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One thing that I would really love in tutorials like this is why certain decisions are made. I am a terrible artist, but I would like to learn how to draw some

One thing that I would really love in tutorials like this is why certain decisions are made. I am a terrible artist, but I would like to learn how to draw something that doesn't make people want to puke, if for no other reason than to give a real artists a starting point, but this tutorial doesn't help. Even at the first step, it says 'Lets start building the body with 3 rectangles'. But if I started with a blank page, and though 'How am I going to draw a helicopter', my first thought wouldn't be draw three random rectangles and start from there. Learning tools is important, but I want a tutorial that shows me how to break complex objects into manageable parts.

dsirijus 14y ago
You cannot expect to have prescription on how to do art. It's about stepping back after you're done and saying "this sucks" and improving on that. Sure, there's methods and best practices, but they're not nearly as relevant as quality of your judgement on your work, developed through practice and exposition and, in part, inherited.
lukam 14y ago
This. So much.
cooperadymas 14y ago
http://www.drawright.com/ http://www.drawright.com/ I haven't read the book yet, but it's on my Amazon wishlist because it's supposed to teach you exactly this. The descriptions on the site and on Amazon don't give much insight, but you can find the introduction and first chapter on Google Books to get an idea of what it's all about. Pretty sure this was first introduced to me on HN, so others can probably expound further.
- rymith 14y ago
  Or just look for any 'How to draw' book ince the whole right brain/left brain is complete myth.
  - XBigTK13X 14y ago
    Do you have a documented case for the claim that the right/left brain ideas are myth? I ask as someone in neither camp, who found Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain to be a great introductory text on drawing.
    - nollidge 14y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateralization_of_brain_function http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateralization_of_brain_functio... tl;dr: it's way more nuanced than "left brain math, right brain art".
  - Lambdanaut 14y ago
    It doesn't matter that the right brain/left brain thing is a complete myth. This book really works! Don't focus on the book's title so much, it's really all about looking at the world in a different way, and the "right brain" part is just the catch to make you pick the book up. I realize how wishy-washy this sounds, but artists really do look at things very differently than scribblers do when they're drawing, and it makes ALL the difference. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain teaches the fundamental concepts of drawing that applies to anything you'll ever draw, and it really just can't be ignored if you want to be able to draw anything without taking classes. Basically, there's a reason this book keeps coming up in discussions about learning to draw, and it doesn't have anything to do with neural theories.
- aleyan 14y ago
  I own this book, it is not the right book for learning how to illustrate. Don't get me wrong, "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" is a decent book. If you follow it, in a few short drawing sessions it will lift you from a person who can't draw at all to a person who is a novice at life drawing with some impressive looking portraiture. You will be amazed at your own progress at life drawing. You however will not progress much further than a novice. For drawing game assets and other types of illustrations, you need to learn to draw from your imagination. This is a very different skill from drawing from life and a skill that "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" will not teach you. I can't make recommendations of books myself, but I can suggest looking at this [1] thread over at cgsociety. [1] http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=844409 http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=844409
  - pcwalton 14y ago
    Well, from what I've seen the ability to draw from imagination mostly results from drawing from life a lot and remembering how things look.
  - loso 14y ago
    I just went through this process myself. Drawing from your imagination takes taking the rules that a book like "Drawing from the right side of your brain" shows you and basically practicing. For example, once you learn how to draw the basic human face you can take the memory you have of drawing that face and tweak it a bit. You tweak it until you have something more monstrous, like an ogre for example. That is why most of the stuff that we see drawn from a persons imagination still has very recognizable human components to it. It takes a lot of practice but books these and other lessons you will find are meant to be a building block so that you can draw from your imagination.
- SpriteAttack 14y ago
  The problem the way I see it is frustration and lack of satisfying results. Most programmers I have come across in my 20+ years of making game art have tried art (even just place holder art) and have scribbled but were not happy with the results and couldn't see any progress in their art. Drawing is a lot harder than 'building' objects from simpler shapes in vector design program. It's more like playing with lego brick rather than try and convert a 3D object you see into a 2D drawing on a piece of paper. I find the 'just take pencil and paper and draw' advice not very helpful for people struggling to draw a stick figure. Usually the road to successful and rewarding results is very steep and long when you learn to draw. Placing a few shapes on the screen and playing around with those, can create results a lot faster and that's the goal of my blog. I don't have any intentions of teaching people to draw like the old masters or be the next comic book superstar. It's just about quick and easy ways to create visually pleasing art assets by people who normally shy away from anything artistic.
rymith 14y ago
You just answered your own question. Look at the thing you want to draw, and break it down into main mass components. Base this on the connection points, or major angle changes where the components connect. So for a car, you could start with 5 random rectangles: The hood, windshield, the body, rear window and the trunk. All the same size to start because you only want to break it down where there is an angle change. If you want to learn this, then take a look at human figure studies. They will show you the exact same concept, but with ovals. Draw 30,000, and I guarantee that your 30,001st won't make somebody puke.
- jarek-foksa 14y ago
  When sketching objects you should be thinking in terms of cubes, cylinders or ellipsoids, not rectangles or ovals. Thinking in 3D makes it much easier to get perspective and shading right.
  - rymith 14y ago
    So your advice to a guy who is brand new to art, and self admittedly can't draw, is to jump right in to volume and focal points because it makes the easy task of shading even more easy?
    - jarek-foksa 14y ago
      Being able to draw basic geometric figures in 3D space is the fundamental skill. Drawing a cylinder instead of a circle is not that much harder, but it sets you in a totally different mindset.
    - jamesbritt 14y ago
      Pretty much. Practice drawing cans. Practice drawing cubes. Don't worry about focal points or perspective right away. Draw some beach balls or other spheres. Then draw other stuff, and think of them as if they were a collection of cubes and spheres and tubes and such.
  - SpriteAttack 14y ago
philbarr 14y ago
I highly recommend reading this blog from the very beginning. He starts out REALLY simple and gently leads up to the more advanced stuff like helicopters. It's given me enough confidence to do some of my own stuff and I'm getting better. Also, once you've followed the blog, try copying from other people like Angry Birds to see if you can recreate it. It's surprising how many game assets start to look like collections of simple objects whereas before you thought "how did they do that? They must be just brilliant."
- SpriteAttack 14y ago
  Thanks, mate... The key is trying it with easy steps and not dive into the complex helicopter.
tripzilch 14y ago
Do a few of those tuts before you start saying that :) This isn't the same as learning how to code, that you have to understand every step along the way. You need practice, and you can actually just copy what he's showing, and by doing you will learn how these drawings come apart as objects. And as a quick answer to your question: in most of the tuts you always start out with either a rectangle or an ellipse. In fact, what he always does is he picks the object that looks most like the shape he wants to draw. It's either a primitive like the rect or ellipse, but other times he duplicates already existing objects. But it's just shape matching, afaik there's one where he clones the nose to shape into an arm :) The point is you can add and delete nodes using the pen tool, so you can tweak the shape entirely, but it helps if you got somethat to start with that already has the right basic shape.

dsirijus 14y ago

You cannot expect to have prescription on how to do art. It's about stepping back after you're done and saying "this sucks" and improving on that. Sure, there's methods and best practices, but they're not nearly as relevant as quality of your judgement on your work, developed through practice and exposition and, in part, inherited.

lukam 14y ago

This. So much.

cooperadymas 14y ago

http://www.drawright.com/ http://www.drawright.com/ I haven't read the book yet, but it's on my Amazon wishlist because it's supposed to teach you exactly this. The descriptions on the site and on Amazon don't give much insight, but you can find the introduction and first chapter on Google Books to get an idea of what it's all about. Pretty sure this was first introduced to me on HN, so others can probably expound further.

rymith 14y ago
Or just look for any 'How to draw' book ince the whole right brain/left brain is complete myth.
- XBigTK13X 14y ago
  Do you have a documented case for the claim that the right/left brain ideas are myth? I ask as someone in neither camp, who found Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain to be a great introductory text on drawing.
  - nollidge 14y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateralization_of_brain_function http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateralization_of_brain_functio... tl;dr: it's way more nuanced than "left brain math, right brain art".
- Lambdanaut 14y ago
  It doesn't matter that the right brain/left brain thing is a complete myth. This book really works! Don't focus on the book's title so much, it's really all about looking at the world in a different way, and the "right brain" part is just the catch to make you pick the book up. I realize how wishy-washy this sounds, but artists really do look at things very differently than scribblers do when they're drawing, and it makes ALL the difference. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain teaches the fundamental concepts of drawing that applies to anything you'll ever draw, and it really just can't be ignored if you want to be able to draw anything without taking classes. Basically, there's a reason this book keeps coming up in discussions about learning to draw, and it doesn't have anything to do with neural theories.
aleyan 14y ago
I own this book, it is not the right book for learning how to illustrate. Don't get me wrong, "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" is a decent book. If you follow it, in a few short drawing sessions it will lift you from a person who can't draw at all to a person who is a novice at life drawing with some impressive looking portraiture. You will be amazed at your own progress at life drawing. You however will not progress much further than a novice. For drawing game assets and other types of illustrations, you need to learn to draw from your imagination. This is a very different skill from drawing from life and a skill that "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" will not teach you. I can't make recommendations of books myself, but I can suggest looking at this [1] thread over at cgsociety. [1] http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=844409 http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=844409
- pcwalton 14y ago
  Well, from what I've seen the ability to draw from imagination mostly results from drawing from life a lot and remembering how things look.
- loso 14y ago
  I just went through this process myself. Drawing from your imagination takes taking the rules that a book like "Drawing from the right side of your brain" shows you and basically practicing. For example, once you learn how to draw the basic human face you can take the memory you have of drawing that face and tweak it a bit. You tweak it until you have something more monstrous, like an ogre for example. That is why most of the stuff that we see drawn from a persons imagination still has very recognizable human components to it. It takes a lot of practice but books these and other lessons you will find are meant to be a building block so that you can draw from your imagination.
SpriteAttack 14y ago
The problem the way I see it is frustration and lack of satisfying results. Most programmers I have come across in my 20+ years of making game art have tried art (even just place holder art) and have scribbled but were not happy with the results and couldn't see any progress in their art. Drawing is a lot harder than 'building' objects from simpler shapes in vector design program. It's more like playing with lego brick rather than try and convert a 3D object you see into a 2D drawing on a piece of paper. I find the 'just take pencil and paper and draw' advice not very helpful for people struggling to draw a stick figure. Usually the road to successful and rewarding results is very steep and long when you learn to draw. Placing a few shapes on the screen and playing around with those, can create results a lot faster and that's the goal of my blog. I don't have any intentions of teaching people to draw like the old masters or be the next comic book superstar. It's just about quick and easy ways to create visually pleasing art assets by people who normally shy away from anything artistic.

rymith 14y ago

You just answered your own question. Look at the thing you want to draw, and break it down into main mass components. Base this on the connection points, or major angle changes where the components connect. So for a car, you could start with 5 random rectangles: The hood, windshield, the body, rear window and the trunk. All the same size to start because you only want to break it down where there is an angle change. If you want to learn this, then take a look at human figure studies. They will show you the exact same concept, but with ovals. Draw 30,000, and I guarantee that your 30,001st won't make somebody puke.

jarek-foksa 14y ago
When sketching objects you should be thinking in terms of cubes, cylinders or ellipsoids, not rectangles or ovals. Thinking in 3D makes it much easier to get perspective and shading right.
- rymith 14y ago
  So your advice to a guy who is brand new to art, and self admittedly can't draw, is to jump right in to volume and focal points because it makes the easy task of shading even more easy?
  - jarek-foksa 14y ago
    Being able to draw basic geometric figures in 3D space is the fundamental skill. Drawing a cylinder instead of a circle is not that much harder, but it sets you in a totally different mindset.
  - jamesbritt 14y ago
    Pretty much. Practice drawing cans. Practice drawing cubes. Don't worry about focal points or perspective right away. Draw some beach balls or other spheres. Then draw other stuff, and think of them as if they were a collection of cubes and spheres and tubes and such.
- SpriteAttack 14y ago

philbarr 14y ago

I highly recommend reading this blog from the very beginning. He starts out REALLY simple and gently leads up to the more advanced stuff like helicopters. It's given me enough confidence to do some of my own stuff and I'm getting better. Also, once you've followed the blog, try copying from other people like Angry Birds to see if you can recreate it. It's surprising how many game assets start to look like collections of simple objects whereas before you thought "how did they do that? They must be just brilliant."

SpriteAttack 14y ago
Thanks, mate... The key is trying it with easy steps and not dive into the complex helicopter.

tripzilch 14y ago

Do a few of those tuts before you start saying that :) This isn't the same as learning how to code, that you have to understand every step along the way. You need practice, and you can actually just copy what he's showing, and by doing you will learn how these drawings come apart as objects. And as a quick answer to your question: in most of the tuts you always start out with either a rectangle or an ellipse. In fact, what he always does is he picks the object that looks most like the shape he wants to draw. It's either a primitive like the rect or ellipse, but other times he duplicates already existing objects. But it's just shape matching, afaik there's one where he clones the nose to shape into an arm :) The point is you can add and delete nodes using the pen tool, so you can tweak the shape entirely, but it helps if you got somethat to start with that already has the right basic shape.