I definitely have to be in a relaxed state of mind so that the images in my head become less "shifty". It's like trying to focus on something under water when there are waves and ripples in the way. If you're focussed too much, you just get frustrated. You almost have to let your subconscious mind guide your hand, and although I know it's the most popular piece of advice given to anyone who wants to learn new skills, practice really does make perfect. The more you draw something, the easier it becomes and the better you get.
Everytime you draw, you learn a new technique just by the fact that you've tried to create something different than anything you've done in the past. All of these little tricks you learn develop your total skills. This applies to any art or any skill-set really.
I almost exclusively draw people, and lately, exclusively from my imagination. It's just where my passion lies. I like being able to create a person/character in my head, and not just in appearance, in personality as well, and bring them to life on paper.
When I was a little kid, I drew in a cartoony kind of style that worked for me at the time. Then I moved on to sort of a manga style as an older kid. By the time I was 12/13 I was ready to start taking on realistic drawing. At first, my drawings were sort of fantasy-real, with exaggerated proportions and facial features. I started really studying people's faces, hair, and bodies. It helped drawing from images at first, and it was definitely satisfying coming up with something recognizable as the subject and working on all of those minute details. Some artists stop there, but my passion was always in making my imagination come to life.
So now, when I feel like drawing. I think up the character in my head, I think specifically about each feature and detail, and then I concentrate on the proportions I want and set down the initial lines.
As for horses, I've drawn them from my head for example, but they're pretty amateurish and wonky, as I've never really spent any time really looking at a horse. You have to make a concerted effort to really focus on what you're seeing. The images in your dreams, I think, only come off as "perfect" because your mind has its own "perfect" image of a horse, for example, that includes every detail it needs to recognize the horse, and that's it. If you saw the dream image in real life, probably everything you didn't focus on would be blurry or indistinct.
The narrative of your dreams takes you away from spending a lot of time examining specific images. Often times when you do examine things in dreams, they become lucid, and usually you wake up soon after. It's all the power of suggestion. And even if your subconscious has a near perfect image of a horse, accessing this in your waking hours without a reference can be nearly impossible unless you're in an almost hypnotized state.
So, don't worry if you find that drawing realistically from imagination is a struggle at first, as the more you really look at real life subjects, the more detailed tools and variety your imagation will have at its disposal to create and invent from. There is so much variation in the world, but also so many constants that are needed to get just right for the subject/object to be believably realistic. So notice those constants and all of that variation and you'll have everything you need for your imagination to work solo.
Can you draw from your imagination? How?
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I definitely have to be in a relaxed state of mind so that the images in my head become less "shifty". It's like trying to focus on something under water when there are waves and ripples in the way. If you're focussed too much, you just get frustrated. You almost have to let your subconscious mind guide your hand, and although I know it's the most popular piece of advice given to anyone who wants to learn new skills, practice really does make perfect. The more you draw something, the easier it becomes and the better you get.
Everytime you draw, you learn a new technique just by the fact that you've tried to create something different than anything you've done in the past. All of these little tricks you learn develop your total skills. This applies to any art or any skill-set really.
I almost exclusively draw people, and lately, exclusively from my imagination. It's just where my passion lies. I like being able to create a person/character in my head, and not just in appearance, in personality as well, and bring them to life on paper.
When I was a little kid, I drew in a cartoony kind of style that worked for me at the time. Then I moved on to sort of a manga style as an older kid. By the time I was 12/13 I was ready to start taking on realistic drawing. At first, my drawings were sort of fantasy-real, with exaggerated proportions and facial features. I started really studying people's faces, hair, and bodies. It helped drawing from images at first, and it was definitely satisfying coming up with something recognizable as the subject and working on all of those minute details. Some artists stop there, but my passion was always in making my imagination come to life.
So now, when I feel like drawing. I think up the character in my head, I think specifically about each feature and detail, and then I concentrate on the proportions I want and set down the initial lines.
As for horses, I've drawn them from my head for example, but they're pretty amateurish and wonky, as I've never really spent any time really looking at a horse. You have to make a concerted effort to really focus on what you're seeing. The images in your dreams, I think, only come off as "perfect" because your mind has its own "perfect" image of a horse, for example, that includes every detail it needs to recognize the horse, and that's it. If you saw the dream image in real life, probably everything you didn't focus on would be blurry or indistinct.
The narrative of your dreams takes you away from spending a lot of time examining specific images. Often times when you do examine things in dreams, they become lucid, and usually you wake up soon after. It's all the power of suggestion. And even if your subconscious has a near perfect image of a horse, accessing this in your waking hours without a reference can be nearly impossible unless you're in an almost hypnotized state.
So, don't worry if you find that drawing realistically from imagination is a struggle at first, as the more you really look at real life subjects, the more detailed tools and variety your imagation will have at its disposal to create and invent from. There is so much variation in the world, but also so many constants that are needed to get just right for the subject/object to be believably realistic. So notice those constants and all of that variation and you'll have everything you need for your imagination to work solo.