Design Software Weakens Classic Drawing Skills 268
mosel-saar-ruwer writes "A recent conference, hosted by UC-Berkeley's College of Environmental Design, sought to 'examin[e] the need and role for drawing today in the design professions and fine arts'. In this Reuters summary, via C-NET, the participants seem to agree that the emergence of sophisticated graphics software has coincided with a startling decline in the basic drawing skills of university students. Apparently teenaged boys don't need to practice drawing their nudes when they can just download them off the web."
I'm a hax0r! (Score:4, Interesting)
Last login: Thu Apr 6 19:51:14 on ttyp1
Welcome to the Infamous P.M.A.C
The-Infamous-P-M-A-C:~ sapnak$ vi comment
i
I come at this story from a different angle. I'm a tech who's starting to
be infatuated with drawing.
It works like this: I spend 90% of my time at work sitting in front of a PC
(a Mac, but that distinction is mighty blurred these days..). I troubleshoot
IT problems and design software. Historicaly, my free time at home was spent
doing thing like playing games and watching movies. It's all virtual,
abstract, and intangable.
Last year, I was in laid up for a bit and found myself with some time and
crayons on my hands -- and I realized that I have no drawing skills. So I
took a semester long "drawing for n00bs" class at a local school. I'm almost
done with it, and it's really changed me.
1) It's a great fun to be able to get down and dirty with real materials.
charcoal, pencils, ink, etc.
2) Even n00bs can make pretty things with a little help
3) I started to notice how much shitty computer-made art there is on the
web (for values of art == design).
Related to the article directly, there's something in this debate that reminds
me of the assembler vs. compiler arguments in tech circles. Is it better
if you know what's going on and how to do it yourself? Is there value in
doing it the hard way?
the question is.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:duno about this (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Same will happen to reading & writing (Score:1, Interesting)
In the middle ages, very few people knew how to read. The skill was virtually unknown. It was like magic.
Today, that's how drawing is. When I turn out a quick rough of a character in two minutes, people just stare. The idea that someone can draw something, out of their head, that is on-model for the character is unthinkable to the modern populace.
This doesn't have anything to do with design software. Ask any fifty year old woman to draw you a dog. Chances are she'll refuse, embarrassed by her stick figures.
The root of it is that half-way through this century, we decided you don't need to know how to draw to be an artist. Art classes started to be about expressing your inner self rather than rendering a form. Ever since that time, the idea of actually being able to draw has faded. It's simply not taught. It wasn't taught long before the computer showed up.
The big difference for university students is that in the 60s, there were still professors who had learned to draw in a world that considered it a teachable skill. If you cared about drawing, you could learn from them.
Now those professors have retired, and many art current professors have degrees that didn't require drawing skills. The Art of Draftmanship, in capital letters, has been partially lost. Finding an instructor who can really draw and enough time in the figure study studio with them to learn is difficult.
The final sad note in this is that figure drawing is now generally restricted to people over eighteen. There was a time that a high school senior could enroll in a figure drawing class, but that time is largely gone. People think that having minors participate in figure drawing is illegal. Completely untrue, but it means that true drawing instruction cannot begin before eighteen now.
Why should universities be surprised that their grads cannot draw when most of them have not previously been allowed to do the one thing you simply must do to learn? Almost all grads will have less than four years of genuine drawing experience under their belts.
Until you've studied the figure, any drawing you do does not count. It hardly changes the result. Take a dozen people, some of whom have never tried to draw and some of whom have been learning from books for a decade. Make them study the figure live for six months. At the end, you'll hardly be able to tell the "newbies" from the "old hands." Many of the newbies will be better.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:duno about this (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:duno about this (Score:1, Interesting)
On the subject of it being embarrassing to draw or paint a naked person, remember: You are studying a discipline. Like taking a programming class (sort of). In my experience, anyway, if I'm drawing a nude model six feet away, it just isn't useful to feel the usual "hey, that's a naked woman/man." I spend my whole time trying to get that damn arm to look like a realistic arm on my piece of paper, and don't even ask me about trying to get faces right. I'm immersed in the technical minutiae of rendering an image by hand, without a computer. Where is the light? Where is the shadow? Do I know what forms that shadow? Yes, it's that bone, and because there is a bone there, I must draw the edge with more contrast, so it doesn't render as a muscle... and so on. If you allow yourself to start thinking in a prurient way about nudity, you will become distracted and your drawing/painting will fail.
Most of the models are ordinary people, not airbrushed porn stars. You're looking at ordinary skin with ordinary moles, zits, splotches, body hair, and cellulite. Also, fashion-model physiques are terrible for figure drawing, because there isn't enough muscle and fat to learn from. For figure drawing, fleshier models are valued.
There was that one time, though, when our teacher hired a model who was actually pretty hot with her clothes off. That was awful, academically, for me because with her clothes off I became so distracted I couldn't draw properly, hehe. You really have to concentrate on the technical goals of what you're doing.
You might say, "if it's like a programming class, where's the passion of art come in?" That comes later: After you've mastered the foundation skill set. Just like any other discipline.
I hope that clears things up a bit.
(Yes, I was an art major)
Photoshop (Score:2, Interesting)
My paintings can be seen on my homepage but I'd rather recommend taking a look at Craig Mullins [goodbrush.com] stuff, he is an excellent artist who do a lot of his paintings with Photoshop.
There's many people who 'cheat' by using filters over photos and such. I say cheat because these persons later say (or let people believe) they did it from scratch. It's not cheating if they are frank about their work process.
Been True For A Long Time (Score:3, Interesting)
Those who could draw also had other talents. One of them used to be able to mimic another artist's style (if you could call it that) almost exactly, in a fraction of the time. It was funny: he'd narrate while he was doing it, too: "Multi-color gradient, Alien Skin-dropshadow, Arial 36 point, done!"
the geezers remember "drafting" classes (Score:3, Interesting)