Review of Week #0
Most of the previous week (the first week of January) has been spent investing the field and coming up with a list of resources.
Based on the recommendations I’ve read on the web and what caught my eye at the library, I’ve selected the following books as initial guides through the art of sketching:
- Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain - Betty Edwards (ISBN 978-1-585-42919-6) - seems a common recurrence in all lists;
- Drawing for the Absolute and Utter Beginner - Claire Watson Garcia (ISBN 0-8230-1395-2);
- Barron’s The Basics of Drawing (ISBN 0-7641-5862-7).
For the theoretical side of things, for now:
- An Introduction to Art - Charles Harrison (ISBN 978-0-300-10915-3);
- Art & fear : observations on the perils (and rewards) of artmaking - David Bayles.
The web is, of course, an inexhaustible resource and my first instinct has been to see what sub-reddits deal with this subject. There are of course, plenty.
- /r/LearnArt, Art, Art Theory, Drawing, Daily Draw, Sketch Daily, Doodles, ArtFundamentals - related to drawabox.com, Aesthetics, and UnusualArt to name just the ones that I have immediately subscribed to;
- Draw A Box - drawabox.com - starts with super-basic excercises for trully utter begginers: lines, ellipses, boxes;
- Ctrl+Paint seems to have a good library of tutorials on digital and physical drawing;
- Finally, I saw a few courses on Udemy, so perhaps I’ll add them to enrich the experience.
Going forward, I will be using the lessons from Draw A Box (DAB) as main practice tool, Drawing for the Absolute and Utter Beginner (DAUB) for the slightly more advanced drawing, Basics of Drawing (BoD) for their views on object decomposition into basic shapes, and Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain further referred to as Right-Side for a comprehensive way to think about drawing.
Plan for Week #1
This post is already part of the plan, in that it reviews the previous week and prepares the plans for the next one.
- Monday: 30 minutes review and 30 minutes spent on planning the week (done!)
- Tuesday through Friday - exercises and homework from DAB:
- 1 (preferrably 2) pages of superimposing lines;
- 1 page of ghosting lines;
- 1 (2) pages of planes;
- 1 (2) pages pf tables of ellipses;
- 1 (2) pages of ellipses in planes;
- 1 page of funnels
- 1 (2) pages of plotted 2-point perspective (w ruler)
- 1 (2) pages of rough, freehand perspective
- 1 page of rotated box
- 1 (2) pages of organic perspective
- Saturday: 2 chapters of DAUB or BoD
- Sunday: 2 chapters of Right-Side. Draw the 3 exercises to mark the start point.
That’s it!