brainbaking/content/post/drawing-week-02.md

title	date	subtitle	tags	published
Drawing week 02 - Art before breakfast	2017-03-07	So ballpoint pens are useful after all	Learning yourself to draw	true

Also read Learning yourself to draw.

After the illustration course, I'm not ashamed to admit I completely dropped the pencil out of the game. It creates lines easy to remove and that means I'm working on a drawing forever. I need something to commit myself to. That something is called ink.

It also seems that I already have stuff to get ink on a paper: pens. Ballpoint pens. Black, blue, whatever. Just simple pens you use to write with - the cheaper, the better. I came across Danny Gregory's work Art before breakfast and The Creative Licence (buy the latter one if you can). These are very inspirational books that get you kickstarted drawing from zero by learning how to see, explaning negative space and other simple techniques. It doesn't go into detail, it simply helps you get drawing.

And Danny is a fan of ink + watercolor. I immediately fell in love and knew that was what I wanted. So yes, put that pencil back where it belongs. I started trying to draw what I see:

{{< pin "308707749443972993" >}} {{< pin "308707749443973015" >}} {{< pin "308707749443973029" >}}

It looks a lot brighter than week 1. After drawing with a pen a few times, it felt better and better. I tried to copy Danny's style a bit by giving it some (water)color but that might be too much new stuff within a few weeks.

I'm particulary fond of the yellow post-it note: an impression of my left foot while waiting for my wife to finish shopping. I keep pen & paper with me at all times: that's a healthy habit I developed 7 years ago when starting journaling. The first foot trace was a complete disaster by the way.

So, what did I learn this week:

1. Pen > pencil.
2. Danny Gregory rocks. He has tons of books and is co-founder of the Sketchbook Skool. Once I knew that, I enrolled in the "beginning" kourse.
3. I like sketching more than doodling.
4. "Seeing" is incredibly hard: I constantly mess up proportions.
5. Adding watercolor seems to add a lot of dimension.

Let's take a look at what Danny does:

{{< pin "381609768399365667" >}} {{< pin "233976143118067754" >}}

Awesome.