Try To Get Into The Head Of Your Favorite Artists
Don’t copy their styles; try to get into their heads!
Practice Drawing This Draw-along. started drawing from memory after I learned that was what Kim Jung Gi did. I did it the naive way: look at something, try to memorize it, then draw it from memory. Then, later on, when I forgot a detail, I imagined it and made it up. That can be a lot of fun and lead to great results.
started drawing from memory after I learned that was what Kim Jung Gi did. I did it the naive way: look at something, try to memorize it, then draw it from memory. Then, later on, when I forgot a detail, I imagined it and made it up. That can be a lot of fun and lead to great results. I’ve copied Kim Jung Gi’s art into my sketchbook recently, and it struck me how much he must have deviated from what he had seen!
Drawing from memory trains you to sense where a line should go and where it would look good. And you don’t have to stick to the original image that inspired you. The line can go somewhere else!
As a side note, even when drawing from observation, I draw them as little drawing-from-memory exercises now, remembering where the line has to go, its proportions, orientation, and position size relative to other graphic elements. And then I try to place it where it looks good. This allows me to be free to deviate from the reference.
Besides that side note, try to get into the head of your favorite artists. Try to understand what must be going on in their mind as they draw. Then copy that.
Copying their work for practice gets you there faster, which helps you find out what they were thinking while drawing.
This Week
I made a new online app for artists: a value study tool. It reduces images to a few tones. This helps learn tonal composition and how to group tonal shapes, and it also helps train the ability to draw from observation, as it makes it easier to focus on the abstract shapes you see. It presents you with a random image from the website, but you can also upload a file from your device, or provide a link to an online image.
You can also turn the image upside down. This helps you focus even more on the abstract shapes and trains you to do so, which improves your drawing skills.
YouTube
I made a YouTube video that introduced the website, and it did stellar! I think “Practice Drawing This” is a great resource now and can benefit others. I was having a hard time figuring out how to show it to the right people. Turns out I have to show it, and YouTube apparently does the rest!
I decided to go down that path further and make videos that go in-depth, showing how you can use the website’s tools for the usual drawing practice exercises. This one went live on Thursday last week.
An interesting effect is that having to explain how to use the website makes me find little things to improve.
Renaming Things
Long ago, there was a product in my country called something similar to “Breakfast Drink.” It was just juice, blended fruits with the pulp still in it. I did drink it in the morning! You can drink fruit juice at any moment of the day, but the name “Breakfast Drink” caused me to drink it in the morning.
Giving things the correct name is hugely important.
If you are a programmer, try this: create a variable named “red” and assign it an object representing the color blue. It becomes utterly impossible to reason about the code.
It’s crucial to give things correct names. And so I have renamed two things.
Self-Critique Training
In the Morning Sketches APP (which, similarly to Breakfast Drink, suggests a time when you can do it), I had sections where you did a “Memory Drawing,” but I think that name gave the wrong impression. The point of the exercise is to help you become better at seeing the mistakes in your work! You also memorize that reference, but if you only do it once, it’s just in your short-term memory, gone tomorrow.
And it is not the main benefit of doing the exercise; it significantly improves your ability to self-assess your own artwork. Hence, the name change suggests the benefit of doing the exercise.
Being able to memorize a reference is essential, of course, but you’d have to do the same exercise with the same reference repeated over days and weeks for it to stick, and the benefit of doing it with one reference once is that you become better at seeing the mistakes in your work, and seeing where lines should go as you practice.
Variable 3D Models
The hand-coded models were called “parametric” 3D models, which is technically correct, but it doesn’t describe the benefits. I saw mention of “variable fonts” this week, and they are roughly the same thing: parametric fonts, where you can change the parameters to change their shapes. The word “variable” expresses that succinctly.
So the models are now called “Variable 3D Models” instead. They are variable. Their proportions, their dimensions, can be changed by you, or at random.
Yours sincerely,
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