This isn't anything personal UM, and it's fun to have these discussions, but here's where our opinions differ.



This is where we disagree big time.

To me, you're not going to paint a lego piece for the satisfaction over the result and knowing that you restrained yourself from using better tools. You're painting it to learn and the satisfaction comes from advancing your understanding. When your learning, you need to be methodical and focus on exactly what you want to get out of a study.

If you want to practice straight lines on a tablet, then fill a page with straight lines, don't agonize over getting that perfect straight line for that lego piece. If you want to practice blending then plop two fields of color and see if you can blend them, don't try to shade the surface of a cylander that was drawn incorrectly from poor reference. If you want to study values, then take a picture and try to guess what values go where, then color pick them to see how many you got right.

And if you want to study how a lego piece lies in space, make a horizon line, vanishing points, a ground plane, and use whatever tools you need to construct it perfectly... and construct like fifty of them, don't just do one.

If you want to study something in particular but don't know where to begin, just ask us for exercises or whatever and we will give them.

The point is that you should never be just winging it and jumping into things, you should know what you're doing and why you're doing it. "Getting used to you're tablet" is vague, and I have seen many artists far beyond the level of anyone who has ever come to this forum who can't draw a straight line or nice curve for shit and use the line tool and gradients, and anything else that some people might think of as "cheating" ALL THE TIME.



Study smart, don't study hard.

I've been out of the office for a couple days so I haven't really look at much, but I think I'll dp some perspective stuff next week when I have some time, it's one of those things I never actually drew out when I did draw, I would always just 'eyeball' it. So yeah, I need to work on the overall process of drawing something correctly. I'm currently bad at pretty much everything, but I've only used the tablet for 3-4 hours total so I feel like that's ok lol

If you guys have suggestions for practices for me to do I'm all ears.

do these: Every day, each line go over it at least 8 times
http://imgur.com/a/kMuZh

I do these on the intuos too, but mostly I just use a giant sketch pad and a felt tip black pen. Make sure the tip is felt or at least fine tipped, you shouldn't be doing these with a big fat sharpie

Then draw 2 points several times on a page. Draw a straight line to connect the points

Then, I suggest doing 1 point perspective practice. I started with this:
http://www.studentartguide.com/articles/one-point-perspective-drawing

and then 2 point perspective, so on and so forth


I've been doing all of these but taking breaks to paint. I'd go crazy if I never ever painted and just did exercises and lessons. There are tons of resources out there, unclemuscles and humari are obviously great resources. Here are some more:


http://www.ctrlpaint.com/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChbk5oV3Rprw51IrZqsnRuw
http://www.reddit.com/r/ArtFundamentals
http://drawabox.com/
http://idrawgirls.com/

Biggest thing is to do it as many hours a day as you possibly can. I recently read this:
https://medium.com/@noahbradley/how-i-became-an-artist-4390c6b6656c

Thousands and thousands of hours doing drawing and painting

This post was edited by Lwe12345 on Jul 10 2015 09:52pm

Thanks for this list! I'll certainly go through them when i get back into work next week, and most likely take the tablet home so I can actually put meaningful time into using it.

I tried the 1 point perspective thing, and then tried shading it. I suck a lot at blending and trying to replicate lighting lol



I think I am going to start doing the drawabox stuff, looks good. Doesn't look like any of those basic exercises leave much worth showing so it will probably be 0 images posted in here for a bit while i just practice.

yeah i have nothing to show for the past week and a half other than exercises

So I have been swamped at work and in the middle of moving, so I haven't had much free time to practice, but I got back to it a couple days ago. Doing the 4 warmups that Lwe posted here are my horrendous results. I can't draw straight lines for shit, or curved lines... or circles... really anything lol. I'm trying to get used to drawing with my shoulder instead of my wrist and that is definitely an awkward adjustment for me. I might start posting the 3-4 warm ups I do every morning, or maybe once a week or something just to keep this thread alive.







IDK, I might try drawing some stick figures in action poses or just standing normally in a week or two if I can ever get the basics down lol.

Tried horizon thing too with 1 point perspective, but not being able to draw straight lines makes all of my horizon lines pretty awful lol

I would try doing these warm ups with a sketch pad and a fine felt tip pen

The tablet is going to cause you frustration with this