Drawing on the Scientific Method

[elfs]

One of the blogs I've been reading reliably recently, ever since it emerged, is The Scientific Artist. Like many just-started blogs the lifespan of this could be as brief as a mayfly or it may last for months and years, but what the author has been saying for the first couple of entries has made sense to me, so I've been following along and trying to understand what he's saying.

Until today. Today's entry, his ninth, stopped me. The first paragraph reads:

Some thoughts about drawing exercises: in my opinion the best ones are those which you devise for yourself, or adapt from existing ones, or even follow verbatim, with no changes, IF you first see precisely the reason to do them. If you do them from understanding, that sort of exercise will have the most meaning to you, and hence the best results. However, if you do an exercise "by rote", as an unthinking follower, as if repeating a magic saying that will automatically generate a result, then... there probably will be little obvious result.

To me, this is the baffling massive wall that separates me from illustration. Because, as an absolute beginner, I have no idea where to begin. I don't know what exercises will help me improve-- I just know that the doodles I'm doing now aren't working. They aren't communicating to me anything about the scene, setting, or characters that I can barely recognize when I'm done.

Comments

[ai731.livejournal.com]

I second woggie's recommendation. "Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain" is excellent for us analytical types.

I'm currently doing a Design course, and had an "a-ha" moment last night doing my Observational Drawing homework exercise. Half way through doing the exercise (for the second time, I screwed it up badly on the first attempt) I suddenly understood how and why it was a useful technique. It would have been nice, of course, if my teacher could have explained this; but finding it out for myself by working it through it was probably more helpful to my learning in the grand scheme of things.

All this to say; sometimes you can't know in advance what exercises will help, or even if they will. I think you just need to find some that work for you (you'll know which ones do and which ones don't, believe me) and go from there.