How will I become great at drawing and painting? Only way to get there is practicing fundamentals for a long time: forever. What are these fundamentals?
- Perspective
- Anatomy
- Composition
- Lighting
Perspective
Learning perspective is essential. I am reading and doing exercises from Scott Robertson’s book “How to draw: Drawing and Sketching Objects and Environments from Your Imagination”. I feel I can draw a pretty straight line now, but those ellipses will take quite some time and practice to get consistent! Scott Robertson’s DVD on drawing and perspective are also great. It covers the same techniques, but actually seeing somebody good demonstrating is very helpful. That reminds me that the book actually have an app that links to great video demonstrations when you scan certain pages with your phone! CtrlPaint’s video series on perspective are also great, especially to get a good mindset for how to use perspective for sketching.
I did some more perspective sketches. Until now, including these, I have just randomly placed the converging lines on the page. Therefore they are usually wrong and because they are not hitting the correct vanishing points. Today I learned how to easily draw my own grids, so now I can actually start drawing in correct perspective. I could have printed out grids or used some templates for Photoshop, but I feel that actually understanding how to create them myself helps a lot.
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