Drawing

There are multiple paths to learning to draw and methods of practice. The correct path though, depends on your destination and on your taste.

If you’re early on your path, I have two pieces of advice for you: First, think about your destination. Ie: where do you want to be in 5 years with your drawing? It might be a style - realistic. Might be a genre - anime. Might be an approach - urban sketching. But spend some time to think about where you are going.

Secondly: Once your on your path, quite jumping around. One of the biggest benefits of school based programs vs self-study is the structured path it gives you. Nothings wrong with self-study but it requires more discipline to stay on track and not diverted by every shiny object.

Now classic approach is the Loomis Method, both for traditional realism and learning to draw from your imagination both. A quick google search will provide a ton of resources, but I wanted to share this quick IG video that is quite motivational on where you can take this method:

Habit Guide

So a big part of this newsletter is forming the habit of daily drawing. If you’ve done that, and now have a solid habit of drawing, painting or creating something everyday then - well done!

But if you haven’t yet got the habit to stick then I would like to refer you to the expert. Best selling author James Clear. if you haven’t read his book ‘Atomic Habits’, but would like to it’s pretty easy to find.

But James offers some other resources as well. He has ‘30 Days to Better Habits’ email course and it’s free, so some may find it helpful:

Link

Artist color wheel

Every artist who works with color has this day: the day they learn the color wheel is wrong. It’s a very ‘Santa Claus isn’t real?’ moment.

It’s because of chemistry and physics and additive color vs subtractive color and a bunch of technical stuff. But it comes down to the fact that we don’t paint with color, we paint with pigments that emulate color.

On this page is a link to a pdf for the Artists Color Wheel:

Link

Its a long page with a lot of in depth information, but what Bruce provides in the pdf is 50 or so commonly used paint pigment and where they actually live on the color wheel. He used some scientific equipment and watercolor swatches to produce the results.

But artists beware, if your prone to stumbling down rabbit holes, then prepare yourself. You could spend the next year exploring his website and still not finish… His exploration of color and many other topics is exhaustive at the very least.