So I was working on some homework for Art 26: Representational Drawing, when I realized (or re-re-realized) that I really… REALLY can’t draw. This caused me to look back on my life as a designer and as a student. How in the world did I get this far with such a deficit in drawing skill? Drawing has always been my weakness. I can’t say that I have no knowledge of HOW to draw, or any fundamental skills for handling a pencil. It’s just that as I go further and further in my endeavors to be the awesom-est designer in the world, I find it harder and harder to properly translate my thoughts and concepts onto paper. These thoughts first arised as I started one of my latest shirt designs: The Saddest Song.
If you're an artist, you might be able to see the complete inaccurate perspective I have on the subject, and even little things like the elongation of the right arm and fingers on the right hand. Not to mention the strings. I'm proud of the finished product, but I still need to work really hard on my illustration skills.
Sometimes I avoid the traditional illustration challenges by doing designs that are more heavily reliant on shapes, or when I need to incorporate a lot of information:
DaVine - Food, Fun, and Faith poster. Notice the lack of illustrative properties, haha. YAY LINES!
I don’t purposely avoid illustration, but lots of what goes on in my head is based on shapes and general composition. Some of the hurdles that runs me into, though, are limits on my expression, poor quality renderings of things that are awesome, and -12 skill. I am glad to be taking Art 26: Representational drawing with Erik Freidman (Super instructor. +5 awesome.), so that I might get a better grasp on value, and even help me express myself clearly and with a higher quality of art and design with some illustration in there. There have been so many times when I wanted to draw something for a poster or something, but I just couldn’t get it right, so I just trashed it. If anyone has any tips, feel free to let me know, haha. I’m all ears.
A lot of illustrative designs I admire. Most if not all of these are on Threadless, haha. I get a lot of inspiration from there. CLICK THE PICS TO VISIT THEIR PORTFOLIOS!
Fragmented Beauty - Raphael Pereira
Lions Are Smarter Than I Am - Keith Carter
Monkey Business - Alex Solis
Graphite for your Life - Adam White
Snake Oil Science - Ryan Keightley
Nature Photography - Alex Solis
These are just a handful of people and illustrative designs that I admire. There are so many I like out there and that are amazing, but these ones came immediately to mind. I would love to have enough skill in illustration to produce masterpieces like these. But then again, who wouldn’t? Anyway, back to Art 26 homework… PAAAAAAAIN!
-ジ
yes you can draw… i like the violin… it has a comic feeling to it..
and yea, i think its ok for you to have better Illustrator and Photoshop skills than hand drawing.. its perfectly fine
drawing is a skill that depends on the person, there are people that think they can draw like a master, but it really looks like a piece of nasty lemoncake, I hate lemoncake (cannot say the S word
)… but there are the other guys, me for example, who had the best marks in drawing in school, but don’t bragg about it
at least you know that you’re lemoncakey LOL… but you could practice it to get better
my weakness is the illustrative part, that’s why I want to practice that, maybe a wacom tablet would help