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How to Draw Animals (1930)
- guywithahat 4y agoIt's crazy how little has changed in drawing styles since the 30's. Those books look like something you could buy today (or at least find on the internet, I'm not sure if people still buy drawing books)
- zuminator 4y agoYou actually can buy it today: https://www.amazon.com/Draw-Animal-Book-Step-Step/dp/1631598414 https://www.amazon.com/Draw-Animal-Book-Step-Step/dp/1631598...
- noahbradley 4y agoI'd say a whole lot has changed in drawing styles. There just happened to be a fairly accessible style of drawing that these sort of books teach which has stuck around well. It can be a nice intro to art and at least starts you thinking about how to construct your drawings. But yeah, once you move past that it's fairly impressive how much things have changed/evolved in drawing.
- egypturnash 4y agoThe fundamentals are always the same. Start with a rough shape that vaguely resembles the thing you’re drawing. Work over it to make it look more like the thing. Look at real examples of the thing if you want to. When you reach the desired level of detail, call it done. The details change over time. New conceptual tools, new mark-making tools. But the process I use as an artist is fundamentally unchanged since the first caveman saw firelight flickering on a bulge in a cave, said “hey, that looks like a bull”, then picked up a bit of charcoal to make some marks that make it look even more like a bull.
- dotancohen 4y ago> The fundamentals are always the same. Start with a rough shape that vaguely resembles > the thing you’re drawing. Work over it to make it look more like the thing. Also called "remove everything that isn't elephant".
- ralfd 4y agoRelevant: The classic owl meme: https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/eccj2/how_to_draw_an_owl/ https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/eccj2/how_to_draw_an... Drawing "The Tick" with a simple oval: https://imgur.com/7HMbY https://imgur.com/7HMbY
- tptacek 4y agoIt'd be more relevant if the owl or Tick memes actually showed you a process to derive a picture of an owl, or The Tick, like this book does with many of the animals it illustrates. But you just knew someone was going to have to drop this meme on this thread.
- xg15 4y agoI dunno. In most of those, the "small details" are actually small - but some, e.g. the butterfly, the boar or well, the owl, get pretty close to r/restofthefuckingowl territory.
- corrral 4y agoCheetah qualifies, too. The last step is like 95% of the work.
- tptacek 4y agoMakes sense, pedogogically: if you're really trying to teach anything, it's the idea of abstracting things and building them up from shapes. You'd start by giving step-by-steps for simple animal drawings, and progress to examples that give less hand-holding. I guess if I have an objection to the owl meme, it's that most of these examples pretty much just work; they're not at all "rest of the owl" throw-aways.
- xg15 4y agoAgreed, which is why I meant some of them. Most of them look reasonably easy to follow, including the last step. I think in general, the owl meme has its purpose though: I'd see it as a reminder to be aware of "expert blindness": If you have lots of practice in a subject, part of your skills or knowledge will become subconscious and you're at risk forgetting they are acquired skills/knowledge at all. If you try to write an "introduction for beginners" piece without being self-aware about this, things can get frustrating for the people you're trying to teach. I guess the meme is the art equivalent of "a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors"... :)
- tptacek 4y agoCompare to the American classic from 1970: https://www.google.com/search?q=ed+emberley+drawing+books+of+animals https://www.google.com/search?q=ed+emberley+drawing+books+of... Both are extremely charming. Are there other examples?
- egypturnash 4y agoLee J Ames’s Draw 50 series. https://www.goodreads.com/series/99108-draw-50 https://www.goodreads.com/series/99108-draw-50
- creature 4y agoWhat To Draw and How To Draw It, by Edwin Lutz and available on archive.org, is another good example: https://archive.org/details/whattodrawhowtod00lutz/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/whattodrawhowtod00lutz/mode/2up
- ThrowawayR2 4y agoBefore you upvote this post, note that ddtaylor is basically farming karma by reposting past HN stories that got significant upvotes. You can see from the user's posting history that roughly 2 posts per hour are occurring, one of which is usually an old article, and this pattern has continued over the past several days. It would probably be a good idea for someone to report this to @dang. This kind of implies some kind of automated posting as well, since it's unlikely somebody is sitting in front of their computer 24 hours a day to post twice an hour.
- jay3ss 4y agoWhat is the point of doing something like this here? Supposedly on a site like reddit people do this to increase karma and then can sell their account or whatever, but I don't see much of a point in doing that here.
- koolba 4y agoNot sure why this is a bad thing. Repeated / recent reposts would be merged into the same link anyway. Kind of reminds me of this classic xkcd: https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Pamar 4y agoThis was already posted twice. Here is the link to the most successful submission (2019, I think): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20110922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20110922
- jmathai 4y agoI missed it in 2019. Had I seen it then, I might not have been interested enough to click. But my daughter just got into drawing animals so this repost is very timely and I'm printing them out for her :).
- tptacek 4y agoThanks for the link! I'm glad to have more comments to read about this. That thread has one of my all-time favorite moderator comments on it. On HN, stories are "duplicates" iff (a) they've been posted within the last year ("or so") and (b) they've had significant discussion already on those threads. This post flunks (b) but not (a) and is thus cromulent.
- russellbeattie 4y agocro·mu·lent adjective [HUMOROUS] acceptable or adequate. "the continental breakfast was perfectly cromulent" -- I can never remember that word. For some reason it sounds like it should be an English pastry of some sort. Everything is eroding slowly?
- sethammons 4y agoIt is a bit more than this definition, which is a perfectly cromulent definition, but misses the origin as a made-up word from The Simpsons
- russellbeattie 4y agoAhh, I think that's what the humorous tag is for. Google should probably make that bit a tad more prominent, or I should learn to read farther down the page. Cromwell, crumpets, parliament... It's definitely a well made non-word.
- gpspake 4y agoReminds me of one of my favorite drawing books as a kid. [Ed emberly's - Make a World](https://www.amazon.com/Ed-Emberleys-Drawing-Book-World/dp/0316789720 https://www.amazon.com/Ed-Emberleys-Drawing-Book-World/dp/03...)
- Minor49er 4y agoSame here. I loved Ed Emberly's books as a kid. I'm pretty sure I also had the Big Purple Drawing Book, among others, since I remember how he drew robots which I thought was really cool
- Avshalom 4y agoI have the Little Book Of Drawing Trains on my bookshelf right next to all my other textbooks.
- sincarne 4y agoI bought this for my daughter. She and I have both really enjoyed going through it. I think it’s immensely helpful for kids with perfectionist tendencies to start off with these easy-win drawing books.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y agoLooking at the examples, the step between the last and the second to last of a series is much larger than the other steps. For example the butterfly.
- tptacek 4y agoThe second-to-last butterfly is the complete, instantly-recognizable shape of the butterfly; the rest is just coloring and shading. Getting the shape right is probably harder! The butterfly also probably makes a point about the importance of getting the basic shape right before you get tangled up in the fine details --- you can be "wrong" about the butterfly pattern and still produce a butterfly, but it's much less ok to be wrong about the shape?
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- Tao3300 4y agoThe goal isn't really to make that exact butterfly. Once you have the basic wireframe, make your own butterfly with your own style in the details, or with color and shape of a specific species.
- sydthrowaway 4y agoHow does this compare to Loomis books?
- egypturnash 4y agoMore designey, less emphasis on installing a 3d modeling package in your brain. Much less textual explanation.
- elihu 4y agoSee also: "Please, enough with the dead butterflies": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27948008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27948008
- YeBanKo 4y agoIt actually shows how to draw a more or less natural butterfly position.
- layer8 4y agoDead butterflies look really nice though.
- fijiaarone 4y agoAnd live butterflies that are flying look nice too. That screed about “dead” butterflies is like insisting Leonardo da Vinci had never seen a real live human being because he drew one with its arms outstretched which is clearly not a resting pose for a man.
- dotancohen 4y agoImagine a world in which the vast majority of media showed humans always in the da Vinci pose. No matter if they are eating, talking, walking, sleeping, they are always in that arms outstreched pose. That what the screed about dead butterflies is complaining about.
- dukeofdoom 4y agoFlickr has old books with drawings in them. Really fascinating to see some of the visuals from a few hundred years ago.
- JKCalhoun 4y agoSort of like, sort of hate these books. They imply that there is a "trick" to drawing each animal — if you can just remember the initial shape, small strokes made for each animal. Drawing by memorization. On the other hand they sort of show you that the final image is built up, not drawn as a single, free-hand, outline. To be sure though it was a book like this that got me started drawing as a kid.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- barefeg 4y agoWhat is the progression that should be followed? I first I thought it was step by step instructions, but some progressions have deleted lines, or lines with modified shape. (Sorry for my ignorance in this subject)
- kqr 4y agoIt is common to draw helper lines with pencil, then the real shape on top with ink, followed by erasing the helper lines.
- silicon2401 4y agoHow do you do that without smudging the ink? On the rare occasion I doodle with some effort, I've found it impossible to erase the pencil lines without just making things even messier in the process lol
- egypturnash 4y agoDraw with a light touch on the pencil. Addressing the paper with the side of the pencil point instead of the tip helps a lot - this stops you from making a trench in the paper with graphite at its bottom, and forces you to use a broad line without much detail for blocking things in. (This also helps to train you to draw with your wrist static, which is a good way to keep repetitive stress injuries from happening. It was one of the first things the old pros taught me when I started working in animation, because they had all seen careers cut short by injuries from bad form.) As you add detail, shift to the tip of the pencil. Your hand will probably smudge the first lines into nothingness as you do this, it’s not a big worry. Grab a white plastic eraser or a kneaded eraser, and go at it. If you decide to go from pencil to ink, you can put some thought into your choice of ink to select one that dries quickly. You can also wait a bit for the ink to dry before erasing. White paint/ink does exist but it’s real hard to find some that works well in a portable pen format.
- silicon2401 4y agothanks a lot for your comment, even for the wrist tip alone. by nature I always defaulted to almost entirely using my wrist to draw lol
- silicon2401 4y agoCurious what advice I can get from HN on this. I've loved drawing since I was a little kid, but gave up in middle school because I just didn't know how to get better and didn't have access to improving (no money, nobody I could ask, etc). As an adult, how can I learn to draw? Ideally in a self-guided way
- ottobonn 4y ago"Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" by Edwards is a good introduction to drawing. I think in particular it is a good explanation of how much of drawing is learning to look at the world, and exercises to improve your skills of looking at things. One of the big takeaways from this book and other drawing courses I have taken is that once you learn to draw what you see, nothing is particularly easier or harder to draw; in every case you are drawing what you see. The feeling of difficulty in drawing a particular object often comes from trying to parse it into visual symbols, then draw those symbols, rather than seeing the object as a pattern of light and reproducing that on the paper.
- Tao3300 4y agoThat book temporarily broke my brain. I had trouble turning off that mode of seeing. Possible that my undiagnosed-at-the-time ADHD was finding the shapes of people more interesting than what they were saying. 10/10 would recommend ;)
- praptak 4y agoI also recommend the Betty Edwards book. It took me from stickmen to realistic drawings of chairs and hands :-) It also makes you appreciate paintings. Curiously the book from the TFA is doing almost the exact opposite of what DotRSotB recommends. The former is about parsing things into shapes while the latter is like tracing from an imaginary glass in front of you.
- eslaught 4y agoThis does sort of beg the question though: how do you draw things that don't exist? Everything (or, almost everything) I personally care about drawing is sci-fi or fantasy, and sort of the whole point of it is that it doesn't actually exist, and therefore I can "see" in a physical sense only my own drawings or those by other artists.
- lxe 4y agoOh here we go again. Waiting for all the "this is a wrong way to draw" critiques. Keep in mind that this is a children's book about drawing animals using lines, not an anatomical study for an academic artist.
- marcodiego 4y agoPublic domain?
- hamiltonians 4y agolooks like physics disgrams too
- Karawebnetwork 4y agoSo this is where my grandmother learned all this! It seems that years later, she still remembered how to make them. I spent a lot of time sitting next to her doodling while she did chores around the house. I was always amazed at how she started with triangles, squares and circles and then came up with amazing animals. They are so identical to her drawings (which we no longer have) that they bring tears to my eyes.
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- rdubs333 4y agoMark Kistler taught me how to draw 30 years ago on TV and he's still at it! https://www.draw3d.com/ https://www.draw3d.com/
- Avshalom 4y agoOh shit! I had forgotten the name entirely, but yeah I owe so much of my doodling to Imagination Station
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoHTTPS version: https://dessinoprimaire.blogspot.com/2012/02/les-animaux-tels-quils-sont.html https://dessinoprimaire.blogspot.com/2012/02/les-animaux-tel...
- amitgupta6 4y agoIs it me only who is bothered by the fact that this "http" link from popular service blogspot, doesn't get auto-redirected to "https"?
- anitil 4y agoDoes anyone know where I could buy this? It would make a family member who speaks French and loves to draw very happy
- magerleagues 4y agoFlickr album here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/taffeta/albums/72157618009562834/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/taffeta/albums/721576180095628...