TRSE: How To Draw Tutorials: Tools to Help Improve Your Skills

TRSE: How To Draw Tutorials:
It's the Patterns!

Too often I have listened to many novice artists whining about how they suck at drawing, and giving up. Geez! That's what the brains are for!!! It's the patterns!! They're the keys to learning how to draw well!!

Patterns are the forms of imaginary basic shapes (or "bubbles" as some artists call them) and lines, and the examples are circles, squares, triangles, rectangles, and any other basic geometrical shapes. By "reading" and using the patterns will make the drawing efforts much easier. All we do is just draw basic shapes, and then work on them to produce the characters/objects.

Now look at the two pictures of the rose below:

The red lines in the second picture are the example of patterns that you must use your brains/imagination to be able to "see" them. The rose looks like it is made up of "bowls with a "sweatdrop" at the center. So all we do is just draw the "bowls" and a "sweatdrop" and then we can work on drawing the petals (shaped like crescents!).

Now let's take a look at picture of Eternal Sailor Moon below, and see how the picture is broken into basic shapes.
(sorry if some details are hard to see)

You can see that everything around you makes up of basic shapes and lines that can be seen only with your imagination, and that's why it's important for anyone to learn to be able to to "read" and use the patterns if anyone want to be good at drawing.

However, just basic shapes won't do any good alone if we don't think of where the lines and shapes should be placed in order to produce something. Basically, it's the "points" where the lines meet (think of "connect the dots" drawings). If we want to draw a right angled triangle, we would have to think where each corner ("a point") of the triangle should be placed in respect to two other corners before drawing the lines, and it gets easier when we know that only one of three corners is like a corner of a square.

So it goes like this:
    How should we arrange the lines in respect to each other in order to form a face?
    Where to place a big circle (for a head)?
    Where on the face should the eyes be put on?
    Where to put the mouth on the face?.
    Where should the nose be in respect to the eyes?
    And finally, how should we arrange the circles and trapezoids to produce a body?

So, you can become a good artist if you can figure out how to "see" the patterns and using them for your benefit, and remember, without imagination/creativity and logic, you won't be able to get far...