I am new to this board, but have been reading various posts on the site for at least a year now. I am currently working in the IT field, in which I obtained a Bachelor’s of IT in 2004. I am interested in starting my path toward a career in design, and would like to vastly improve my drawing/sketching skills. Do any members of the board have any suggestions on what kind of classes I could take at a comm. college that would help me to improve my drawing/sketching skills? I would like to take these classes in order to begin to work on a portfolio for school admissions. Thanks for any and all help and suggestions[/b]
if you want to improve your drawing skills your going to have to get used to the idea that it’s going to take more than just the classes. the fact is, you’ll never be done learning how to draw, and if you want to be good you should be drawing every-day for the very least an hour or two.
community colleges i think offer mostly life-drawing classes which are good but not really what will help your drawing for ID (where drawing from concept is more the focus). take some manual mechanical drafting classes if you can, also classes in perspective are helpfull and you should try hard to challenge yourself with understanding the trick of perspective.
draw with your entire arm and not your wrist. your sketches will look smoother rather than all hairy. draw small thumbnails and large sketches.
find the right materials that work for you. different combinations of paper and pen\pencil yeild very different results
find somebody thats better than you at drawing and watch them draw.
draw alot…
post some drawings here and get real hosest feedback and help.
Here’s the logic:
The kind of sketching ability required in ID is the ability to visualize an abstract idea, meaning you have to be able to draw from your head.
To be able to draw from abstraction, you need to be familar with drawing real objects, because this knowledge will be your reference to draw the abstract.
So, you have to learn from still life first, whether it’s drawing people or objects. Get familarize with how to visualize a form on paper, and displaying the qualities of its surface texture etc. Then with this knowledge, you can then draw from your head.
So, take still life classes and practise as much as you can. For a start, try drawing white matte objects with only one light source in a dark environment. This gives you the simplest lighting condition and surface. Then move on with multiple light sources, then objects with various textures, then colors, then onto things that you find in daily life.
It can be as easy as drawing a white vase with a desk lamp as the light source in a room at night. Pencil will be a good medium to start with too.