[Nick Hausman]

Congrats Erik!

It was fun watching your work. I love the idea for your last mural with the colored blocks. Looks great.

[Nick Hausman]

Hi Erik,

I am a fan of your work. Loved the school mural with the kids and the ocean mural as well.

In the red hawk mural, isn’t the blue car rather small? Based on the yellow lines It looks like you were going for a rapidly diminishing perspective, but it doesn’t seem to match up with the road width and nearby lamppost.

[Nick Hausman]

Thanks for sharing your challenge. Amazing work and very inspiring. Great job on making it through 100 days!

[Nick Hausman]

Hi Ram,

I am also a beginner, so I don’t have any authoritative advice to give you. I did happen to see a suggested course track being developed by NMA that Joshua Jacobo posted on the Discord server. Here it is:

The Curriculum (Based on one year of learning. If the same number is listed more than once with different letters, then you choose which course you are more interested in)

Term 1- Setup, Drawing Basics, and Inspiration

1. A Beginner’s Guide to Drawing

This course is a perfect introduction to the skills and concepts that you will need for a successful art career. You will learn materials, setup, mark making, shape, form, construction, measuring and observation, value design, rendering, and basic composition.

2A. Introduction to Materials for Artists

This course is all about experimenting with materials. You will draw the same scene using a variety of media to learn how different effects can be achieved.

Note: You don’t need to do every material in this course. You can pick 2 or 3 and do those.

2B. Photoshop for Beginners

For digital artists we recommend this course as a strong starting point. All graphic software owes a debt to photoshop and mastering it will allow you to learn new software quickly.

Note: If you don’t have access to Photoshop follow along in your software of choice and try to do the assignments using your software’s equivalents.

3A. Fundamentals of Observational Drawing

This course is perfect for artists who are looking to do realism or who want to understand traditional drawing to apply it to more designed styles. You will learn a traditional drawing approach taught in Russia for over one hundred and fifty years that combines construction (building up drawings by using 3D forms) and observation.

3B. Stress-Free Sketching for Beginners

This course is great for animators, comic or anime artists, or artists who wish to develop a loose and confident sketching style. Less price and more free-flowing than Fundamentals of Observational Drawing, this course is about life, motion, and feeling and is also rooted in the art of the Renaissance.

3D: Introduction to the Sight-Size Method

If you’re interested in the sight-size atelier method, an optical drawing method that yields realistic tonal drawings, this course is the perfect place to learn it! With this method you carefully set up your home studio so that your reference and your drawing paper are aligned on a level with each other for increased accuracy.

4. Finding Your Voice as an Artist

This course is all about how to grow as an artist. You will learn ways to think about your own artistic journey and how you have control of your voice or style and how you can study the work of others to improve your own.

Term 2 – Perspective and Composition

1A. Perspective Crash Course

This course is an intense but beginner-friendly overview of traditional one and two point perspective drawing. Perspective is essential to your development as an artist and will help you create more convincing illusions with your work.

2A. Stress-Free Perspective Sketching

An alternative approach to plotted perspective is “sketch perspective.” This loose approach is often used by animators and sketch artists to get a feeling of perspective without having to do a full perspective underdrawing.

3A. Elements of Traditional Composition

This course goes over the elements of traditional composition used by artists from ancient until contemporary times. There is an emphasis on movement, and contrast of elements.

3B. Composition for Visual Artists

This course covers composition with an emphasis on contemporary approaches. This is a great course for artists who want to move into narrative arts, animation, illustration and other commercial art application.

Term 3 – Accuracy and Rendering

1A. Plaster Cast Drawing: The Russian Approach

Drawing the plaster cast is a traditional drawing exercise that goes back hundreds of years. This course will help you see form, and judge proportions more accurately while allowing you time to develop your drawings to a full value range.

This course builds on the first term course: Fundamentals of Observational Drawing

2A. Drapery: The Russian Approach

Whether or not you intend to draw drapery or costumes in your work, learning how to draw drapery is a great way to understand form, gesture, and drawing technique. This course has several assignments that you can do alongside the instructor.

This course builds on the first term course: Fundamentals of Observational Drawing

1B. How to Draw the Charles Bargue Plates (Sight-Size)

The Charles Bargue plates are a 19th century set of drawings to copy to improve your accuracy and give you a strategy for simplifying rendering in your drawings. This course provides you these plates and gives you a strategy for doing these careful studies.

Note: for an overview of the sight size set up see this this course from the first term: Introduction to the Sight-Size Method

2B. Sight-size Plaster Cast Drawing

This alternate plaster cast approach to the Russian version stresses optical accuracy and simplifies the value relationships more than modeling the planes and turns of the form. The result is a more illusionary and subtle effect. Follow along with the instructor for the first demonstration then do additional ones on your own

[Nick Hausman]

Hi Ram,

I think you are doing some good work on your practice. One thing you might want to consider is starting with other topics instead of figure drawing. It is very helpful to have a strong foundation before diving into something more complicated like the figure. A good course to start with is the Beginners Guide to Drawing. You can still practice figure drawings. It’s just very helpful to be learning composition, perspective, shading, light and value, and other basics early on as they will all help a lot with figures and everything else you want to draw.

[Nick Hausman]

First off, these forums don’t get a ton of traffic, but there are a fair number of regular posters for the challenge. So don’t expect too many replies.

Capturing emotion in portraits is a fairly advanced topic. Since you are also struggling with perspective, you might want to go back to basics for a while and go through one of the beginner courses like the Russian Academic Drawing course or the Beginner Drawing course. Or you could take a look at some of the head drawing videos, I think there are several different series to choose from.

Most likely, to capture expressions, you will need to get the features of the face in the proper proportions and locations reliably.

[Nick Hausman]

Hi Amelia, welcome. Don’t worry about starting late. I am starting off as well, and I’m in my 40s. We all come to things at different times, and you are still young.

I wish you well on your artistic path.

[Nick Hausman]

Nice work. X1 looks especially good.

I also have recently started with the Introduction to Drawing for Beginners and the Russian Academic Drawing courses. The exercises in the Russian course definitely take a long time if you complete them all.

I feel like basic control and ability to draw lines and ellipses is the study of a lifetime.  Right now it is so hard for me to draw ellipses fluidly with my whole arm in an exact area. I am definitely getting better with an eraser though, which I never really thought about before, but is a skill in itself.

[Nick Hausman]

Hi David,

Nice work. I would like to take on a 100-day challenge, but am a bit worried about getting drawings in on the weekend.

Not sure if you figured this out already, but I’m pretty sure the wax pencils mentioned near the end of the Beginner Drawing videos were referring to wax-based colored pencils. Prismacolor is supposed to be a good brand. They have a few different lines of pencils, and as mentioned in the video, Verithin is harder. Premiere is their line of softer wax-based pencils. Most colored-pencils are wax-based, so you do have a lot of choice.

Get a few in black and gray (or whatever colors you want) and you should be good to go.

[Nick Hausman]

I meant the reference photo was from February, from a trip to Southern California. I finished the drawing today.

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