Some Thoughts (and Tips) About Drawing
a creative writing post (#32)
This is a creative writing post (#32) from my occasional series for paid subscribers, who can also leave comments on most posts. As always, email hollymathnerd at gmail dot com if you would like a paid subscription but can’t afford one.
And this one has a ton of pictures, so remember you can always read it at the Substack website if your email client goes nuts with it. Look for “Some Thoughts (And Tips) About Drawing” with a posting date of May 5, 2024.
Drawing As A Hobby of Mine
I like to draw, and have been posting some of my drawings on Substack Notes, to mostly positive response. “Mostly positive” on the internet is rare enough that this is noteworthy and worth encouraging, so here are some reflections on drawing, how to learn to draw as an autodidact, and some tips.
If this post gets some traction and/or a lot of comments (indicating that readers enjoy it) I will do more on this topic. Besides my thoughts on the value of drawing as a hobby, I will go into detail about my five suggestions:
a particular 30 day course,
a helper friend,
a particular type of practice routine (I’ll share mine),
paying attention to something in particular about drawing as a hobby, and
the right supplies.
My History As An Artist
I taught (and continue to teach) myself to draw from books and YouTube videos, so my skills have always been very uneven. I’m very good at fine details, like the curls in curly hair or the veins in an eyeball. I’m also very good at using the full palette with graphite, from 10H (super thin lines, barely visible) to 9B (basically soft black carbon).
But I have always had a weakness in the area of proper perspective.
My helper friend (more on how to choose one below; they don’t need to be an artist themselves!) picked up on this and gave me some books on perspective and some drawing paper with perspective grids for my birthday last year.
With a little study and practice, my perspective drawing skills have really improved!
Here are two pictures, one in-progress and one finished-product for a perspective drawing I did yesterday:
The perspective on this one isn’t great — the cloth the lamp sits on isn’t right — but it was a great learning experience and a lot of fun. The wood grain on the wainscotting was especially fun to do.
These pictures, one before the “finishing touch” and then the final product, show the value of using the super thin, hard leads at that end of the palette. The paneling in the last step was done by using an 8H to put in some whorls and curved lines to represent variation in the wood, and then a 10H to lay in the base of the paneling itself:
For a long time, my weakness in perspective kept me only drawing people, not things. I could make people look like themselves but not things, so I stuck to what was more fun (because I felt more successful at it). Here are a few portraits I did during that period, including one of James Lindsay (in case he looks familiar to any of you, he is!).
This one has a very slight cartoon quality. I didn’t do that on purpose. It took me awhile to spot it, but I finally did — the outline of the face is too dark/harsh, and that’s why. That was a very important lesson, one that’s always stuck with me.
Graphite is my first love, but I also experiment with watercolor pencils some. These are what they sound like, colored pencils that are made to mimic watercolor paint by what you do when you’re done drawing: take a wet paintbrush and touch it to the drawing. Here are two recent watercolor pencil drawings.
My thoughts on the value of drawing as a hobby and an expansion of my five suggestions are below the paywall.
Extra space to allow for the “unlock one post free” option that Substack offers on paywalled posts, in order to give free subs a chance to see what they’re missing.