So I’ve become an avid fan of Megatokyo over the past few days. I used to read it weekly years ago but stopped, sometimes you have better things to do than read comics. However I also recently purchased the manga for this series and it has been very good. One of the things I’ve always thought about myself is that I am a horrible artist. However this is one of those things that isn’t so much raw talent as opposed to practice. Most things in life are that way. Some people have raw talent (sometimes I think my interactions with technology are (or were) raw talent) for things and others have to practice hard at them. Being good at anything involves doing it often and getting oneself critiqued (even if it’s by yourself or a friend). Being good at something also implies that you have knowledge of the process by which a task is accomplished along with the tools to do complete it successfully.

So I began to study the art of drawing. I’m not really shooting for manga-style drawings so much as I’m shooting for the ability to draw things better. I am also looking for something to do outside of computing…many of my hobbies involve computing in one way or another and this is an attempt to get away from that. Obviously computing and drawing can go hand in hand with tablets and inking and GIMP and whatnot, but I’m really trying to stick to the pencil and paper approach here.

So the tools of drawing. Line and Shape. Everything is made from lines and shapes. The problem with shapes is that your mind plays tricks on you, it tries to affix a meaning to a shape, a definition. It sees a shape and says “that is supposed to be a tree, but it looks *horrible* so erase it and do it over.” This makes drawing difficult; shapes are only the base of any given drawing, sometimes they are supposed to be meaningless or lack definition. An Artist will end up using other tools to form the shapes into actual objects (most of the time anyway :)).

Perspective and Proportion; these make drawing realistic. Certainly one of the many manga/anime crimes is making a woman have huge breasts. You take one look and go “jesus man those are big”. Especially when drawing people, proportion is difficult to do properly without experience. Perspective is an indicator of depth and of size. A reader (or looker, or whatever you call someone who “reads” art) can easily determine the size of an object based on it’s depth, so perspective is an important tool here.

Light and Shadow are another pair of tools (notice how these are coming in pairs?) A drawing would be completely black without any lightsources so light and shadow are often required to make a piece both believable and to make the piece ‘fit in’ particularly in a set of pieces (as well as any background items in a given piece). Light and shadow give definitions to materials; by seeing how the light is portrayed a viewer can make a guess as to what a given surface is like and perhaps what material it is (or what the object in question is). Light and Shadow can also make or break a piece; obviously making things too dark or too light makes it difficult to see certain things (or anything, depending on severity). Light and Shadow can always be used to hide details or shift the focus of a piece.

So I have one drawing done and I will try and do more this week. If I get some that aren’t horrible (and trust me my first few were *HORRIBLE* then I will post them here (or link to them from here).