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MBA Industrial Design here. I think that all art should start with the ability to draw. A foundational book like Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is a goo

MBA Industrial Design here. I think that all art should start with the ability to draw. A foundational book like Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is a good jump start if it is important for your ego to see quick feedback. Like mastering anything, drawing is about repetition. Exercises are key for building muscle memory. I personally like to start with pencil/prisma. Don't get in the habit of erasing. From there you can work up to other medium like pen, chalk, etc. Even if you eventually end up being a sculptor, mixed media artist, 3d animator, painter, being able to draw (sketch) well is the foundation you will always use! After learning to draw well, I would suggest learning design. Things like order, rhythm, emphasis, etc. is the underpinning of all art.

aronowb14 5y ago
Agreed. I’ve done generative art for many years now: and I have found generally (with a couple exceptions of course), the most successful artists in the space all have a strong foundation in drawing/painting/graphic design.
systemvoltage 5y ago
> A foundational book like Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is a good jump start if it is important for your ego to see quick feedback I completely and unequivocally disagree. This is one of the most misleading books IMO. It gets you to the point where you can draw and feel pretty good about it. It’s easy to verify how people are deluded by this book - the litmus test is as follows: Ask them to draw the same thing but now from a different perspective, say rotate the object about some axis by 30 degrees. They’ll fail. The way to learn drawing, if you want to be taken seriously is to internalize the 3D geometry and be able to modify it without much struggle. This is why good teachers start with basic shapes such as Cube and Cones. I would strongly discourage anyone from using this book unless you’re doing it for fun and as a hobby. There are many good sources, search for Sycra on YT or take a course from Jeffrey Watts on basics of drawing.
- blueboo 5y ago
  I remember having similar sentiments in junior high. Maybe I was right back then, but I have a different view, now.. That is, the ability to draw rotated geometric primitives without reference is not on the critical path to be taken seriously as an artist.
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    It totally is. Without it, you cannot apply shading for example. Or make caricatures. Or literally do anything in drawing that would be considered a normal routine expectation from an artist. I’m speaking about a specific skill here, not emulating Jackson Pollock or doing something crazy in the art world. Talking about strictly the ability to draw well.
- syntheweave 5y ago
  It's easy to talk past each other when discussing which techniques to prioritize. Drawing forms in perspective is a large hurdle, and it is important if you want to work quickly on a variety of projects with little reference(a common need in professional illustration) but also not the defining thing of "drawing". The huge number of artists that define themselves in a completely flat style should signal as much. I found it was more important in my studies to prioritize proportion. Proportion rules over and interacts with everything else - it is unavoidable, and there are many proportioning tricks and strategies out there. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is fine at guiding this basic principle. The other things can be done with a bit of reference and specific techniques: If you understand the proportions correctly in an orthographic side, front and top view, you can already create character turnarounds: just rotate the top view in 2D and then draw guidelines downwards, and you have the horizontal location of everything after rotation, which can subsequently be matched with the vertical from front and side. It is a major labor to do this because you will most likely not have perfect proportions in your original views if you drew them from scratch, but the process itself is intuitive and accurate, and involves no cubes or cones. Form in perspective is likewise mostly reducible to knowing the location of the horizon line and then informally distorting proportions according to the rule: "above horizon=looking up, below horizon=looking down". And then doing studies of the perpendicular cross-section to internalize the detailed form of real objects. Again, cubes and cones are not a priority. They are a method of simplifying, which helps when you aim towards arbitrary constructions from imagination, but the drawing assignments I've undertaken are achieved with most accuracy by starting from either using a maximum detail reference image to set proportions, or first working in orthographic views to simplify understanding. The emphasis on primitives is primarily a yesteryear's art education phenomenon, because it was much, much harder to get accurate references then. Artists were known for possessing giant stacks of source material. We're in a world defined by digital processes, and the stacks are disappearing accordingly. You can easily tell the computer to make an accurate cube and then trace over that, and if you need more details you snap a quick photo on your camera. You can build up exactly the reference you need via photobashing. The process is a giant shortcut that doesn't give the same results, but when pushed hard to be stylized, it still leads back to the traditional skills of observation, and eventually to drawing cubes.
- thraxil 5y ago
  Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain isn't frequently recommended because working through it will turn you into a great or even mediocre artist. It's frequently recommended because most people out there without any artistic training can't make it past the first, most basic hurdle of thinking that you have to have some kind of amazing innate "talent" to be able to draw anything more sophisticated than a stick figure. I haven't seen another book that breaks that barrier down and shows that drawing is mostly just a skill that can be learned and improved with study and practice like many other skills as reliably as Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain does. I've seen that change happen for many people (many of whom have gone on to take and enjoy proper drawing classes) with that book but I've never seen any of them "mislead" or "deluded" by it.
WHA8m 5y ago
For anyone interested in the book 'Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain', there is a pdf of it easily be found with a simple google search. So easy, that I'm not sure if it's even public domain. I don't want to link it here anyway.

aronowb14 5y ago

Agreed. I’ve done generative art for many years now: and I have found generally (with a couple exceptions of course), the most successful artists in the space all have a strong foundation in drawing/painting/graphic design.

systemvoltage 5y ago

> A foundational book like Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is a good jump start if it is important for your ego to see quick feedback I completely and unequivocally disagree. This is one of the most misleading books IMO. It gets you to the point where you can draw and feel pretty good about it. It’s easy to verify how people are deluded by this book - the litmus test is as follows: Ask them to draw the same thing but now from a different perspective, say rotate the object about some axis by 30 degrees. They’ll fail. The way to learn drawing, if you want to be taken seriously is to internalize the 3D geometry and be able to modify it without much struggle. This is why good teachers start with basic shapes such as Cube and Cones. I would strongly discourage anyone from using this book unless you’re doing it for fun and as a hobby. There are many good sources, search for Sycra on YT or take a course from Jeffrey Watts on basics of drawing.

blueboo 5y ago
I remember having similar sentiments in junior high. Maybe I was right back then, but I have a different view, now.. That is, the ability to draw rotated geometric primitives without reference is not on the critical path to be taken seriously as an artist.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  It totally is. Without it, you cannot apply shading for example. Or make caricatures. Or literally do anything in drawing that would be considered a normal routine expectation from an artist. I’m speaking about a specific skill here, not emulating Jackson Pollock or doing something crazy in the art world. Talking about strictly the ability to draw well.
syntheweave 5y ago
It's easy to talk past each other when discussing which techniques to prioritize. Drawing forms in perspective is a large hurdle, and it is important if you want to work quickly on a variety of projects with little reference(a common need in professional illustration) but also not the defining thing of "drawing". The huge number of artists that define themselves in a completely flat style should signal as much. I found it was more important in my studies to prioritize proportion. Proportion rules over and interacts with everything else - it is unavoidable, and there are many proportioning tricks and strategies out there. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is fine at guiding this basic principle. The other things can be done with a bit of reference and specific techniques: If you understand the proportions correctly in an orthographic side, front and top view, you can already create character turnarounds: just rotate the top view in 2D and then draw guidelines downwards, and you have the horizontal location of everything after rotation, which can subsequently be matched with the vertical from front and side. It is a major labor to do this because you will most likely not have perfect proportions in your original views if you drew them from scratch, but the process itself is intuitive and accurate, and involves no cubes or cones. Form in perspective is likewise mostly reducible to knowing the location of the horizon line and then informally distorting proportions according to the rule: "above horizon=looking up, below horizon=looking down". And then doing studies of the perpendicular cross-section to internalize the detailed form of real objects. Again, cubes and cones are not a priority. They are a method of simplifying, which helps when you aim towards arbitrary constructions from imagination, but the drawing assignments I've undertaken are achieved with most accuracy by starting from either using a maximum detail reference image to set proportions, or first working in orthographic views to simplify understanding. The emphasis on primitives is primarily a yesteryear's art education phenomenon, because it was much, much harder to get accurate references then. Artists were known for possessing giant stacks of source material. We're in a world defined by digital processes, and the stacks are disappearing accordingly. You can easily tell the computer to make an accurate cube and then trace over that, and if you need more details you snap a quick photo on your camera. You can build up exactly the reference you need via photobashing. The process is a giant shortcut that doesn't give the same results, but when pushed hard to be stylized, it still leads back to the traditional skills of observation, and eventually to drawing cubes.
thraxil 5y ago
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain isn't frequently recommended because working through it will turn you into a great or even mediocre artist. It's frequently recommended because most people out there without any artistic training can't make it past the first, most basic hurdle of thinking that you have to have some kind of amazing innate "talent" to be able to draw anything more sophisticated than a stick figure. I haven't seen another book that breaks that barrier down and shows that drawing is mostly just a skill that can be learned and improved with study and practice like many other skills as reliably as Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain does. I've seen that change happen for many people (many of whom have gone on to take and enjoy proper drawing classes) with that book but I've never seen any of them "mislead" or "deluded" by it.

WHA8m 5y ago

For anyone interested in the book 'Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain', there is a pdf of it easily be found with a simple google search. So easy, that I'm not sure if it's even public domain. I don't want to link it here anyway.