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."

Comments

Re:duno about this

[tverbeek]

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.