40 Days of Art: Add #3 to #1, Mix
Mar. 15th, 2011 09:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinSo, you've got your tracing, and your head construction – the next step is to apply one to the other, for maximum cognitive benefit!
As I stated before, tracing is mildly educational in that it trains your eye-brain-hand coordination, but if you really want to get the most out of it you have to set about reverse-engineering the drawing you're tracing, and build your traced drawing from the inside out.
It's often easiest to start with the eye line and the centre line when you're tracing, and figure out the head circle by the placement and curvature of those. Once you've got those three things down, then trace off the features.
While you're doing this, think about the features. How far apart are the eyes? How big are they in relation to the head circle? How close are they to the nose? What shapes is the nose made of? How fleshy are the cheeks? Does the head build on the basic spherical cranium at all? (Most realistic human heads are a little longer front-to-back than a perfect sphere.)
You can apply the circle-and-crosshairs construction to just about anything.
Animal characters:
Anime:
Even photorealistic humans:
I still do this when I'm learning how to draw a character. I'll take the model sheets given to me (or assemble my own out of screen caps from test animation, if the model sheet hasn't been made yet) and trace off every drawing, constructing it from the inside out, paying attention to the proportions and shapes used, not just to learn the character intellectually but to get it 'into my hand,' or begin to commit it to muscle memory.
Cartooning skills can be useful no matter what style of art you're doing, as long as you want solid construction and some sort of dynamism. Before the evolution of 'cartooning' as its own art form, a 'cartoon' was a pencil drawing done in preparation for a painting. Michaelangelo did it, Rembrandt did it, Van Gogh did it. Drawing is useful stuff, no matter how it ends up!
As I stated before, tracing is mildly educational in that it trains your eye-brain-hand coordination, but if you really want to get the most out of it you have to set about reverse-engineering the drawing you're tracing, and build your traced drawing from the inside out.
It's often easiest to start with the eye line and the centre line when you're tracing, and figure out the head circle by the placement and curvature of those. Once you've got those three things down, then trace off the features.
While you're doing this, think about the features. How far apart are the eyes? How big are they in relation to the head circle? How close are they to the nose? What shapes is the nose made of? How fleshy are the cheeks? Does the head build on the basic spherical cranium at all? (Most realistic human heads are a little longer front-to-back than a perfect sphere.)
You can apply the circle-and-crosshairs construction to just about anything.
Animal characters:
Anime:
Even photorealistic humans:
I still do this when I'm learning how to draw a character. I'll take the model sheets given to me (or assemble my own out of screen caps from test animation, if the model sheet hasn't been made yet) and trace off every drawing, constructing it from the inside out, paying attention to the proportions and shapes used, not just to learn the character intellectually but to get it 'into my hand,' or begin to commit it to muscle memory.
Cartooning skills can be useful no matter what style of art you're doing, as long as you want solid construction and some sort of dynamism. Before the evolution of 'cartooning' as its own art form, a 'cartoon' was a pencil drawing done in preparation for a painting. Michaelangelo did it, Rembrandt did it, Van Gogh did it. Drawing is useful stuff, no matter how it ends up!
