My renewed enthusiasm in the 90s...

In the 80s, while I was pursuing my degree in engineering, I learnt some technical drawing as well as free hand drawing of objects. It helped me to understand shading with various grades of graphite.

Once, while browsing through the shelves of a book stall I came across a couple of art books published by Walter Foster. I purchased them. Some of my early art books are: Painting in Four Mediums and Landscapes You can Paint by William Palluth. Willam Palluth is an wonderful artist and his paintings are like the old masters.

I was more interested in watercolour and thought of learning it from the books I possessed. I wanted to buy all the materials required for watercolour painting. But as soon as as I did a market survey, I found that most of the items such as Masking fluid, Gum Arabic, watercolour brushes and even watercolour paper were not available locally. I also found that oil painting was more popular and the items required for oil painting were available in the art shops. Therefore I decided to try and learn Oil Painting.

My collection of books published by Walter Foster.

Here are some of my early paintings:

Since I could not get a proper watercolour paper, I painted the above two paintings in cartridge paper. Special effect and textures were impossible in this paper. I also used Camlin Artists' watercolour.

As I painted these I realised that the ability to draw, especially free hand drawing is very essential and a prerequisite, rather prelude to a painting. Hence I seriously thought of learning how to draw and sketch. Those days internet was not available so were the information. I had seen an advertisement in a magazine about distance learning where different options were available. I found that cartoon learning course was the cheapest where free hand drawing is included in the syllabus. I took up the course which helped me immensely in my pursuit to learn sketching.

Besids learning how to draw cartoons, three things that I learnt from this correspondence course are:
How to draw in perspective, tone and shading and mind and hand control. Here is an exercise which helped me immensely to draw what I see. It's a simple but powerful exercise.

There are many theories on the right and wrong ways to hold a pencil when drawing. For freedom of movement here is a useful way of holding a pencil. It is better to avoid a 'writing' grip which is suitable only for tightly controlled lines with limited range of directions contained in a small space.

There is a good book named "You Can Draw In 30 Days" by Mark Kistler on drawing which I found to be very useful for beginners and those who are afraid to draw. I followed this book and even today I practice some of the exercise given there. This book can be viewed and even downloaded from http://issuu.com/search?q=you+can+draw+in+30+days.

My course in cartooning in the 90s introduced me to Drawing as the base for my study of Art. It covered basic drawing, tone drawing and simple perspective. Whatever we see with our eyes are three dimensional. Without learning these basic things it is very difficult to draw three dimensional figure in two dimensional surface (paper, canvas etc.).

By looking at the above drawings one can easily make out the one is drawn by a kid and one drawn by person who learnt the art of drawing.

I found that the materials required for learning and practicing drawing are already available at home. You require a pencil, and eraser and simple blank paper. As indicated in my course material I in course of time bought 2B, 4B and 6B pencils. Later however, I mostly used 6B pencil as it is easy to get different tones with varied pressure. However, one has to be careful while applying pressure as the lead of the pencil is very soft and might break.

While I was learning to draw, I found that drawing landscape or still life is easier than drawing flowers or animals. To me portrait drawing is the hardest of all. Landscape is easy as the drawing don't need to be exact replica of the original. However, in case of portrait one has to be very meticulous with every curve. I don't have a fractal mind and those have it are blessed.