Understanding Drawing – A Guide From Beginner to Imagination

Understanding Drawing is the culmination of over 6 years of research, investigation, testing, practice, failing and learning. During this time I’ve taken hundreds of courses, gone through hundreds of tutorials and demos from different artists, read a multitude of books, trying to piece together what it is that I need to do in order to improve my art. I’m self-taught, I’d never taken art classes before, didn’t draw as a kid and started at 25 with 0 previous experience and no idea what I’m getting myself into. Sometimes I got it right – very often though – I got it wrong.

Regardless of whether you’re studying with an experienced artist, or learning by yourself – you’re always in charge of your development. It’s your responsibility to piece together a big picture view of art and to try to figure out the next steps for your work. At the very beginning – this can be a very daunting task. Art can be massively complicated, with so many skills being tangled together. There is overlap between different fields, language that is imprecise – words are used to mean several very different things to different artists. Things can get very confusing very quickly.

My goal with this course is to provide you with context. To go through what’s important and what is not. As beginners it’s very easy to mistake a convention or a style as something we need to be doing, only to realize later on we never developed the thinking and the skills required to produce our own work.

Drawing is an incredibly important skill to develop. It’s essential for visual communication. And with practice and internalization of skills, it becomes very powerful and so much faster. We begin to be able to think through drawing, in order to create what we imagine, rather than being constrained to technical issues. But this development of skill has to be deliberate. We have to be able to see the big picture, in order to know what we need to do next to progress.

We’ll start from the very beginning – we’ll talk about what the purpose of drawing is. We’ll examine visual language. We’ll talk about structure and how we often mistake the end result we see for the work that went in to produce the image. We’ll talk about cause and effect. How to begin training our ability to think dimensionally and spatially. How to start creating objects. We’ll deconstruct drawing down to separate Levels, tied to distinct Skills that we need to train in order to go from absolute beginner – from symbolic drawing, to realistic or stylized imagination work. These Levels and Skills are also coupled with Knowledge – we absolutely need to acquire certain theory and drill it to a very high level, in order to internalize it and be able to act on it, without having to think about it.

01 – Introduction 02 – Overview of Contents 03 – Understanding Drawing Roadmap – A first look at Levels, Skills, Traps and Maps 04 – Maps – Drawing as Language, Compound Skill, Pro vs Beginner, Theory vs Practice, Levelling up 05 – What is Drawing – Visual Illusion, Structure vs Outline, Styles & Copying, Brain & Perception 06 – Types of Drawing, 2D and 3D, Cause and Effect in Images, Drawing Through, Experienced Artists and Structure 07 – Form as Combination of Structure and Light, More on Shapes and Volumes, Multiple Passes of Drawing 08 – My Early Work – Going Through Levels and Improving Skills, From Symbolic Drawing to Imagination 09 – Levels & Skills In-Depth, Progressing, Skill Training and the Brain 10 – Observation – Training Like an Athlete, Developing Perceptual & Mechanical Skills, Proportions, Alignments, Relationships 11 – Understanding – Construction, Perspective, Going from Flat Shapes to Volumes, Reading 2D images as 3D 12 – Understanding Part 2 – Perspective, Camera Lenses, Building Objects, Perspective Resources, Roadmap, My Early Work 13 – Feeling Form, Knowledge, Design – Internalized Perspective, Using Drawing to Learn ABOUT Things 14 – Imagination – Reality as Inspiration, Process, Strategy, Using Research, Beginner Mistakes & Misconceptions, Style 15 – Traps – No Big Picture View, Thinking Not Tools or Style, No Process, Bad Ways to Practice 16 – Closing Thoughts, Quotes & Training – If You See The Way Broadly, You Will See it In All Things 17 – Sketching Demo – Simple Cartoon Characters with Volumes 18 – Sketching Demo – Hand with Volumes, Feeling Form 19 – Sketching Demo – Gladiator – Figure, Gesture and Structure 20 – Sketching Demo – Robot Perspective Sketch 21 – Sketching Demo – Head Structure and Light 22 – Get Started! and Thank You Understanding-Drawing.7z

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