Draw a Box 2018-04-13
In this post:
- A summary of the value of the Draw a Box lessons.
- An Earth-shattering revelation.
- Musings on the art supplies I have destroyed with my untrained hands.
When I was thinking about the idea of following online art tutorials, I assumed I'd be able to basically breeze through them. On the briefest possible reflection, I have no idea why I thought that.
I haven't looked at the overall trajectory of Draw a Box. Instead, I've just been focused on the first lesson. The first part of the first lesson. The first parts of the first part of the first lesson.
Drawing is hard.
What I've covered so far is techniques around drawing lines. Mostly straight lines, but there's some stuff about curves so far. The main thing I learned so far is, my mental model for "draw a line" was all wrong.
I assumed, at such a deep level that I couldn't really examine the assumption, that, well, if you draw a straight line, clearly you had to move the pen straight, so if you just send the pen out straight, then you have a straight line and you're done. For purposes of putting together an overall shape or composition, this is wrong, possibly entirely so.
These early lessons focus on training to draw a line with specified endpoints. Once I thought about this, the utility was obvious. Instead of trying to get every error and deviation to match up, just outline things by end-point, and...
and...
AND...
Connect the dots. Oh my god.
Anyway, these exercises are for a felt-tip pen, which I'm willing to go along with, but I have messed up two pens already I think. I've accumulated a surprising bunch of art supplies, some of which I'm not planning to replace. I probably need a new Sakura Micron 01. For future exercises, I'm going to try out the 05.
Once I get past these exercises, I feel like I'd rather use ball-point pens; these felt-tip ones feel really unforgiving right now.
(By the way, I could scan in the exercises I've done, but they aren't... like... interesting, I think.)
In any case, I've since gone through the rest of part 1. (Of lesson 1.)
I should do the "homework" assignment at the end of part 1, though I'm not currently planning to ask for feedback. After that, I'll try to get onto part 2.