Thursday, July 12, 2012

Joining conceptart.org, and more future plans


Conceptart.org is a forum for artists of many genres. Its users are older, and in general far more skilled than on sites like deviantart. A friend of mine recommended that I should sign up if I was serious about this whole drawing thing, so I did. I've got a sketchbook going, which is a lot like this blog, only without these kinds of posts.

So far I'm getting used to the many sections. I like Sketchbooks, Fine Arts, and Lounge. While browsing I stumbled across a guy who went through "The Natural Way To Draw". Basically it's a course on figure drawing, where you draw for up to three hours a day, five days a week, for about a year. That's a lot of hours. In fact, it's 375 hours. If you follow the thread you'll see that you'll be doing thousands of quick gesture drawings, drawing from memory, plenty of blind contour drawings, and plenty of other stuff. The intention is to be able to put life and energy into what you draw, which is obviously critical.

As you may have read, one of my main long-term goals is to draw people. While I've made a great amount of progress so far I know there are many fundamental skills that I need to spend a lot of time on. The question is what the best path is. TNWTD is a course where you spend insane amounts of time doing scribbles and things that seem pointless. It seems very much like a Karate Kid-approach. Once done it all makes sense, but the fact remains that 375 hours could be spent on many things. Thanks to conceptart.org I've got a bunch more books to check out, all of which are highly regarded, and have made successful artists on their own.

When learning music in a similarly serious fashion you're spending similar amounts of time on scales, arpeggios, chords, sight reading, ear training, etc. Practicing these things aren't necessarily fun either, and while you could spend the same amount of time playing by ear there's a huge difference afterwards. It's about getting it internalized - being able to just do without thinking.

For now I'll work my way through some more of the drawings done by the great masters, get some more hatching / cross hatching practice, draw more from life, and try to finish off the other books I got from the library. The day needs more than 24 hours.

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