Came across this excellent article by Chris Spooner of SpoonGraphics: 40 Free Tutorials on Advanced Drawing Techniques.
There’s really a lot of good stuff in that post, including drawing manga-style things, drawing actual people, even a great tutorial on drawing eyes (and other specific body parts are covered as well). Some of those tutorials even cover drawing something with pencil and then taking your drawing and inking it in Illustrator (yet another super useful skill).
Now, what’s with the drawing, you ask? Have you managed to get by without really knowing how to draw things? I used to be one of those people who could only draw blobular things. I would often have these concepts for logos or artwork in my head, but couldn’t really sketch them out on paper and would get really frustrated.
I always told people I couldn’t draw to save my life, and always admired the friends who could do it. My boss at Sac City used to do all these intricate drawings in Illustrator and I would just watch in fascination. He’d sometimes solicit ideas from the tutors and then come back a week later with finished drawings in Illustrator. He’d do life-like portraits of people or even weird, whimsical creatures (he once drew a squid wearing a suit because when he solicited an idea, all I said was, “Draw a fantastical squid.”).
So all this time, I would just be jealous of those who could draw. I thought I could get by. But at some point, the frustration over not being able to sketch out or execute certain ideas came to a head and I figured I’d better learn how to draw. So I’m enrolled in a drawing class this semester at Sac City. And while it scared the living daylights out of me, it’s been a lot of fun. And I wondered why I hadn’t done it sooner.
Drawing is a really fundamental skill that all designers should know. I’m not asking you to be the next Leonardo Da Vinci, but knowing some of the basics can help. Like knowing about composition and perspective and shading. I used to be frustrated that I couldn’t make anything that had depth in Illustrator; now that I know a little more about shading and positioning, I’m a little better at it. Drawing cityscapes is easier for me now because I know a little more about two-point perspective and everything doesn’t look so distorted anymore. And so on and so forth.
So if you belong in the I-can’t-draw-to-save-my-life category, maybe you should bite the bullet and learn how! It’s scary but so worth it in the end.
