Sundries

I’ve been spending some of my recent hobby time getting back into drawing.  Since I’m very interested in Anime and Manga I’ve been doing some of that but I’ve come to realize something lately.  I’m not very good.  When I was younger I was a rather good artist for a 8 or 10 year old kid.  Below is a picture I did when I was in 4th grade of an AT-AT walker from Star Wars:

Click on any of the images to see a full sized version.

It’s not perfect but pretty good for a 4th grader I think.  No, it’s not traced.  It was drawn on a sheet of notebook paper with a good old No.2 pencil and a ruler.

Unfortunately I didn’t continue drawing much after I was 12 or 13 years old.  I did some during high school.  I used to stay up late listening to Dr. Demento and drawing, mostly Iron Maiden album covers:

I believe these were drawn during my senior year in high school.  I wasn’t really into “art”, my life revolved around playing guitar and trying to get getter.  I drew these because  friend of my at school was getting into drawing and I figured why draw some as well, I used to like it.  It didn’t last too long, I only drew for a few months before giving it up again.

As I got back into drawing recently I was surprised to see it wasn’t as easy for me as it used to be.  I didn’t “suck” but my drawings were lacking.  I think the main reason is when I was younger I never thought about the chance of not being able to draw.  As I got older I see that I’m more and more worried about the possibility of not being able to draw good again.  Here are some examples of recent “manga style” drawings:

After looking at drawings that I really like I’ve discovered the ones I like the best are from people who have a really good understanding of human anatomy, even if it’s a anime/manga style drawing.  I did some research and found a great series of DVDs by Glen Vilppu that’s basically a college course on drawing, mostly focused on the human figure.

I’ve just started so there’s not much progress to see but I’m enjoying it so far.  I’ve started out learning gesture drawing which teaches you to focus on the action and flow of lines of the subject:

Kimon Nicolaides – You should draw not what the thing looks like, not even what it is, but what it is doing… Gesture has no precise edges, no forms. The forms are in the act of changing. Gesture is movement in space.

The hardest part with gesture drawings are trying to avoid making a picture.  The end product is not a drawing for the benefit of someone else seeing but it’s a study tool to help the artist understand the form of the subject, it’s a learning tool.  This sounds simple but it’s hard to keep yourself from fiddling with the drawing trying to make corrections or improvments.

Since I’m drawing on large (18″ X 24″) sheets of newsprint paper the examples are too big to try scanning into the computer so I took some photos of my recent gesture drawings:

As you can see, there are problems with proportions and just forget about looking at hands and feet, most of the time I didn’t bother trying to do details there.  As messy as these are, they are actually more detailed than I should have drawn them.  I spent too much time concentrating on the countour (outline) of the figure and not enough on the actual gesture.

Since I don’t have access to a model, I’m using “The Figure in Motion” book.  This book is just fantastic, it has 176 pages of pictures of “artistic nude” models to study the human figure from.  It’s not a perfect substitute for being able to study from a human model but it’s very handy.

I’ve been interested in using the computer to draw with because of all the advantages it has such as being able to “undo” a step, copy, transform, rotate….  so on.  The trouble I’ve always had was using a tablet pen was just so damn frustrating.  I couldn’t understand how so many people are able to draw with such control on a computer yet my drawing was all over the place.

I know practice makes perfect but no matter how hard I tried I could hardly make a straight line.  I’ve researched pen settings and made adjustments and some things helped but very little.  A few years ago I bought a huge (and rather cheap) drawing tablet on Ebay.  It was from a company called UC-Logic and it had a 12″ X 9″ drawing surface:

In the image above, the blue around the edges is painters tape.  I’ve attached a sheet of paper to the very slick surface of the tablet to help give a better feel and texture to draw on.  This did help some but it still wasn’t very good.  If you have a tablet your not happy with, give this a try – it just may help out some.

A little over a week ago I got frustrated with trying to use this thing again and did some searching online to see what options I had.  I found out that Wacom, one of the biggest names in drawing tablets, has a new line of products out called Bamboo.

After reading some about it I got interested.  They weren’t that expensive and had some good reviews.  I then headed to YouTube and watched some video reviews and got very excited hearing how much people loved it.  I also loved hearing that it had a built in textured drawing surface!!!

Well, I had just got a year end bonus at work and these things weren’t expensive at all so I bought myself the one designed for artists, the Bamboo Fun, in a medium size.  It’s called “medium” but there is only a small and medium size.  Not sure if they plan on coming out with a large size later but the medium is just fine.

It’s not as large as my previous tablet with a drawing surface of 8.5″ X 5.3″ but it’s more than enough.  It comes in a few colors but I went with classic black to match my other computer equipment:

This is one beautifully designed piece of equipment.  First off, it’s thin.  Very thin…  It’s only .3″ thick.  The good thing is, even as thin as it is, it feels very sturdy and not fragile at all.  It comes with a nice USB 2.0 cable, it’s a little short for my tastes but it gets the job done.

On the tablet there is a large round touch sensitive dial, similar to an ipod I hear.  When I’m in photoshop I can run my finger clockwise/counter-clockwise to soom in/out of an image.  It also has 4 programable buttons at the top, 2 on each side of the large center piece.

The best part of this tablet is that it works incredibly well.  It’s just fantasitc and fills the void I had with trying to get other tablets to work correctly.  No, it doesn’t draw the images for you but it doesn’t get in the way of letting you draw what you want.

There is still a slight learning curve with getting used to drawing on the tablet but looking at the screen.  Right now I’m using it to clean up scans I had of my pencil drawings so I get accoustomed to the feel and controls of the pen.

I think I only paid $173 with shipping from buy.com to get mine so it’s very reasonable.  This tablet is such a huge improvement over the others I’ve tried, I can’t believe I waited this long to get a wacom.  The only thing that seems better for drawing on the computer is the Wacom Cintiq 21UX:

Yes, as you see in the image, it’s not just a drawing tablet but the surface of the tablet is the computer monitor so you get to draw right on top of the image your working on.  That’s very natural for artists of course.  From what I can see with this, there are 2 possible drawbacks, first is the price.  The 21″ Cintiq pictured above costs about $2,000 so it’s a bit more than the tablet I just bought.

The second drawback may not be as obvious and I’m not sure it’s a real issue or not.  Artists who have used a regular tablet for a while may be used to not having their hand and pen in front of what they are drawing.  With a regular tablet there is nothing blocking your view of the image.  It may take a little time to get used to having your hand and pen in front of what your drawing on.

The $2,000 price tag is the much bigger issue as I see it.  Sure, if your profession is working on digital images or digital art then it’s not too hard to justify the cost of such an incredible piece of equipment but for the hobbyist such as myself….  No way.  The $173 I spent for the Bamboo Fun was more what I’m willing to spend.

**James.