Expand Your Visuals

As a wannabe professional artist, my brother and I have always thought of the outcome of creating awesome visuals, but not much on the process of it. For many years in childhood and our teen years, we've just kept trying and drawing, but improvements were not seen in huge leaps. We sought little guides and how-to-dos' but they seem to never effectively did the trick for us. Was it something we lack?

Maybe a lot of ignorance on our part.

Ever since heading into college, I only realized the importance of BUILDING an artist's visual vocabulary or visual library. You could put it that our brain is a library where it stores all of the information we need, in this case, visual & arts. Lecturer taught this to us once and I thought it was really great. It has never much been mentioned on the net(or maybe I haven't paid enough attention), but many great artist & sites would tell you that practice makes perfect. Didn't I talk about this in the last post... why yes I did.

Trinity College Dublin Library, source: www.thezooom.com.

Practice not only improve your familiarity with that drawing but also its an addition to your visual memory. Take it this way, by really studying hard & learning to draw or even memorizing, say on figure and anatomy, you actually build that structure or foundation in your head, and you can always pull it out whenever you need it. Just like getting a book in the library.

So let me sum things up , short but simple conclusion to this post: build own visual library and have fun practicing art.

Here are a few sites to get started with

http://www.theartofanatomy.com/

http://drawsketch.about.com/od/learntodrawanimals/ss/zoo-animal-sketching_3.htm

http://www.conceptart.org/showthread.php?t=14739

and don't forget about these good books!
Dynamic Anatomy by Burne Hogarth
Dynamic Figure Drawing by Burne Hogarth
Figure Drawing For All It's Worth by Andrew Loomis (http://www.alexhays.com/loomis/)

-Zach

21/4/2013 (Sunday)