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Postby SekoETC » Sun Aug 03, 2008 11:02 am

Smellfungus wrote:How did you all become so great at drawing? I'd love to have half the talent you guys have. :D


Years of practice, that's what it takes. I'd say there are two types of drawing people nowadays. One type is the one that spends hours tracing Disney and anime characters through thin paper, then they learn to draw them by having a model next to them and finally from memory or imagination. The other type is people who draw what they've seen (and felt, since primitive and children's drawing is originally based on the sense of touch). They put the lines first where they can feel them, and eventually they realize that lines are mostly unnecessary and start working with shadings to create an illusion of 3D.

I haven't had much inspiration to draw lately, but I did draw one for my character. He has it on a note and I'm planning to drop a copy somewhere. I also drew a lion in Seko's diary to replace old ascii art, even though the ascii art was rather cool.

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   Ruwwww!                           |                  _/
                  |        |   /     |            /     / .
   (Tis is muy lionne)     |  |     |         |  |     /  .
         ?          |      |  |    |            /    /    .
                    |     | /    |        |  /     -     .
                     |    | |   |           |     /      .
                     |   | |  |      |    /     /       .
         ((#           # # # #########   |   ## ##  --------/
       # #   #     # #                ##   ##     ##    .
      #         # #         IIIIIII       ### )))    #   .
 -   ((   (((  ###     ----------------      ## )))   # -----/
   - #   ((  ###                               ##    #    .
     ((    ###          #####---------######   #####     .
      #   ##    IIIi                            #        .
  -----((###        ¤¤¤¤¤¤              ¤¤¤¤¤¤¤  ## ----------
         ##          ==###=           _/=#####     ##    .
--------  #           #####  7///###_ /   #####       -##----------
  -----      #   IIIIIIIIii    (0HHHH)     //   IIIIi #-------------
    ///7  #                     `HHH/        ///      # -##--------
  --------  ##                    |                   ##--##---------
   --------- ##  _______//  /VVVVVVVVVVVV  -------   ##  ---------
     //// ///  --        /#################       -###  # \
             -### _/    / ################## -   ##3  -- ## +
     // ////     ##    /AA####################- ###     # +
        //      /  ## / //AA##############   ###    ## 
      //     ///     #####    AAAAAAAA   | ###   -     
    //    ////         ######          ###|      - #3
         /   //// //##///### ##########    |     .
                    //// //|||######|| ##      .
                          /// //// //||| ++        .
Last edited by SekoETC on Sun Aug 03, 2008 4:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Postby Piscator » Sun Aug 03, 2008 4:02 pm

So you are saying that there are people who try to copy art on the one side and people who try to copy nature on the other side? I'm definitely one of the first type and I would say most people start the same way. When I learned to draw a house in kindergarten (the type with a door, three windows and smoke from the chimney) that had very little to do with reality, but that was just the way a house was drawn. I can't imagine any child sitting in front of a house drawing what it sees. But that's perhaps just me. I never really developed beyond drawing dinosaurs from out of a book.

Anyway, the lion looks cool. Even though it could be a teddy bear too. :wink:
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Postby SekoETC » Sun Aug 03, 2008 4:43 pm

I was interested in skeletons as a child and was tracing this one picture through thin paper several times, then I learned to draw skeletons by free hand. But mostly I've been drawing impressions and memories. I also remember a discussion of which geometrical shape should be used to represent a nose. That was probably when I was 6. People were using a J or a triangle or two holes. I've read that children draw the way they do because their impression of the world is based on the sense of touch. They feel that the nose is shaped like a triangle and has two holes in it, so that's what they draw. They feel that hair is made of string-like units so they draw each hair separately. Drawing based on vision requires interpreting areas of uniform color or darkness as a block instead of drawing each hair or each brick in a wall separately, making generalizations. But if you're replicating someone else's drawing, someone else has already separated the real life or imaginary object into outlined segments, so there is less "data" to keep track of. Also in drawing from a photo, you have the advantage of having a 2D model that doesn't change (much) if you look at it from different angles. When looking at a real life model, a living target, they will have shifted every time you take a new glance at them, even if they were trying to stay still, and if you follow the model exactly for each section you're drawing, the result is going to be out of proportion because the model was moving. But this isn't really an art theory topic so I should stop talking off-topic.

Edit: Actually, could someone split these last three posts? It might be nice to have a general art discussion topic.
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Postby Joshuamonkey » Sun Aug 03, 2008 9:47 pm

Seko, I like your descriptions. =p I find the descriptions more important than the pictures.
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Postby the_antisocial_hermit » Mon Aug 04, 2008 3:19 am

Split the topic as requested by Seko. :)
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Postby Piscator » Mon Aug 04, 2008 4:49 pm

I'm not sure if I can follow the sense of touch argumentation. After all a nose doesn't just feel like a triangel, but looks like one also, regardless from where you look at it. At least to the same extent as it feels like one.

I assume the problem may rather be that a child knows what hair looks like, but doesn't realize that the whole doesn't look like the sum of its parts (especially if the parts are too small to be drawn properly with crayon). It's also quite difficult to get proportions and perspective right. A nose, a mouth and two eyes don't necessarily make a face.

On the other hand, two dots and two lines can look like one. But that's probably because the human brain is designed to see faces everywhere.
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Postby SekoETC » Mon Aug 04, 2008 5:57 pm

Image

The idea is originally from a psychology book. If vision was the first sense consulted, a primitive drawing of a face would look more like the one on the right.
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Postby formerly known as hf » Mon Aug 04, 2008 6:00 pm

And then, of course, you have non-representational, abstract art...
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Postby SekoETC » Mon Aug 04, 2008 6:32 pm

Yeah, that's a whole new subject. I'd suppose abstract art comes straight from the imagination since it wouldn't make much sense to copy something that doesn't represent anything. Can you do abstract art wrong? You could draw something that looked chaotic but maybe expressing chaos was intended. Or imbalance. Although something that follows rules of composition or color would require more skill and knowledge to make than something that's completely unplanned.
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Postby HoH » Mon Aug 04, 2008 6:45 pm

My art skills stop when the game of hangman is over.
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Postby formerly known as hf » Mon Aug 04, 2008 7:21 pm

SekoETC wrote:Yeah, that's a whole new subject. I'd suppose abstract art comes straight from the imagination since it wouldn't make much sense to copy something that doesn't represent anything. Can you do abstract art wrong? You could draw something that looked chaotic but maybe expressing chaos was intended. Or imbalance. Although something that follows rules of composition or color would require more skill and knowledge to make than something that's completely unplanned.
Can any art be 'wrong' - but let's hope this doesn't descend into an 'waht is art' discussion, as that's a nonsense question.

Anyway, as for art coming straight from imagination, I'm personally not so sure. I've never agreed with the Descartes view, that seperates human consciousness from the world it is in. Whatever we think always has links to the world(s) we live in, although we can't always readily see them.

Hence, whilst abstract art is often non-representational - in the traditionalist sense that it doesn't attempt to capture, represent or picture 'reality' (as limitedly defined by, basically, what we can see), I've never believed it possible to somehow have escaped the world into entirely abstracted imagination.

Which is kind of what I like about it, that constant tension between a desire to express something not necessarily grounded in the world - as we know it - yet there is the ultimate futility of that attempt.
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Postby SekoETC » Tue Aug 05, 2008 11:12 am

I found the book that contains the original drawing I was trying to remember, it's available on Project Gutenberg. It also has a lot of other interesting stuff. The drawing is near the beginning on "page" (or in section) 45.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14264/14 ... 4264-h.htm
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Postby Piscator » Wed Aug 06, 2008 2:36 pm

Thanks for the drawing, Seko, but I understood what you meant. I'm just not sure if I agree. If we assume that art is just a reflection of what we sense, we completely ignore that there is a brain involved, too. What we draw is not the real thing that we see or feel, but our mental image of the thing. And that's a composition of all our impressions, regardles if we gained them by touch, by vision or by reading.

The reason why children draw like they do is that they don't have an image of a face, but only of it's parts. They know there has to be hair, so they draw hair. They know there has to be a nose with holes in it somewhere in the middle of face, so they draw it. But as I tried to point out, drawing all the parts doesn't make the whole thing. Especially if less obvious "parts" (like lighting, proportions and so on) are left out, because the painter isn't aware of them.

As for abstract art, well, I always suspected that the real art of an abstract painter (the kind that pours a bucket of paint on the canvas and that's it) is making gullible people believe that what he does IS art.

There is a nice German saying (unfortunately completely untranslatable) that states that "art" derives from "ability" and not from "intention". Many modern artist seem to substitute the ability to actually deliver a message by art by just plainly telling what they want to express. ("With these two black lines, symbolizing the economic disparities in modern society, I want to make an statement against the poverty in the world")

But let's stop ranting now. :wink:
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Postby Songthrush » Thu Aug 14, 2008 5:08 am

In response to the comments of Piscator and others who feel the same way about abstract or expressionist art, let me point out to you some of the base assumptions in your line of thinking.

In the background you have presumed that an artist is essentially a worker, or a "black box" machine tasked with the doing of special feats, by the means of which valuable artifacts are produced.

You disapprove of artists who:
a) do no special feats
b) produce no valuable artifacts.

This mode of reasoning reveals a consumerist ethic: "art for the people" and "we want such and such art, and nothing besides".

You have forgotten that not all artists are in fact the servants of this need to consume certain kinds of things. Some of them are rebels and revolutionaries who, on the contrary, seek to destroy the entire set of assumptions you consider natural and immutable. Whether they succeed or not, that is another question - but we must at last realize that artists (as a species of human being) have other functions, far beyond producing and serving.

What are these functions?

They are their spiritual function, the making-visible of natural wisdom.
They are their revolutionary or destructive functions, which we mentioned.
They are the records of inner struggles of human beings, and their brave decisions to go against the grain of omnipresent, blinding societal pressures.

There are others, and we are not obliged to know about them all, as long as we have understood the simple idea, that an artist in society isn't always a productive genius; sometimes he is more akin to a polyp born out of the excesses of his socion and formed in every way by it, symptomatizing by the means of his work the sickness that affects us all on a larger, normally invisible level.

Such curiosities as Pollock, Duchamp, Malevich remain beyond the understanding of the consumer even as the artists are demeaned and denigrated by him; but then so do also the works of Ghirlandaio, Michelangelo, or Da Vinci, which are equally misunderstood when the consumer foolishly praises and applauds, simply because he intepretes their works as expertly crafted pretty pictures.
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Postby formerly known as hf » Thu Aug 14, 2008 9:02 am

Remarks such as Piscator belie the continued desire for the premise of the Albertian window, which has been the dominant ideal behind art and photography for some time - that the artist can (and - moreover - should) be able to engage in an objective way with 'reality' and replicate it in a way which is unmediated by others senses than sight, and by the artist's subjectivity.

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