The Pen is mightier than the sword

[Pensword]

Hello!

As an introduction to my sketchbook I will tell you what my idea of my goal is:
I want to make characters and maybe buildings that "look cool".
By that I mean that a non-art-person should look at it, not knowing how it is done, but finds it "somehow cool" or "somehow appealing".
I am such an non-art-person myself and this is how I determine, if I like an artwork or not:
If it is "somehow appealing" I like it, but I have no idea what the rules are to make it so.

I also see a very strange contradiction in this topic, because on the one hand everybody has different taste and maybe one person likes an artwork and another person does not like it. But on the other hand there are "rules" that can be applied that make things "generally appealing", because such rules are used in everything like product design, in the making of movies, of advertisement and so on.
So it is a weird contradiction. There are rules, but also everybody has their own taste.

Whenever I post something and you know how to make it more appealing, especially when you know a good teacher, a good online-lesson, the specific rule that I could apply or anything like that, feel free to tell me how to make the thing that I tried to do more appealing. Or you can also give any feedback you think is helpful of course!


So here I have my first pictures. These are some 2 minute Life Drawings from Photos from the internet.
My goal was to make them as quickly as possible without drawing everything very time-consumingly detailled.
Very rough, very quick and get it down, but capture the essence of the pose.
This was my goal on these pages.

[ThereIsNoJustice]

Welcome, Pensword!

I think Glenn Vilppu says something along the lines of, the things he teaches are tools, not rules. I like that line of thinking. Because for almost any 'rule' you can think of in art, someone is still out there making awesome stuff without that rule, or even directly breaking the rule. It can feel reassuring to to treat some things as rules, at least for a while, because we human beings don't like uncertainty. It's nice to have some certainty, even if it is partially an illusion.

A lot of people start off with gesture. A ton of books and instruction out there are saying to do that. This form of gesture practice seems to me about mileage more than anything, and that's not entirely wrong either.

My opinion is that someone new to drawing won't know what gesture is for or how to tell whether a gesture drawing is successful, and it might be better to take the opposite approach. Strict copying, then once it becomes clear that dynamic shapes and flow, the feeling of life is missing, trying to approach gesture again.

I'm not a teacher. I'm just another artist with an opinion. But I wish I had started out with a proportional divider, like Stefan Baumann describes here:



The purpose of this tool is to teach seeing accurately, which is the most vital skill.

After that I would focus on construction drawing, breaking things into simpler 3D shapes, perspective drawing.

Then rendering the forms with light and shadow.

Then once you realize that everything you are drawing is stiff and lifeless looking, too mathematically structural, gesture is there. Trying to get the flow and life. (Though of course, when you do learn gesture, you will probably start a drawing/painting with gesture, then put structure on top of it, etc.)

Anyway, none of this is to say that you're wrong for doing gesture, but it will be a while before you truly understand the purpose of it and the problem it's trying to solve. For now keep going, and as long as you're drawing you'll improve.

[Pensword]

After that I would focus on construction drawing, breaking things into simpler 3D shapes, perspective drawing.

Then rendering the forms with light and shadow.

Thank you for the suggestions.
I was also thinking about those topics. The very first thing to do is to draw simple 3d bodies like boxes, cylinders and a ball and then get it right to rotate the "camera"/point of view around them aka draw them from different angles and make them look right.

After being able to do that with the simple forms those forms can be upgraded and made a little more complex.



So this is what I started here on my next photos.

The Idea is to create a good looking scenery. Since I wanted to start with boxes I figured that this can become like a Diorama. It starts with empty boxes, but I can put other, more complex bodies into those boxes afterwards.

First step was to dabble a bit in perspective, which is especially easy with simple boxes.

But what I found is that it seems way more efficient to not use 1-point or 2-point perspective, but instead just make it (i think it would be called) isometric.
Just make all the angles the same, so that the viewer of the picture can see how big all those planes are instead of having all of them distorted by all sorts of angles which are different from each other!


So the Idea is a Diorama, which can be opened on the backend and then you can look into it.
Also it has several Floors.
It will be something like Graslands in the middle and Mountains in the back, where the highest boxes are.

[Pensword]

[JosephCow]

Ooh that's cool! I like how the map is translated to 3D. A while ago I was experimenting with ways to do that in 2pt perspective like they do for architectural drawings. Is your goal to do a drawing with all 3 floors of the environment drawn in isometric perspective?

[Lege1]

Really cool perspective work, the first one with all the cubes reminds me of an old NES game, Marble Madness; the map is super cool too =) Keep up the good work.

[Pensword]

Ooh that's cool! I like how the map is translated to 3D. A while ago I was experimenting with ways to do that in 2pt perspective like they do for architectural drawings. Is your goal to do a drawing with all 3 floors of the environment drawn in isometric perspective?

To draw the full environment, possibly with all 3 floors is an option, yes.
But the focus is more on making the idea in the end look good (like a finished, polished Illustration).
Thanks for saying its cool, glad you like such ideas.

Really cool perspective work, the first one with all the cubes reminds me of an old NES game, Marble Madness; the map is super cool too =) Keep up the good work.

Glad if you like such things.
It does not deserve too much praise, since the quality is not very high, yet.
Its just a rough idea.





Today just some basic 3d forms, put together to form a mannequin.