09-01-2014, 08:47 AM
Hey Stardust! I really love your use of traditional mediums, love how you make the canvas's out of pages from books and, is that a kids toy box on the self portrait? Really creative man!
Since 'drawing through' was mentioned above (sometimes called 'constructive drawing'), I'll share what helped me the most - aside from doing the exercises in Dynamic Sketching 2 video it was 'Figure Drawing: Design and Invention' by Hampton that has made it really click for me. It's about human anatomy but the process can be applied to anything - if you have a desire to study human anatomy anyway I'd really recommend it. Going through the steps and doing the exercises suggested really develops that kind of thinking.
Using the Hampton approach on the ant above, you'd first capture the gesture of the body with lines, the legs, the rise and dip from head -> abdomen -> thorax, then use a straight line to represent the tilt and lean of each of those three parts, then place a sphere / egg shape over each straight line, then use wrapping lines over the sphere's to give each part some volume, then represent the legs with three or four cylinders each, using the degree and direction of the ellipse on the ends of each cylinder to show if it is moving towards or away from the viewer. That's the underdrawing, and since it's simple shapes you can tell quickly if something is wrong, once you get that down tight you can go in and carve out the details. Also, since it's built with simple shapes, figuring out where the light will fall is a much easier task as well.
Hope that made sense - obviously the book presents it in a much better way than I can. I couldn't see any good youtube video showing this kind of thing but if you watch the last 7 minutes of this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIiqgXqjWCw
It kinda shows the process from a gesture drawing adding the simple shapes in the correct places.
Hope that's useful for you! Keep drawing brother : )
Since 'drawing through' was mentioned above (sometimes called 'constructive drawing'), I'll share what helped me the most - aside from doing the exercises in Dynamic Sketching 2 video it was 'Figure Drawing: Design and Invention' by Hampton that has made it really click for me. It's about human anatomy but the process can be applied to anything - if you have a desire to study human anatomy anyway I'd really recommend it. Going through the steps and doing the exercises suggested really develops that kind of thinking.
Using the Hampton approach on the ant above, you'd first capture the gesture of the body with lines, the legs, the rise and dip from head -> abdomen -> thorax, then use a straight line to represent the tilt and lean of each of those three parts, then place a sphere / egg shape over each straight line, then use wrapping lines over the sphere's to give each part some volume, then represent the legs with three or four cylinders each, using the degree and direction of the ellipse on the ends of each cylinder to show if it is moving towards or away from the viewer. That's the underdrawing, and since it's simple shapes you can tell quickly if something is wrong, once you get that down tight you can go in and carve out the details. Also, since it's built with simple shapes, figuring out where the light will fall is a much easier task as well.
Hope that made sense - obviously the book presents it in a much better way than I can. I couldn't see any good youtube video showing this kind of thing but if you watch the last 7 minutes of this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIiqgXqjWCw
It kinda shows the process from a gesture drawing adding the simple shapes in the correct places.
Hope that's useful for you! Keep drawing brother : )