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Design Software Weakens Classic Drawing Skills
mosel-saar-ruwer writes "A recent conference, hosted by UC-Berkeley's College of Environmental Design, sought to 'examin[e] the need and role for drawing today in the design professions and fine arts'. In this Reuters summary, via C-NET, the participants seem to agree that the emergence of sophisticated graphics software has coincided with a startling decline in the basic drawing skills of university students. Apparently teenaged boys don't need to practice drawing their nudes when they can just download them off the web."
Typing reduces handwriting skills, instant messaging reducing conversation skills, etc.
Kind of like how the invention of farms produced a decline in the ability of people to grow their own food?
There aren't many jobs in drawing nowadays anyways. It's all computerized.
http://chickencamels.poemofquotes.com/
You occasionally hear about the executive in a company who can't read or write; but functions well because his secretary does this for him - and his skills are being able to talk a good sales talk and wine-and-dine customres. With modern technology this can happen to all of us.
I think computers will bring on a great new age of illeteracy, where it doesn't even matter if someone has thhose skills.
Yeah, back in the day, everybody had such a nice handwriting, and then that damn Gutenberg had to come along and spoil everything. Bastard!
I'd like to see the study itself. As a fine art + design student, I have some personal interested invested in this. I would guess that its the current "new media" style of teaching destroying drawing capability, not the existence of graphics computers. There are very few ( and the number is decreasing ) schools that require adequate drawing education, the current style is ignoring drawing and teaching students to be funky. Luckily, I've had training in drawing/painting/sculpture/printmaking etc etc before I was allowed to use a computer for my work. Hell, design is easier by hand with cutouts and all sorts of stuff. anyway, I'd blame the current teaching philosophy and not the programs.
Calculators certainly caused my long division skills to deterioate.
While I can see where this article is coming from, and I do think drawing skills are important, I can't help but feeling a slightly reactionary undercurrent to this. A lot of young people now are more comfortable using computers than drawing on paper... so what? You still have to put in a lot of work to create something good, regardless of the medium. Besides, I don't think you have to be good at drawing to be good at creating art on a computer, just as you don't need to be a great painter to produce an excellent sculpture. It's just a new medium that offers possibilities that paper drawing can't, as well as limitations that paper drawing doesn't have.
Right from the beginning of TFA, I got the sense that it was a bunch of old stodges saying "those newfangled machineries!, no sense to it!". I am not an artist, I can barely handle stick figures, but I think that computer aided artistry is going to end up like computer aided drafting, a vital step in the evolution of the species. Art has always existed for one purpose, to evoke an emotional response in the viewer, good or bad, that is art. If Artists today are using computers to progress faster, to push boundaries, to express themselves in ways not possible before, how can this be a bad thing?
Apparently teenaged boys don't need to practice drawing their nudes when they can just download them off the web.
So anyone who uses a web browser is now a power user working with "sophisticated graphics software"?
The summary may be wacko, but the real article refers to things like Adobe Creative Suite 2, rather than web browsers, as the sophicticated graphics software.
The invention and popularization of the gun led to a decline in swashbuckling skills, did it not?
These days, where there are guns (substitute any newer technology,) swords are used more for nostalgic fun or novelty, as hand-drawing may become.
(FSM at work: gunpowder igniting upped global temperature, causing less sword-wielding pirates. Ramen.)
I've also heard that modern artists don't know how to mix their own paints from animal dung, blood and dirt.
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The-Infamous-P-M-A-C:~ sapnak$ vi comment
i
I come at this story from a different angle. I'm a tech who's starting to
be infatuated with drawing.
It works like this: I spend 90% of my time at work sitting in front of a PC
(a Mac, but that distinction is mighty blurred these days..). I troubleshoot
IT problems and design software. Historicaly, my free time at home was spent
doing thing like playing games and watching movies. It's all virtual,
abstract, and intangable.
Last year, I was in laid up for a bit and found myself with some time and
crayons on my hands -- and I realized that I have no drawing skills. So I
took a semester long "drawing for n00bs" class at a local school. I'm almost
done with it, and it's really changed me.
1) It's a great fun to be able to get down and dirty with real materials.
charcoal, pencils, ink, etc.
2) Even n00bs can make pretty things with a little help
3) I started to notice how much shitty computer-made art there is on the
web (for values of art == design).
Related to the article directly, there's something in this debate that reminds
me of the assembler vs. compiler arguments in tech circles. Is it better
if you know what's going on and how to do it yourself? Is there value in
doing it the hard way?
-- Have you ever imagined a world with no hypothetical situations?
"If Artists today are using computers to progress faster, to push boundaries, to express themselves in ways not possible before, how can this be a bad thing?"
Which is why I'm not a C/C++ programmer. But use non-mainstream languages.
Does it matter how art is done as long as the viewers like it? Applies (almost exclusively) to art. Drawing skills used to be the only tool to express or create art. But now using Photoshop also allows people to express themselves, shows their creative nature, and introduces a new form of drawing skill. Nobody stole your cheese, it's just moved some place else. And in regrads to online messengers..... A social retard like myself would not have been able to converse properly if not for IRC and ICQ and other messengers.
I love humanity, it is people I hate
... the invention of the new high-tech material called "canvas" has led to a dramatic decline in traditional cave-painting skills among incoming art students at Bedrock University.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
While things like this might erode such skills, I'm pretty certain that there isn't much call for the lost art of wagon wheel making thanks to Mr Ford, or lye soap making etc... its the natural way of things. Film developing has kind of gone out of style these days too... uhhh so what?
Drawing skills are seldom needed these days, and for where they are, that just makes artistic folk more appreciated...
Its not software that erodes or diminishes drawing skills, it happens when people have no incentive or reason to use said skills. No news here...
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Its a matter of what you do with what you find on the internet and with technology.
This was done in genuine #2 pencil by a human hand http://www.threeseas.net/pencil-nude.jpg
This was done to try and correct bad caring for the artwok http://www.threeseas.net/pencil--nude.jpg
But today technology can take a photo from a cell phone and make it look like pencil.
So only to a collector might such work be of value.
Then there is the talent in photography to produce the original photo.
Honestly, a student genuinely interested in the media of pencil by the human hand, then they will pursue it.
So what it means is that we simply have more interested as collectors or at least observers.
As an art student, I definitely agree with this article. I've had (and am presently in) rather serious drawing classes, and sucked at all of them. I've also messed with computer graphics since I was around 5. I've noticed the same condition in other students in my classes who work primarily with computers.
There are still way too many students who've never heard of Illustrator for this to be any kind of threat to the future of art, but it's still rather disturbing.
It's not a very relevant skill to most academic pursuits.
This is UC Berkeley's Architecture school. Older architects, who learned how to do everything by hand, have been bitching and moaning about the reduced skillsets of students since computers were introduced in architecture schools.
Yes it's true. But computers in architecture are here to stay. Drafting by hand is extremely inefficient and not done by the vast majority of architecture firms. Hand drawing skills are still to be desired however. Spending the extra time drawing by hand forces you to think more about the importance of every line you draw. When you draw in CAD, its very easy to zoom in and out and lose the sense of what should or should not be visible in a particular drawing, depending on the scale it will be displayed at. When working by hand however, you are very concious that you don't need to draw that toilette paper holder in the bathroom stall because its barely a dot or smudge on the paper.
If you can draw and draft compelling works by hand, your skills can be translated to CAD. The reverse is not true.
The remedy to this is not to take computers out of architecture schools, the remedy is to require more hand-drawing classes. If you want the students to have art skills, make them take art classes.
But, like I said, this is not a new debate... the exact same things were being said when I was in architecture school 9 years ago. And people older than me say the same things were said when they were in school. Old-timers like to bitch and moan about "the good old days". The irony is that these same old-timers were criticised by their respective predicessors for the exact same thing: newer drafting tools meant that students were getting worse at freehand drawing; newer modeling tools and materials (i.e. plastics and precut small hardwoods) meant that students were getting worse at woodworking; newer art materials (cheap watercolors, latex paints) meant that students were getting worse at guache and oil painting.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
My girlfriend is currently in an illustration & design program, and she had to present a 20-piece portfolio of work. Her entire first year is hands-on stuff, they only touch computers in the second and third years. I think most programs are still like that. And really, it seems unlikely that people's drawing skills will generally decline.. just like music, people will always be making art. Those who are good at drawing are usually doodlers, and that is something that just comes naturally. I doubt that the presence of computers has much of an effect on that. Just a hunch though.
As someone with pretty good drawing skills (I can sketch a human that looks human), I've found that I am totally unable to use graphic design software. I can't even draw a proper stick figure in Paint. Does anyone else have a similar experience? Must someone who is good at one be bad at the other?
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
Apparently teenaged boys don't need to practice drawing their nudes when they can just download them off the web.
Design software and drawing skills? CG porn isn't quite there yet...
I do a bit of artwork from time to time--on computers and off--and I'd say pencil and paper drawing skills are essential for producing truly good computer artwork. Not even the best graphics tablets can imitate the tactile feedback you get from a good piece of paper and it's almost infinitely easier to produce quality computer art if you storyboard and produce concept sketches first. That's where the paper comes in.
I observed simular phenomena in engineers graduating in 1980... a friend who was an excellent artist in high school could no longer draw after receiving an Electronics Engineering degree. He claims it was just from lack of practice, but I think it was also due to Engineering school teaching people to not think artistically. I've lost most of my artistic talent since high school too, but I never had that much to begin with. Drawing skill is like a muscle -- if you don't excercise it, it atrophies.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
As a former design student, a design professional and instructor I found the post, the article and the first two comments a bit distressing. I'll try to keep my comments concise.
1. Blaming the tools is the first sign of a bad instructor
2. Drawing skills are still extremely valuable and *ARE* taught with digital tools today (Wacom tablets are wonderful)
3. Finding someone to agree (or disagree) that a piece of art is good isn't very hard; it's a matter taste to most, even the 'educated'
4. Drawing on the computer is just as challenging and frustrating as drawing in any other fashion; more so because of the myriad of tools and effects that can be used in a single drawing
5. Most professors that degrade the computer as a design tool are usually computer illiterate or barely literate and can be equated to math instructors that think that we should all go back to slide rules and ditch calculators (although for some types of calculations they may be correct)
My point is, the tool is not to blame. And, because the skills aren't necessarily directly transferrable from one medium to another (from graphite and paper to stylus and tablet, or mouse and screen) doesn't mean the artist is lacking in ability. All artists find a medium that they are comfortable with and will (in a lot of cases) stick to that medium for the duration of their careers. Just because I'm BETTER at drawing on the computer than drawing on a piece of paper doesn't make me a bad artist, creative thinker, or whatever. It means I've found a medium that allows ME to express my creativity.
As a leftie, the opposite is true for me (pun intended). I have pretty bad handwriting, but I love doing calligraphy. On paper, my results aren't so good. But using a Wacom tablet in Corel Painter, Photoshop, etc., I achieve amazing results; the letters come out like they're supposed to, and everything looks like I imagined it should.
Same goes for basic drawing. My lines (and drawings) look much better when created with the Wacom instead of traditional media.
That said, when it comes to painting, I find there's no substitute for REAL watercolors.
Nothing is inexplicable; only unexplained -Tom Baker, Doctor Who
Oh noes! Design software reduces our drawing skills? It must be stopped! While we're at it, let's ban fire starters. How many people do you know who can start a fire the good old fashioned way, with two sticks?
Sunwalker Dezco for Warchief in 2016
'Nuff said.
There's been a lot of cognitive studies done on right brain / left brain in regards to creative expression. For example, left handed people, tend to use their right side of the brain (which is believed to contain most of the creative and artistic processes). But many left-handers, myself included, learned to use a mouse right handed and type with both hands. So say a left hander has gone from freehand drawing (a right brained activity) to electronic using right or both (mostly a left brained, or logical activity) -- that would be a different process.
Reason I mention this, is a larger proportion of artistic people are left-handed then in the general population; I think lefties make up about 10%, but notice how many artistic people are left-handed, a lot.
I also can say from experience, the mechanical process of typing and using a mouse is WAY differt than feeling a pencil/charcoal on textured paper, or the sensation of working with oil or acrylic paint on canvas, or better yet in true 3d in clay or stone. I started college as a studio art major, so have some experience here.
I've also seen studies that when writing a letter to say a friend, by hand, versus an email, they've found different parts of the brain are used. And also, the nature of the letter itself is different (hand written letters I believe have more 'emotional content'). Can't find the article, but I'll look for it.
Given these kinds of things; I think it's likely there is an effect of creating works of art on a PC than the 'old fashioned way'. Doesn't mean it's good or bad, but I could see it affecting how people work and create.
Lastly, I would argue that learning to draw things proportionately by hand, with proper depth and shading, is damn hard; but software can mask or add to those shortcomings since they offer so many filters and tools to do it so easily. In a sense, maybe you don't develop you artistic 'muscles' as much?
Just some thoughts...
'The unexamined life is not worth living' - Socrates
Should check out this artist, Linda Bergkvist. She's in the realistic realm:
http://www.furiae.com/gallery/spoiled.jpg
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Killed my freehand drawing mad skillz.
I was a very good freehand artist until I took my first technical drafting course in junior high school. Took another one in high school, plus 6 credits of what used to be called "mechanical drafting." The icing in the cake was that we were the transition class for the switchover to AutoCAD (this was back in 1987 or so).
By the time I finished the transition to AutoCAD I could barely draw freehand anymore. I don't know if it was the tedious and repetitive drafting, or the detached way in which we embraced AutoCAD. What I do now is I can't draw 1/10th as good as I was able to when I was 12-13 years old.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
"This is UC Berkeley's Architecture school. Older architects, who learned how to do everything by hand, have been bitching and moaning about the reduced skillsets of students since computers were introduced in architecture schools."
So how's this debate any different than the "calculators will stunt people's math skills" argument?
i am an architecture student and a computer scientist (a floor wax and a dessert topping, baby) -- and i have seen a lot of the degraded drawing skills discussed in the article. the real problem, i think, isn't that architecture students nowadays don't know which end of the pencil to stick in the scary-twirling-blade-with-a-handle thingy -- it's that drawing is a way of "feeling" your way through to understanding of the physical world, and it's that intuitive knowledge that they lack.
an extreme illustration -- if you sit on your computer making ass-kicking spacescapes all night long, you may not understand that a two-hundred foot cantilever is, on our little planet, in many cases, physically unwise. oh, you might know it, intellectually -- but you might not really *feel* it in your bones -- the way you would if you spent years on the floor with legos, and another few years drawing nature and building with an actual pencil, in your actual hand -- getting the feel of the world and of architecture in your hands and your body. technology will, of course, catch up with that lack, as well -- but it hasn't yet, and you can tell, often, by looking at the stuff the non-drawers produce...
Imagine a future world without computers... it will involve knowing how to kill things with pointy sticks!
What about the decline in common sense in recent years?
Art is whatever the observer thinks it is.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
My mother designs kitchens for a living. Serious kitchens that go in million dollar homes...upscale showroom kind of stuff. She used to do it all by hand, and would swear against ever using a computer. Well she did some work for a company that required her to use some CAD software (this one). After working with it for a few months she couldn't go back. According to her, it did so much of the work for her that it allowed her to focus more on the designs and layout of the kitchen and less on fixing errors. Now any draftsman would see this as a reduced skill set. Your drafting board skills get rusty, and you can't do as much. However, if you look at the big picture, her productivity has skyrocketed and her designs have benefitted from the use of CAD tools.
As previously mentioned, it's the Compiler and Debugger vs Assembler argument. It's keyboard vs handwriting. It's growing your own food vs buying it at the grocery store. We're not so good at hunting, gathering, or painting on cave walls anymore either, and I can picture a bunch of cavemen standing around lamenting about that newfangled paper and how it's ruining their basic skills.
Whenever a new technology usurps an old one, the skills required to use the old one will fade. Not that there isn't intrinsic value in the old pen and paper...I'm just saying this is the way of the world.
I after using a computer and tablet almost exclusively for a couple of years, I can tell you that I developed a horrible case of "Undo Dependency". I actually came to rely on being able to undo things, and my real drawing skills suffered for it. I didn't see this coming *at all*, and it was pretty alarming when I finally noticed it. It's been a real bitch to kick the habit.
"You know why you do not see me styling wit my homies? Because I have no homies!!" -Mojo Jojo
Does it decrease drawing skill or does it just not reinforce/rely on those skills as much.
I.e. how well can you draw a circle/line free hand?
When was the last time you had to?
Does this mean tools like a ruler and a compass decrease the ability to draw circles and lines? No it doesnt, it just means less people actually do/practice those things free hand. And there are tools that provide better results.
Same thing here, people just dont feel the need to practice drawing free hand.(so less people keep doing it after college)
Given some time and designs start to burn out and people will go back to drawing/free hand work.
Look at comic books, Marvel comics in the 90s saw a decline in pencil work as they started to go for all digital ink and color. The result was a mess, crappy looking figures with gradients and colors that looked very dull. meanwhile you had comics coming out from other companies like Wildstorm and Image that had extremely fine and detailed pencil and ink work, blended with computerized color. The shit hit the fan at marvel and now they make movies, but thats a diffrent story.
There are a handful of skills every paranoid /. reader should have. Lye soap making is one of them. When society crumbles, and the world falls to anarchy, the man who can make soap is worshiped by many. ;)
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Office software weakens classic writing skills...
See, kids who grow up with computers don't learn basic art skills =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Apparently teenaged boys don't need to practice drawing their nudes when they can just download them off the web.
This is, by far, the most amusing Slashdot summary I have read in quite a long time.
Dang! I remember Deluxe Paint. I used to use Deluxe Paint to upgrade 4 bit game graphics to 8 bit graphics back in the day for a gaming company. I also used Deluxe Paint on my Amiga to make a product called Digital Collage.
I have to agree with both the parent AND your comment. Although it is true that the de-emphasis on drawing by curriculum can be at fault (and the influence still of the "anything goes" style of rendering introduced by abstract expressionism), I began updating my portfolio in a new direction a few months ago and discovered to my horror that I had lost many of my basic skills. Oh, I remembered, but my hand didn't. So I've started from scratch (as part of the flickr community here.) I'm picking up speed to be sure, but all that photoshop work I did over the past several years took me away from the desk and adversely affected my skills.
This isn't rocket science, though. If you don't use it, you lose it. I think bringing awareness to the problem is a good thing, however. If it was such an obvious conclusion as some of the cheekier posters contend, why would so many artists be experiencing this problem? We'll just have to work harder to make time for the pencil and paper (Sorry, but graphic tablets just aren't there yet...too much lag and who can afford a Cintiq?)
The Splintered Mind - Overcoming
WOW!
THAT was one HAL of a test, 3seas (u managed to link to some nip and tuck, wink wink). To-get-her was EZ. I clicked both URLs and got thru. Oh, maybe it's that the first 65 or so of us posters aren't so horny as hell as to bring down that site. They'll need to MIR-ROR HER later on, I guess...
image word: citrus
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Virtualized killing is making today's killers less violent.
Case in point is Brian Denham's Killbox comic. The work is amazing.
Regardless of which method is actually used, it takes a mastery of the art to produce great work. Understanding is probably the greater part of any art, the rest is actual technique. You can't just sit down with Illustrator or Draw and whip something out unless you understand the theories and concepts needed to make eye-catching drawings.
R(k)
Anything done on a PC could be construed in this way.
Remember when people used ta write letters by hand?
Remember when people used to work out their own budgets?
Hell... Remember when people used used to handcode HTML? now you got Dreamweaver, Frontpage blah blah blah
The same can be said for any technological advance... i mean remember telegraphs, then landlines now mobiles... where does it end?
It can still be called art. Just because it was created on a PC does not exclude it as being art.
Trolling along, singing a song...side by side
I see nothing surprising or terribly interesting by this. People use a skill less and its not as good. Any kind of automation or change in the way things are done are likely to reduce the skill level of the way things were previously done.
automatic transmissions reduced the over-all ability of the population to use a clutch. We could spend all day here saying how things are different than they were last week, last year, or 10 years ago.
Maybe I'm a bit old school. I did study industrial design, and currently work in automotive engineering. I feel that even though that CAD/CAE has unumerable advantages over the old drafting process, the ability to clarify and express ideas using a sketch is priceless and much more efficient that using a computer. You would be amazed just how many ideas are concieved on a bar napikin. I'm not talking about the final product.
Also, from an artistic standpoint, important concepts such as composition, line quality, volume are best learned using pencil, charcoal, etc.. I would bet that Most successfull graphic professionals have a strong drawing skills.
Oh, and for the record, anyone who has taken a figure drawing class knows that the typical model is anything but sexually appealing.
Jeff
Like anything there are pros and cons.
One could argue that the invention of matches has seen the decline in our ability to start a fire by rubbing two stick together... but personally everytime I am planning on an pyromaniacal spree I am glad I don't have to resort to the "good old ways" to kick things off (it really eats into one's burning time).
Seriously though, technology always comes at a price. Making design tools more accesible to the broader public increases the number of people out there "designing" but like anything, quantity rarely produces quality.
'Necessity' as the mother of all things has long lost out to it's father, 'Laziness' (and us humans do generally love to take the easy path).
Why manually layout and kern type when most applications do an adequate job for you?
Why spend years learning how to draw when you can whack something together in PhotoShop in minutes and then use the charcoal filter over it to make it look "authentic"?
Why go play frisbee outside when you can be 007 on your PC indoors?
On the plus side, perhaps this will clarify that long confused line between artist and designer?
Runs counter to what I'm seeing. To me, there seems a resurgance of drawing and graphite art: see the forums on sites such as WetCanvas, ArtPapa and DeviantArt. Seems to be growing rather than declining.
DevArt gallery
After all, you don't see me complaining about the fact that spellcheck and "grammar" check have made me the functioning illiterate you see today.
Math is math. Regular expression is regular expression. The tools are there. The future is now.
Who needs Classic drawing skillz when you've got OSX drawing skillz?
I honestly thought that when I first read it - shows you where I'm at in the 'computers dominating my life' stakes.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
I am a graphic artist who designs web sites and corporate image for a living but I also draw and paint for recreation. I use all the standard computer graphics applications in my work (Adobe) but have found that I need to do real 'hands on' art to feel happy. I love using my Mac for work but there is no comparison between computer art and traditional media. Artist need to get their hands dirty and use their brain in a different way. The former is like looking at porn online, the latter is like sex with a beautiful woman.
Photo-referencing is really common in comics nowadays. Any illustrator could photo-reference, but it seems like now they just surf porn sites (well Greg Land does anyways) and then use Photoshop to create their panels.
7 44.html
This can be good, such as Alex Maleev's work on Daredevil, or not so good, such as Greg Land's work on Ultimate Fantastic Four.
Greg Land gets some hate in a few places:
http://www.shortpacked.com/d/20060215.html
http://community.livejournal.com/scans_daily/1191
And while there are more comics out there now that go for the photo-referencing, the vast majority still don't. Comic shelves seem to have room for lots of different styles, and this is just one more.
Since your UID is smaller than mine, I can only conclude that you're trolling. -s20451 (410424)
I will wager any dollar ammount that brian worked extensively in "fine" mediums honing his skills in life drawing classes, obsevational drawing... years of work to produce work that fine. The point EVERYONE in this thread seems to be missing is that the article is not saying computers are BAD but that students don't take the time to learn the concepts and theories. Booting Photoshop and slapping some gradients and the plastic wrap on an image is considered art to many students today. I consider myself a decent artist, and my work always looks much sharper and crisp when using the computer as a tool, but I use it as such. I spent the better part of my life studying figures, drawing in pencil/pen/marker/oil/watercolour to get to the point I am today.
One need only take a glance at deviant art or any other free web art sites, or the countless webcomics, to notice that a copy of Photoshop and a marginal ability to draw lines gives people the impression they are decent artists. Not to marginalize the work of aspiring artists, but it is fundamental they return to traditional mediums and studies to futher their abilities. Yes, absolutely as you pointd out, the computer is an AMAZING tool for artists, probably the most important breakthrough in art medum in the last 100 years or so, but it is only that a tool.
This is garbage. As a 3d character animator i've seeked out to improve my classical figure drawing skills in recent years.
Why?
Because if you cant draw it, you cant truely see it. Seeing things is having an understanding of form. Yes you can have references, but you will never understand that form in your mind three dimensionally until you can express it quickly on paper.
Yes we can all make a sphere easily in 3D. We see a sphere in our mind, so we click the Create Sphere button in 3D.
BUT Lets talk about the shoulder, or thigh... the complex forms it takes as muscles work underneith the skin and fat. First we need to understand where those muscles are, what they look like and how they attach to the structure of the skeleton. We also need to know how they work, that way we can easily see in our minds the forms they create. Muscles cause our body to form interesting shapes that are very dynamic looking from all angles.
Unless we have a good understanding of this, and can quickly express it on paper through drawing, we really cant sculpt it in 3d from all angles.
I've been drawing my entire life, and I was always good at drawing arms, and chest muscles... but i noticed that i could only do them from certain angles. I had problems with foreshortening/perspective and form. I also was quite bad at legs and hands. Now its hard to draw an expressive character without understanding the forms of the hand.
When i got into animation... i noticed all of the great animators could see things in their heads as i could, but they could express them... and i could not because i could not draw like they could. I may have had the pose, or the action in my mind but i could not translate that shiluoette to paper... until i took classical figure drawing.
Now i can draw whats in my head. That is very important because 3d work is very involved. If you can not draw your idea out in a quick sketch and then refine it... work it on paper... Why would you sit down and put a ton of work into 3D modelling when chances are... its not coming from a clear vision.
Sure you can look at an empty lot, and see a giant building, and you know you can get people to build it, and you can use a hammer...
But you need to really see your vision, a blueprint before you embark on the task.
Learning classical figure drawing is essential for animators, fashion designers etc because its not only about form, its about expression.
Drawing isnt technical, its about taking that spark of thought in your brain and using your hand to express, or guesture your emotion onto a physical canvas. The thought in our mind is but a moment, but once we can capture it on paper, its easier to edit, refine and view.
Drawing is essential and its so rewarding because it really does help you to express your ideas, find poses for animation, and it has been true for a long time in animation that... those who can draw anything, are usually classically trained figure pencil artists.
The best cartoonists understand form first, then widdle down to simple toony characters because they understand the body language and how to push it to abstract levels.
Being able to draw, is to have a clear vision and a way to express it to others. A thought is but a moment in your head. Sitting down and working for weeks on a 3D designed character could proof a complete waste of time because you never had a clear vision.
The first one was better. Less defined squares. It looked more natural and fit the mood better.
qz
Most of the article was referring to art, but my $0.02 as someone who draws on a daily basis as part of my professional work:
As an engineer, the ability to be able to come up with a hand sketch at a meeting to explain to a client or an architect how you plan to solve a problem is important. being able to draw clearly enough that someone can go from having no idea what you are conveying, to understanding it to the point where they can suggest changes or alternatives is the goal.
You may well be able to drive a CAD machine to make a perfect drawing of the detail, but unless you can sketch it up in the first place, it is hard to sell the concept.
In some cases, freehand sketches are enough for something substantial to be built from, and there may be little benefit in transferring the drawing to CAD. Some engineers wont use rulers in their hand sketches (using tracing paper laid over grid paper), as the eye will more readily read an almost straight hand line as straight, but will look at a ruled line and compare it against other ruled lines, and spot any minor discrepencies in being parallel, or the like. It is counter intuitive, and took me a while to adjust to it, but my sketches are looking better for not using a ruler to get straight lines.
There is a place for both computer generated drawings as well as hand drawn, and the balance needs to be found in the training of professionals who will need to be familiar with both.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World" 1 John 4:14
This is news?
I just hope the author got a decent kickback from Adobe. At least that way *someone* would be getting something of value from this meaningless piece of drivel.
A point by point summary the article, for those who want to save a minute that might otherwise be spent reading the whole thing:
---------------------
Grandiose title, largely unrelated to the text.
"University instructors" and "teachers" say students can't draw today, and the reason is because they use computers.
Drawing with a computer is easy, and doing so makes one lazy.
A professor of architecture who hosted a conference on the topic says, "I see an increasing passivity on the part of students." (But we're not going to give you enough context to guess at what the hell his actual point might have been.)
"Teachers say" drawing with computer is easy. Not using a computer gives one the qualities of a saint.
Another professor of architecture says "it" takes a long time, and adds some meaningless spiritual gobbledegook. (What "it" is, or why on earth we should care that he finds drawing a spiritual experience, or indeed why he would bring up the subject when he's meant to be discussing the decline in his student's artistic abilities, are left as exercises for the reader.)
BLATANT, TOTALLY ABSURD, PARAGRAPH-LONG ADVERT FOR ADOBE SOFTWARE THROWN INTO THE MIDDLE OF THE ARTICLE FOR NO REASON.
Drawing is good, says the director of an art school.
Computers are good too, says the director of a computer-art school.
Some drawings sell for a lot of money.
An art auctioneer says that many people buy drawings.
Drawings are cheap compared to paintings and sculpture. (Err... didn't this set out to be an article about computers?)
It doesn't cost much money to draw on paper.
An artist says, it doesn't cost much money to draw on paper.
----------------------
I sure am glad I read that. My world view will never be the same.
Drawing skill isn't that important. If I'm creating art from something I can see, it's the seeing part that needs the most practice. Small details become more and more apparent to the trained eye. Impressionists for example aren't famous because they could mix and dab paint skillfully. It's because they had the vision to create their paintings.
TFA was kinda weak but I can see where it is coming from. However if a student fails to meet the standard then that student should "fail" the class. /semi tangent
Universities are as much to blame for passing less than mediocre students as students are for not learning what they need to. Not saying that students are perfect, and in fact at that age they should not be babied along, but it's not the students that are running the classes it is (or should be) trained and seasoned professionals.
TTL metering killed photography in the 60s. Priority auto-exposure in the early 70s, programme auto-exposure in the late 70s. Autofocus killed photography in the 80s along with matrix and TTL flash metering. 3D and colour matrix metering killed photography in the 90s. Digital cameras killed photography in the 00s
Tools are tools are tools.
Photoshop won't make you a good graphic designer.
A shiny DSLR won't make you a good photographer.
Art will always be art... well, except when it's lobster telephone.
--- Do you believe in the day?
Digital tools are both good and bad I think. With Photoshop (+wacom) I can do more color studies. I don't have to buy expensive materials or set things up. The tools are just a click a way. I can mix and select colors faster. The threshold of having to set things up and clean up is not there. On the other hand I've gotten a bit sloppy, maybe because I work at a screen scale and can't zoom in the same way as with the eye on a paper.
My paintings can be seen on my homepage but I'd rather recommend taking a look at Craig Mullins stuff, he is an excellent artist who do a lot of his paintings with Photoshop.
There's many people who 'cheat' by using filters over photos and such. I say cheat because these persons later say (or let people believe) they did it from scratch. It's not cheating if they are frank about their work process.
The Chair Corp. comic(*00-12)
If the stuff these kids turn out is boring and derivative, it's only because they are boring and derivative people. A talented artist can do wonderful things even with Photoshop. The GIGO law applies to digital art too.
There's no place like ~.
I knew something was up when the ads started saying 'How well can you draw Tippy the PIECHART' instead of the usual lovable forest fauna...
Computer graphics apps can't teach anatomy, proportion, shading, perspective, and composition. Dicking around on the computer is NOT going to impart these eessential skills. Having a modicum of drawing talent, the best thing that ever happened to my drawing ability was to learn the above basics. Want to draw sexy chicks? Learn anatomy and proportion for starters, then move on to shading/lighting. For drawing people, a great starting point is Drawing the Head and Figure by Jack Hamm. The best drawing books are by Andrew Loomis, but unfortunately most of them are out of print but they can be found *cough* online.
All these guys who went through four-five years of intensive engineering experience and very few can draw a straight line, much less an isometric box without a computer. What ends up being lost is the ability to quickly convey concepts "on the fly". It's one thing to come up with the greatest idea in the world, another to be able to express it well enough to convince others to follow it to fruition.
I suspect that the loss of "arts" in education could have a more drastic impact on our creativity as a nation than we could even comprehend. The "concept on a napkin" is being lost.
(disclaimer- i am an engineer)
Yes, Photoshop was the basis for his 4 by 4 foot sized paintings. He took and image, photoshopped it, then printed it out, and made paintings of the printouts. Ironically, he didn't paint any faster than the other art students in the class, nor did he paint with any more creativity than anyone else. So, computers didn't ruin him, nor did it really help him. It was really a mental crutch to make his art work look different for a reason, he used technology. Oh, and he could draw pretty good as well.
I'm horrible at drawing things by hand, definitely not what you'd term an "artistic" person in the traditional sense. When I discovered computers and graphic programs it was awesome because I was able to use technical skill express my artistic side that would otherwise never have seen the light of day.
The shape of her arms looks a little odd, especially the one on the left (her right). The texturing of the hair is really great.
Back in primary school (that's Australian for Elementary) I used to draw all the time. It was one of my favourite passtimes, and I was good at it. Then I discovered the addictive world of computer games and programming (although I had been playing games for several games, I wasn't an addict). In high school I spent much less time drawing and more time playing, and what do I have to show for it? Not much. My drawing skills could have been so much better by now. When I realised this, shortly after finishing school, I decided that computer games are not worth investing my time in. At least programming is useful, but if I want a rush I'd rather go ride a mountain bike with friends than pretend to shoot them. I still don't draw much - I've got out of the habit, but I'm not wasting fifteen hours a week gaming. That said, here I am, wasting time on Slashdot...
This sig is covered under the GPL.
And so began the decline of Hentai
The emergence of of ink and papyrous has coincided with a startling decline in the basic stone carving skills of temple apprentices
due to funding cuts most elementary and middle schools have no art classes and few if any high schools do either has any affect what so ever on basic drawing skills. It's gotta be the computers. Damned if any baby boomer (my generation) would dare take the blame for screwing this one up.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
There must be a template in Word for these kind of articles by now:
E N_A_KID."
"$OLD_SKILL is not being used so much any more because of $NEW_TECHNOLOGY. Kids these days won't learn $PURPORTED_ADVANTAGE of the old ways. $RANT_ABOUT_WALKING_UPHILL_TO_SCHOOL_BOTH_WAYS_WH
Education time is finite, adding new skills necessarily means some old skills will be pushed out.
Art is skillfull worksmancraft, take look at jugend styl. Computer based art is like garden art, sure one can make a great garden but i won't suspect the next van Gogh to be using a computer. As art is more about artistic feeling giving other people a view of how a painter or drawer looks at reality. This isn't learned with the next version of adobe but learned by practicing.
You might check my webiste as i have drawn a lot of models at http://www.peterboos.tk/
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
The slashdot headline has little to do with the actual article. There is no causality present between the use of CAD and drawing, or at least none that has been discussed in the article itself, and the association is much clearer. My design students generally suck at drawing when they begin their studies for a simple reason: they've been spending less time practicing drawing (and more time playing WoW, not necessarily using CAD).
..
A bigger problem that isn't mentioned is that the command for traditional drawing and sketching skills in the United States is shrinking, and growing dramatically in China. http://www.core77.com/reactor/08.04_china.asp has an interesting article about this topic, which - in my opinion - is the design equivalent to off shoring in India. Cheaper labor combined with equally (or often better) skilled employees is a no-brainer for traditional US business. Additionally, the manufacturing firms in China will often "throw in" design services for free if you tool or manufacture with them.
It's gotten to the point where the Taiwanese are off shoring to China because it's cheaper
Obviously if you stop drawing, you lose some of your ability at drawing. I think this applies to about anything. It doesnt' matter if you use computers to draw, it matters that you stop doing real drawings. By the way, as an MFA student, I can tell you that life drawing rules. If you think any computer simulation will ever, ever replace life drawing, you're wrong!
stuff |
Practice makes perfect.
Who'd have thunk it?
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
I find it rather amusing that slashdot even cares about computer users that draw. That being said I started doing "drafting" type drawings in 1989. I currently work in an architectural firm drawing both architecture and mechanical systems. If you think that using a computer to draw is somehow inferior then boy are you out to lunch. I bet I can code better than the average programmer can draw with a cad station. It is a different mindset and is far more flexible and productive than any manual graphics process period. As far as medium I can print to a postage stamp or a billboard. Same image... Same resolution. These are after all vector based graphics. When the article mentions that it wants more "production" then there is no other solution. All that being said the only thing more annoying than a liberal arts person writing about the latest thing in database hashing algorithms is a computer geek writing about graphics professionals. They jump back and forth between fine art and technical graphics so much I couldn't make any sense out of weather they were talking about html editors or assembly language programmers. I am yet again encouraged that us lowby graphics folks have been acknowledged as some form of computer nerd. To bad its so general as to be meaningless.
"Apparently teenaged boys don't need to practice drawing their nudes when they can just download them off the web."
Teen age boys are already set or not in their artistic skills. Don't project a geek outlook onto the topic, smaller boys practicing their art usually draw planes and ships.
I've worked in an art and media-ish department in a telecommunications company for a long time, and even 5-6 years ago, we had people who could only work on computers. I recall a power failure we had and about half the artists were just milling about, doing nothing, while the others just pulled out some drawing paper and their pens and pencils and just kept on going.
Those who could draw also had other talents. One of them used to be able to mimic another artist's style (if you could call it that) almost exactly, in a fraction of the time. It was funny: he'd narrate while he was doing it, too: "Multi-color gradient, Alien Skin-dropshadow, Arial 36 point, done!"
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
Plato lamented that the invention of writing could cause men to forget epic poetry. And they did, they did!
Before writing, poets memorized ten thousand lines of Homer by ear, listening to other poets.
After writing? Few people memorize anything by ear; only a savant memorizes the Iliad.
People develop skills which their environment accomodates. When environments change, so do societies.
-kgj
-kgj
As a professional illustrator and teacher for over a dozen years, I've heard this debate for more than a decade. There is merit to the points discussed, but the article represents only one side of the argument. Some other points to consider:
-Many senior artists and instructors are unwilling or unable to learn how to use digital tools. These instructors have a suspicion and/or disdain for those that can.
-Bad drawing skills have always been common. Programs like Photoshop can help these students make their work appear better. In the past, these students would have remained poor artists (or become art directors). Digital approaches are probably increasing the quality of work at the lower end of the spectrum.
-If used wisely, programs like Photoshop can be an incredible teaching tool. In a non-destructive manner, instructors can make changes to show the effect of a different color scheme, or a correction to anatomy, etc. A student who watches their work being transformed before their eyes in this manner is affected very profoundly... moreso than any other method I've witnessed or used.
That said, I tend to agree with the overall message in the article -the computer can be and is used as a crutch by far too many students. Traditional methods do involve the brain to a greater degree, and the time spent using traditional media does immerse the student in the process, with more consideration and a greater understanding of artistic or conceptual principles as the result. But despite these negative considerations, digital work is here to stay, and students need to learn how to use it correctly. That is the responsilibility of the instructors.
This is the exact same thing they said about cave art when paper was first introduced.
"Seven years of college down the drain. Might as well join the f-ing Peace Corps." - John 'Bluto' Blutarsky
This is a highly valuable skill. Yes, even in today's modern world.
I heard an interview with a Pixar animator. She said they do the storyboarding drawings by hand. Why? "Because it's just faster."
As a scientist, I can communicate complex ideas far, far easier because I can quickly sketch it while speaking. When I want pretty or accurate I go to a computer.
There is no substitute for hand-drawing skill if you are someone who does things.
Cowboy Neal Said: "Apparently teenaged boys don't need to practice drawing their nudes when they can just download them off the web." WTF? I realize you probably just skimmed the article and didn't actually read it so you could spend more time crafting that witty little "grab-em" phrase above, but the article has NOTHING to do with downloading images from the web and everything about the lack of discipline some art students have because they are using computer graphics software.
Some people have brought up that in their education they're still forced to learn basic drawing skills and a solid artistic/craft grounding, and I agree with this (being an artist too). I think it isn't a question of learning those skills though, but a question of using them regularly. I'd hazard a guess that any artist or designer could tell you that the best way to learn those drawing skills is to get a lot of practice in, conversely, when you get to working and suddenly everyone wants to see things 3D modeled or photoshopped because it looks more finished, then you start focusing more and producing those things faster rather than spending the time sketching. When that happens your drawing skills do tend to erode. It isn't that the software is weakening drawing skills, but more that the software changes peoples' expectations which forces artists to work in a different medium. You could probably counteract it by just forcing yourself to do more drawing every day, I know I just realized my marker rendering skills are shot and have been trying to use them more.
I can only imagine the horror of internet forums if we actually had to deal with bad teenage handwriting in addition to the atrocious spelling and grammer... on the other hand... I could make a lot of money with that too...
It used to be junior high and high school that most guys would take hand drafting classes. Wther they'd to on to college to be engineers or just be a mechanic, it was thought important to understand skills like precise machinery description, multiple views, clean line drawing and lettering, etc. This was one of the first skills to be computerized in CAD products of the 1980s.
What's important to take from this article is the perception of drawing skill as a main criteria for a "true" artist. This started as soon as majors evolved that had a primary focus on the computer instead of studio arts. I have a BFA in Graphic Design with an Emphasis on Computer Art. My drawing skills are actually quite good ... but they sure are getting rusty. The flip-side is that I can illustrate nearly anything I can conceive in Illustrator and I can doctor a photo in ways few people would beleive possible if they weren't in the industry.
The important thing to recognize is the nature of the design arts and how traditional studio arts always hold on to the idea of "selling out" for the commercial / computer arts. Well, maybe that's true to some degree. Maybe I should paint in my spare time or draw nudes. But the reality is that my art is seen by millions of people every year and is USABLE. People interact with my art and that's not something a stuio artist can usually say. I don't think this dynamic is very different in other fields. In fact, I'm sure it's the same--the purists holding on to the past and the futurists embracing change.
If I can still hand render my designs on a computer (or a pad of paper with charcoals) then I'm simply acquiring a new set of skills based on the evolution of the profession.
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
Just think, the old fashioned way:
$1 - pencil
$5 - sketchbook
New, obviously better way:
$1000 - base computer
$100 - WACOM tablet
$600 - Adobe Photoshop
------
$1700
Thank god we're getting away from the "horse and buggy" days.
Personally, I like drawing with a pencil or painting with a brush
because I have been working on computers 8 hours a day for 25
years. It is refreshing to get away from the computer for an
hour or two.
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
I'm currently a designer at Portland State University, in a town that is home to a bulging assortment high profile companies to work for; Nike, Gard & Gerber, Wieden & Kennedy, REI, Columbia Sportswear, etc. The number of graphic design majors has been rising steadily over the years, to the point where every class is packed. The old fogies at the university continue to harass n00bs about the necessity for traditional skills and how losing them will somehow make you less of a designer. I'd say it has more to do with the individual than anything else. A good 7/10's of each class has students that produce utter garbage, using all the latest toys and tools, even after years of traditional media classes. Out of every graduating class of design students, only a fraction willprobably ever get to do real design work. If you have a solid gold hammer you can pound nails, but it's still just pounding nails. It's the idea that counts. If you're doing design, you can succeed with a stick in the dirt, just as easily as with a computer. -Art Chantry
These "media" (using both the old and new sense of the word) have a lot in common. As a painter of a few decades I can say that the important thing is the thought processes behind the work. What ideas or energies are you trying to express? Your choice of tools, digital or otherwise, will depend on this. I believe it was Robert Beverly Hale, a venerable teacher of figure drawing at the Art Student's League in New York, who said "drawings are thoughts with lines around them." This is true regardless of whether you're using pencil, drawing tablet, or mouse, or thinking in terms of marks, lines, curves, or volumes. These "thoughts" consist of thousands of myriad decisions about shape, proportion, motion, light, mass.
Figure drawing does help immensely, partly because our minds give us so much more feedback about images of bodies than, say, trees, but also because we live in the body: by connecting lines to felt, physical gesture you can get much more expression into your work.
The beautiful thing about pen/brush/pencil and paper/canvas/panel/... is the absolutely sensitive, sensual nature of mark-making, which is still not quite matched by the digital media. But if a student has powerful graphic ideas and practices their expression assiduously, she will have an impact regardless of her tools. Artists need to learn about traditional tools (for their exquisite sensitivity and to connect with tradition) and the new ones (to take advantage of new visual and technical possibilities).
EOT
while there are many fine digital artists, there are too many and working digitally is too easy. i eschew drawing digitally for the superiority of working traditionally.
-e
I'd like to see the study itself.
RTA. There is no "study".
As a fine art + design student, I have some personal interested invested in this.
Translation: I'm going to take this personally and try to shift blame.
I would guess that its the current "new media" style of teaching destroying drawing capability, not the existence of graphics computers.
New media is a discipline, not a teaching style; maybe you mean postmodern sensibilities. By definition, New Media courses and artworks necessarily involve technology; although it's the instructor's prerogative whether to allow students to submit CG artwork, university drawing classes and foundation-level undergraduate courses continue to emphasize traditional media.
There are very few ( and the number is decreasing ) schools that require adequate drawing education, the current style is ignoring drawing and teaching students to be funky.
As you say, "I'd like to see the study". Be careful about generalizing your limited experience into the status quo. Based on the student work I've viewed here in the States (both before and since completing my fine art studies), I would agree that many liberal arts colleges seem to award degrees to students who are weak in the fundamentals; but to blame this specifically on emergent media is rather facile and astigmatic.
For one thing, a lot of people who don't really have "drawing skills" are now able to more easily produce things on the computer and publish them for the world to see. There's an upside and a downside to this, of course. The disadvantage is that you now see a lot of stuff--especially on the web--done by people who obviously have no artistic ability, and it's terrible. Sometimes this means that people who would have either given up on art or been forced to improve stay lazy. The advantage is that folks who lack the motor control skills to do drawings (who for instance, can't draw a straight line) can now express themselves with drawing tools.
Lots of folks have noted that the important thing in art isn't the skill of drawing or painting, but seeing. This can't be over-emphasized. If you can't see something (really see it, in the sense that art instructors mean) then you can't draw it. In my opinion, as long as learning the software doesn't detract from learning what's important, then there's no harm in using it. The underlying principles of light and shadow, or composition, for instance, are just as important in a Painter project as in a watercolor.
When I was in the army, I spent about 8 months working in a "drafting" shop that produced all kinds of media. Most of what we did was "traditional" (I can still remember cutting out Pantone bits to color overhead projector slides) but computers were being introduced. We never saw them as anything more than another tool--something that was good at a certain set of tasks, but not a universal solution to every design problem. I do distinctly remember excitement that we could produce brochure pages without setting them up on the camera.
I also see areas where technology can help make things easier from a technical standpoint (if that makes sense). I am doing a mural in our gameroom, and instead of working from small print and using a grid (which I've done before) I can just use a projector to put the image on the wall at 50x, and then trace the outlines. That will wind up saving me quite a few hours of work doing the transfer from print to wall. That's not a bad thing.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
I, for one, have the bad habit of going for years without using my basic drawing skills, and they never go away... in fact, they actually seem to improve with time.
Rendering skills -- that is, knowing how to use a particular tool to finish a drawing in a particular medium (like drawing lines with a fine-tip paintbrush, for example) -- are something else. Those are sort of like knowing how to play an instrument. It's muscle memory; once you stop, it takes a while to get back to where you were. But I've seen no evidence that drawing skills just "atrophy" for no reason.
Breakfast served all day!
``Moofie'' said:
>my design skills are better when I have a computer to assist me.
No, your ability to execute a nicely finished design is enhanced, and the speed and efficiency with which one can work improves, but your design skills do not improve.
A good design is a good design whether roughed out on a napkin w/ a felt tip, comped tightly on a layout pad w/ a pencil, written out carefully and expressively w/ a broad-nibbed fountain pen, or as a contract proof done from film using a DuPont Waterproofing system on Glatfelter laid 60# premium paper.
When I interview designers, I ask to see thumbnail sketches --- if they don't have any in their portfolio I send them packing.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
You mean cochineal? It's pretty commonplace stuff and has been used to color many foods over the years. A friend of mine once tried to dye his hair with it years ago. The idiot failed to realize it colors skin just as well as hair and isn't easy to wash out.
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
And those damned GUI's ruined my
ASCII art skills.
Table-ized A.I.
...weaken those skills a little further :)
http://www.rendera.net/
I advertised for someone to design furniture, on Craigslist and also listed with the local art school. Most of the replies were terrible. These kids (mostly they were college students and recent grads)often couldn't draw, couldn't design--they just wanted to play on the computer. They designed things that they knew how to do on the screen, only. And I talk to one guy, really talented, but we were doodling on napkins at dinner--he doesn't know how to draw in perspective. The computer is certainly useful, but, ahem....the point is well taken.
Just use a fountain pen like this one, even though they are cheap and often take some skill to write with they are preferable to quills. Quills are so 18th century, get into the 19th century you insensitive clod!
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
"yes, my horse skills have just tanked since i got a car."
"My bicyle skills tanked when I got a car. I also gained forty pounds in one year as my weekly mileage went from 150-200 to zero."
I laughed at the loss of 'horse skills', thinking it was a few overly rational, humorless people that modded it informative. However, I stopped laughing when I saw the next one about losing bike skills.
It's hard to imagine it, but I'm sure many will 'rediscover' the bicycle (as I have always known it -- 20 years without a car and only a bike and most everything can be done with a little preparation) and soon the roads will look like those in Japan; scenes from a chase in "Black Rain" are coming back to me where there were more bikes on the road than cars.
No sig for you! Come back one year!