Tutorials

EDIT 2013: Somewhat misleading. Though that is the best source I've found on colour and I highly recommend it, I've since been learning about colour from other places as well, and the tutorial would be my own take on it.

I also have various half-written tutorials and notes on things like how to draw spheres, inking, optical illusions (that one may become an ebook too), how to deconstruct a style, etc. but I'm not sure which of those will see the light of day.


The more I learn about drawing, the more I realise perspective is perhaps the most key thing you need to understand. Loomis mentioned this in Successful Drawing; now I'm starting to see why.

I was drawing a cartoon tiger the other day, getting confused and attempting by trial and error to correctly bend the stripes around its slouching body. If I had just laid out basic perspective, I could have been like, "Okay, the eye level is here, so everything above/below and to the left/right of that will be bending outwards". Problem solved. (Or at least made easier.)

The thing is, perspective has some very counter-intuitive facts, which make total sense once you learn the reason, but are utterly confusing if you don't. Generally when perspective is taught, they don't go into much depth about the reasons for things, so you have to sit there and work it out yourself. Basic questions like, "Why do circles appear as perfectly symmetrical ellipses when they're in perspective, instead of more distorted or squished at one end?" are not even addressed. They just teach you rules of thumb. (No wonder many artists hate learning perspective!)

And this makes it difficult to apply the rules of thumb, because what if you're in an unusual situation where the rules you memorised don't apply? If you understood the reason behind what you're doing, you'd be able to work out what to do. If you just rely on rules of thumb, at some point it's going to look wrong.

Learning perspective is the process of learning to see things in 3D in your mind. Manipulating shapes in 3D space in your mind isn't a skill some people have and some people don't — no one has it until they learn perspective (or spend a lot of time with 3D models).

So, guess what — all those figures you've been drawing rely on either your knowledge of perspective, or your ability to do a carbon copy of what you see. If it's the latter, you're not going to be able to change them much before they start looking unrealistic. If it's the former, you'll be able to use your knowledge of perspective to change things around, or even construct from imagination, and still have it look realistic.

(For those of you who can do some stuff from imagination without having learned perspective: that's from learning rules of thumb or having an inexplicit understanding of stuff that perspective teaches explicitly.)