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The zebra is very Rest Of The Fucking Zeba. But then again the zebra is also near the end of the book, and essentially a stripey horse. You can sort of infer “w

The zebra is very Rest Of The Fucking Zeba. But then again the zebra is also near the end of the book, and essentially a stripey horse. You can sort of infer “well I already showed you how to draw a horse, right? Draw a horse and out stripes on it”. Really the instructional step missing in the last images of a lot of this is “go look at the actual thing and take details from there”.

Tao3300 4y ago
Exactly. The unwritten guidance in the last step for these is "look, you don't really want to just draw this exact zebra every single time, fill in the details of the zebra you want to draw in the style that you want to draw it". It's kind of a problem with the step-by-step style of instruction in general. A lot of students take away that this is exactly the one and only way how to draw the thing, and you have no talent unless you can do it just like this. Draw the rest of this owl and that is how you draw an owl. When I was teaching my daughter, I did a lesson where I ran it the other way around. We started by just drawing basic shapes and cutting them out of card stock. Then I posed the challenge of "How can we make the parts of a cat from these? How can we make the cat from those parts?" as a way to build a visual language and individual style first. Were they photo-realistic cats? No, but they were fine, unique, expressive things. The last question was "what if we only had squares? could we still make a cat? why would someone ask us to design such a cat?" and she immediately said "oh, if we were making it for Minecraft!" We still practice contour drawing and other more classical exercises, but I try to leave as much room as I can for experimentation, self-style, iteration, and discovery. Step-by-step approaches tend to forget to mention that.
- egypturnash 4y ago
  Yeah, this is an easy nuance to miss in solely image-based step-by-step books. Kid me never figured it out! Adult me obviously picked it up somewhere along the way. :) Leaving room for style is a complicated thing, if you say “it’s my style!” too often in defense to people trying to critique your work (especially artists who have been at it longer than you) then maybe what you actually have is a big gap in what you are able to draw that you are trying to cover with “style”. There’s a a point in every young artist’s development where they get obsessed with “finding their style” and it’s usually at a time where they still have a ton of gaps in their anatomy, rendering, and general knowledge that they’re covering up with “style” borrowed from someone else without really understands what’s going on with it and why. But actively spending a lot of time playing with different ways to stylize reality is part of how you find the set of stylisations that work well for you, so you’re probably putting your daughter on a good path here!

Tao3300 4y ago

Exactly. The unwritten guidance in the last step for these is "look, you don't really want to just draw this exact zebra every single time, fill in the details of the zebra you want to draw in the style that you want to draw it". It's kind of a problem with the step-by-step style of instruction in general. A lot of students take away that this is exactly the one and only way how to draw the thing, and you have no talent unless you can do it just like this. Draw the rest of this owl and that is how you draw an owl. When I was teaching my daughter, I did a lesson where I ran it the other way around. We started by just drawing basic shapes and cutting them out of card stock. Then I posed the challenge of "How can we make the parts of a cat from these? How can we make the cat from those parts?" as a way to build a visual language and individual style first. Were they photo-realistic cats? No, but they were fine, unique, expressive things. The last question was "what if we only had squares? could we still make a cat? why would someone ask us to design such a cat?" and she immediately said "oh, if we were making it for Minecraft!" We still practice contour drawing and other more classical exercises, but I try to leave as much room as I can for experimentation, self-style, iteration, and discovery. Step-by-step approaches tend to forget to mention that.

egypturnash 4y ago
Yeah, this is an easy nuance to miss in solely image-based step-by-step books. Kid me never figured it out! Adult me obviously picked it up somewhere along the way. :) Leaving room for style is a complicated thing, if you say “it’s my style!” too often in defense to people trying to critique your work (especially artists who have been at it longer than you) then maybe what you actually have is a big gap in what you are able to draw that you are trying to cover with “style”. There’s a a point in every young artist’s development where they get obsessed with “finding their style” and it’s usually at a time where they still have a ton of gaps in their anatomy, rendering, and general knowledge that they’re covering up with “style” borrowed from someone else without really understands what’s going on with it and why. But actively spending a lot of time playing with different ways to stylize reality is part of how you find the set of stylisations that work well for you, so you’re probably putting your daughter on a good path here!