What the f...
Not really working on anything specific at the moment.
Age 36, Male
Monash University
Australia
Joined on 5/21/02
What the f...
It so annoys me when I'm on a tutorial of how to do an explosions or something, and it's basically:
Draw a frame that looks like this.
Now do one that looks like this.
Now do one that looks like this.
And carry on.
this is the sort of tutorial i had most closely in mind when i was making this post.
Art is creative, yes, but there is a correct and incorrect way to imitate nature, which is what most real art teaching aims to do. Reinventing the wheel still makes a wheel, even though you taught yourself, and it's much faster to just learn from someone else.
That said, I think your problem is with teaching formulas (which is what handwriting is), which I would agree with. If someone says "you draw humans by making these lines here, now do it until it looks exactly like mine" is teaching a formula and that's just as useless as figuring it out yourself. However, learing concepts like color theory and figure drawing basics like weight and mass from a teacher isn't going to stifle creative development in any way.
Sorry if I sound confrontational, but I'm in art school right now and I'm paying people to teach me how to glue paper together. It's the biggest waste of time, and it's because people are afraid of stifling this precious and frail originality and creativity that they believe everyone possess. Yet since I'm dramatically undereducated in how to actually draw the human figure and mix colors of paint together, my creativity is stifled because I'm not satisfied with abstract splatting and gobbing of paint. The ideas you laid out here have destroyed art education over the past century, and because I realized that too late I've just had to accept that I'm paying for a piece of paper and I can start actually learning art once I leave college and enroll in a real art school that, funny enough, isn't endorsed by the government with a degree program.
Really, your ideas are an attack on art itself, and they have already destroyed the so called "fine art" due to a lunatic fringe that was accepted into the mainstream at the turn of the century. Please abandon those ideas. Knowledge of the methods that have been used before you will not hurt your creativity.
i think we both agree that a line has to be drawn somewhere. it's just where you draw the line that we are a bit hazy on. you make a lot of valid points though. i've taken them all on board.
Good man! :D
I've never taken any tutorials either. I feel more accomplished and proud of what I've taught myself.
we all gotta start somewhere
I would agree and disagree, I believe that tutorials have a way of reproducing styles, but somethings you can't figure things out by yourself. For the life of me I can not figure out how to draw a shoe. I look at pictures and everything. I have yet to look at a tutorial for that, but if I did I am sure there would be things I would and wouldn't do.
I guess it would have to deal with the person reading the tutorial. How they work. Some people do things by the book and take a tutorial to heart, while others may take it as a suggestion, or something along those lines.
fluffkomix
okay nvm delete my other comment i figured it out.
yes we did all write striving to make it look like the letters at the top of the screen, but eventually over time we all formed it to make it our own style.
if we all had learned to draw from a book like the one's you're talking about we would all start off the same but then eventually form our own style from it.