want to make sure my lines, circles, and boxes are all solid before I move on. I’m going to redo some exercises except with modifications from Andrey. He suggested trying drawing the lines slower, contrary to drawabox, as he said it improves accuracy a lot for a small loss in line quality. Behold I am actually stopping on the points now but my lines are a little wobbly at the ends.