Fundamentals

It’s been over a month of just non-stop fundamentals lessons from a lot of the role models from last month's masters & Mentors blog post. Specifically, in the realm of fundamentals I mean as follows;

Shape        Form            Perspective

LIne Weight/Confidence    Dynamics 

Light & Shadow

So my first shout-out will be Mathew Mattessi as he is a great instructor when it comes to these fundamentals. He teaches a new way of thinking when it comes to lines and their representation of Shapes and forms through the forces and mechanics to which the worlds are tied. Giving new ways to push shapes more dynamically without losing.

Shape

The premise sounded simple and it was in ways. Basic shapes are circles and Triangles, and lots of them.  Some say square goes in that category, but I say rectangles and squares are just two triangles loving on each other. The most accurate use of the circle when drawing will be ellipses.

Form.

To make the shapes more three-dimensional, we now will cover the five primary primitives, the true building blocks of any drawing. The sphere, The Cube, The cone, the cylinder, the egg.

Line Weight and Confidence.

    Before moving on to my favorite fundamentals I wanted to talk about line weight and confidence. A lot of the artists I have been looking up usually mention line weight, quality, and overall confidence later down the road. However tackling this first ahead of time is in my opinion a good idea, as it is something that happens passively and through the evolution of your art journey, so stomping out the bad habits to progress that evolution alongside your main progress is a plus. 

    Line quality comes with confidence. This is key to making beautiful lines and increasing the overall speed of the workflow. To gain this confidence you can exercise using something more permanent when drawing like a pen or a sharpie. You can even take the extra few seconds before committing or at the very least practice ghost tracing ( The act of keeping the pencil barely above the paper and repeating the strokes until it slowly becomes visible.

#1 avoidance =  Feathering your strokes.

    As I continue my studies I will do my best to keep these things in my mind so that I may develop the right habits early on. Line weight covers depth and contrast. Thicker lines look to be more “in front” than thinner ones. The thinnest should be outlines of detail within the major ideas or concepts.

Perception

My favorite topic to cover and one of the hardest to master for the more intuitive drawers and it is a more mechanical and structured fundamental. We got one, two, and three points of perspective in our early understandings of how vanishing points and the Horizon works. Smaller in the back, closer in the front. With a simple side rule. Overlap always decides what is in front of what first. After getting used to these points it's best to learn, practice, and make a habit of using the Four-point perspective, which is how we use eyeballs to see and interpret the world around us. Every mentor so far that covers this mentions being in a tall skyscraper in a huge city. Looking out from the window towards the horizon you would find 4 vanishing points as things get smaller below, above, and to the sides. I highly recommend this practice on repeat until you feel you mastered it, then master rotation. In a very simple exercise you just need a paper set as a landscape, add the 4 vanishing points and the horizon line. Then begin filling the whole page with primitive forms. The Cube, The cone, and an Egg. The sphere as you will notice doesn’t change shape from angles or perspectives and will always be circular in that respect. It only can shrink and grow based on foreshortening. Go crazy placing these primitives down too because you're working your muscle memory in your hand as well as your visual/spatial memory.

Value of light and shadow.

    Give form depth and texture adding the final ingredient. The rendering grind. This is what turns a simple sketch into a full-on illustration. This along with the other fundamentals can be entire posts themselves and each has its courses across the web. The key takeaways are Core Shadows, Cast shadows, half-tone, highlights, and the law of 80-20. Halftones are where a majority of your rending will take place, just at the edge of the core shadow. Cast shadows are always sharper and are caused by the direct blocking of light.