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40 Days of Art: Feeeel dthe Woleum
Mar. 17th, 2011 05:03 pmJust a quick little thingy today, an introduction to an idea which will be recalled when I talk about life drawing.
A good exercise to do when you're tracing stuff is to delineate the planes that illustrate the volumes of the characters (or whatever it is you're trying to draw). Try to discern what the drawing is telling you about the three-dimensional surfaces it describes in line, and fill in for yourself some contours that illustrate this. imagine you are taking a marker to the actual character and drawing on them, around them, lines which describe their shape, like the latitude and longitude lines on a globe or the lines on a topographical map.
For example:
If you imagine your pencil is not making curved lines on a piece of paper but actually passing over a solid object, tracing straight lines around a curved surface, you will begin to internalize the self-deception of a 3D space contained in the 2D picture plane.
If you're using characters wearing clothing, you can use clues like the cuffs of sleeves, elbow wrinkles, shoulder seams, waistlines, tops of boots, etc. to give you a clue as to the contours of given parts of the body. If something is unclear or not expressly delineated, make your best guess! Try it three or four times until you find something that works. What counts is that you understand how the lines used in the original imply the forms, the foreshortening, and the overlapping.
Have at it!
A good exercise to do when you're tracing stuff is to delineate the planes that illustrate the volumes of the characters (or whatever it is you're trying to draw). Try to discern what the drawing is telling you about the three-dimensional surfaces it describes in line, and fill in for yourself some contours that illustrate this. imagine you are taking a marker to the actual character and drawing on them, around them, lines which describe their shape, like the latitude and longitude lines on a globe or the lines on a topographical map.
For example:
If you imagine your pencil is not making curved lines on a piece of paper but actually passing over a solid object, tracing straight lines around a curved surface, you will begin to internalize the self-deception of a 3D space contained in the 2D picture plane.
If you're using characters wearing clothing, you can use clues like the cuffs of sleeves, elbow wrinkles, shoulder seams, waistlines, tops of boots, etc. to give you a clue as to the contours of given parts of the body. If something is unclear or not expressly delineated, make your best guess! Try it three or four times until you find something that works. What counts is that you understand how the lines used in the original imply the forms, the foreshortening, and the overlapping.
Have at it!
