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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."
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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?
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
I'm a former illustration student and current tech support geek for a college of art & design. For our foundation/intro-level courses, computers are deliberately left out of the course work. Drawing I & II, Intro to Graphic Design, Color Theory, etc. are all traditional-media classes, because it trains students to focus on getting ideas out of their heads and into a tangible medium, rather than just twiddling knobs and seeing what the computer does, or (worse) going directly from vague concept to digitally-precise "finished" image without the doodling and sketching phase. Computers can be useful tools for serendipitous exploration and experimentation (the ability to play "what if" without having to redraw everything by hand is invaluable), but they're best used by people who've previously learned to do that sort of thing non-virtually.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
'm pretty certain that there isn't much call for the lost art of wagon wheel making thanks to Mr Ford..
First off, most of Mr. Ford's (and Mr. Benz's, and Mr. Olds') original vehicles had wheels with wooden spokes. They moved to steel rims with the technology that became available.
Right now, I'm involved with making movable bridges. Big gears, horribly complicated stress-distributing girders, the like.
What do I like to do for a hobby? Woodwork.
Working in the more primitive medium teaches you things. How stresses effect things, the ways structures move, and so on. Many parallels to be made. I'm self-tought in the finer arts of woodwork, and count my joinery technique as a invaluable experience and teaching tool. Engineering school teaches me how things should react, but there's nothing like sawdust on the floor to drive it home.
I think I need a new sig here.
My father was a graphic designer (all by hand) until he retired about 10 or so years ago. He sold his business to his tech savvy partner and found that the demand for his 'old way' was deemed to expensive by a majority of the client base. All his clients wanted computer savvy designers or people who could at least produce the designs in a computer format. Last 2 years my father has had freelance consulting projects to - get this - do graphic design by hand. Hired by? The guy who my father sold this business to. Reason? No one can do it the old fashioned way by hand anymore.
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)
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
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.