This weeks drawing, painting and learning resources 23 Oct 2021

Hey there,

​

Here's your weekly dose of resources, thoughts, 'aha moments' and announcements directly from my brain to yours!

​

- What I'm reading

​Figure drawing for artists: Making every mark count (By Steve Huston)​

Steve Huston is one of my favourite instructors when it comes to learning how to draw the human body!

This book delves deep into Steve's thought process and simplifies complex principles.

Steve has such an iconic way of rendering form, as soon as I saw he had a book, I jumped on it.

This has inspired me to do some more figure drawing posts for sure, so stay tuned for that!

​

- Aha moments

A key thing from the book mentioned above "Figure drawing for artists: Making every mark count (By Steve Huston)" That I wanted to get out of it was Steve's process for rendering light and shadow.

I've been facinated lately by understanding how light works and his way of explaining it was quite unique.

He mentions a technique called Chiaroscuro wikipedia link here for further reading this technique is used to show a high contrast between lights and shadows when representing 3D forms (you can see this a lot in steves work).

A couple of key take aways from the section on rendering form...

Box logic

Steve explains that "by finding the hard edge between light and shadow on any form we've found the principle "corner" for that form."

He demonstrates this on a sphere with a two values (light and dark) and draws a hard line where the light and shadow meet, creating that 'corner'.

But this is just a starting point, if you're drawing a sphere, you don't want to have a hard line between light and dark... He continues with "You can always round off the corners later".

This way of thinking about transitioning values between light and dark I've found very helpful!

​

Highlights

Just one key quote that gave me a nice little 'aha' moment "Where the beginning of a shadow is a corner, highlights are a corner between two planes in light".

Thinking about highlights as corners is a really cool way to wrap my head around placing them on a form while painting.

--

I've been trying to observe these principles in real life as often as I can, and asking myself "where would the hard edge between the light and shadow be on this (insert random object here)" or I try and imagine highlights as 'corners' that have hard edges.

I highly recommend trying to observe these principles in the world around you; it can really help the concepts stick.

Below is a taste of Steve's teaching style, I recommend you look up his work as well!

Steve Huston video on drawing the head

​How to Draw the Head / Face / Portrait with Steve Huston PART 1 (3 HOURS!)​

​

- Videos

Kim Jung Gi on: Memory drawing and understanding the form​

For those of you that don't know, Kim Jung Gi is a master when it comes to drawing from memory, he'll draw entrire scenes with correct perspective and tonnes of characters, buidlings, props etc all with an ink pen, no undo and no erasing!

Here he unvales the mistery behind how me 'memorises' all the things he draws.

I won't give it away, but it's worth your time, trust me!

​

- Thoughts and musings

Consuming content with intention

A habit I've started to get into recently is actively recording key principles/ideas that I'm getting from the books I read/videos I watch and storing it in a place that I'll consistenly come back to.

There have been so many awesome ideas/concepts that I've heard or read in the past and said to my self "You've got to remember that" and then proceeded to forget said idea within a day or so.

I'm making it a mission to (try not to) miss a good idea with the educational content I consume.

Does this make it less "relaxing" to watch certain content, for sure! But I'm pretty sure I'll be thanking myself in the future for taking the time to record key ideas.

Having this intention of mining for the gold nuggets of wisdom has helped me be lazer focussed on the content that I do consume.

Why not give it a go next time you're watching a tutorial video? Grab a pen/paper or open your favourite note taking app and jot down a few key ideas and note the original content if you every want to come back to it, your future self might thank you!

---

​

Well, that's all from me! Until next week, stay consistent, use reference, have fun with it and remember; it's only pixels baybee!

​

Cheers,

Ben

​

Have any questions or just want to say "hey"?

DM me on:

​Instagram​

​Twitter​

​Youtube​

Email me at b.eblendesign@gmail.com or simply reply to this one.

​