100 - Tips Email to Rich
I spend part of my month, working with Scrace Architects and they are based at TEN (a Council run organisation offering 'affordable' office and meeting space).
Another tenant at TEN is Rich Lloyd who runs Blue Flame Digital. Today a few of us went for a drink in the market square after work. I got chatting to Rich about 'Demo Partys' - a kind of underground, vintage-computer-game hackers network. Something I'd never heard of! Conversation led onto various other underground and subculture niche groups and interests, such as street photography and international online figure drawing.
Rich is interested in figure drawing, partly as a way to illustrate his ideas. So fired up after the conversation I sent him this email when I got home:
Hi Rich,
Fun chatting to you this evening about all the creative stuff...
Here's some tips on figure drawing:
Imagine you are just drawing cartoons. Cartoons are not as far from sophisticated drawings as you might think. Thinking of them like that makes it easier to just get started, make 'mistakes' and learn.
Julian Opie's work is very cartoon like - he seems to have experimented a lot with how simple you can make a drawing and still recognise it as a likeness.
https://www.julianopie.com
Block out: this is what we were talking about with the triangles and squares - building a figure with blocks before you go into detail.. But you can do it in a more gestural way. For example you could get some paint and swish for legs and arms, body and head and then put add detail on top:
Here I have approximated the figure in yellow pen and then 'corrected' as I drew on top with the black pen.
Copy a photo of a person upside down. This forces you to see the face and body as shapes and lines arranged in various angles in space.
Use a grid in front of a person or face and draw what is in each square. Again this stops you getting bogged down in making it look like the real person and gets you looking at sections of shapes and how far / close one 'part' is to another.
Stick figures - start with the stick and then flesh it out.
Here, I've 'practiced the rough shape of the figure on the bottom of the page. You can see that the rough sketch on the right is more accurate. The second time I drew it my brain learnt and understood what I wanted.
Don't erase mistakes, draw over them. That teaches your brain the 'right' position of a line in relation to the wrong one.
Most importantly, just start - make that first line and continue with the next line. Just roughly approximate. You will learn naturally through practice.
Look at different drawings and try to copy them - you'll be really surprised at what you find in them.
Have fun!
Frankie