I am a student but would like to ask this of y’all professionals:
- What are your drawing skills?
- What do you do every day to improve said skill?
- What do you wish you started doing earlier in your career to help your drawing skills?
- Moderate
- When I do draw, I draw a lot of type.
- Loosened up. When I was a student my style was so tight. I was going out with an interior designer who used to badger me and try to teach me to loosen my style. I resisted. Years later I realised she was right and that I can actually draw pretty decently, but that only happened by letting go and finding my own style, it’s easy to come back to tight if you need to. Not so easy the other way.
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- None
- Nothing
- Nothing
Hi Peanut 
My skills are relatively good. Sometimes I participate in certain contests to improve my skills. I draw more or less, every evening. You improve when you repeat the activity. What also helps are looking for tricks and tips on the internet.
As a graphic designer, drawing is not really necessary . I have many sketchbooks where I sketch my ideas for logo design or typography. That helps me brainstorm. You can also specialize in illustration or focus completely on illustration at some point. In this case it is important to develop your own style as early as possible. This way you have a recognition value and more likely that people will buy your Art
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So how do you process or record your ideas and design and all those pictures in your mind??
Mind-maps, very rough sketches, drawing apps, use someone elses drawing skills, verbalise in conversations.
Research ideas.
I don’t draw. Haven’t done a sketch in about 20 years.
My interest and ability in drawing are arguably what caused me to pursue an art education. In my university program, life drawing and various other kinds of drawing from painting to printmaking were always required every semester.
When it came time to specialize, I chose graphic design. After graduation, I pursued both graphic design and illustration professionally. Gradually, graphic design won out, and I gave up illustration altogether for several decades.
I occasionally needed to sketch out graphic design ideas, but soon found that I could do that more efficiently in my head than with a pencil. Until recently, I hadn’t drawn anything other than a logo sketch every now and again for many years (which really isn’t drawing).
Recently, I’ve rekindled my interest in drawing, and I think I’ll keep it up as a personal pursuit in my spare time. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed doing it.
I don’t have any regrets about when or how I began drawing earlier in life. Unless one wants to become a professional illustrator, good drawing skills aren’t needed for graphic design. Quickly sketching out ideas might sometimes be useful for those starting out, but that sort of drawing only requires the most basic of drawing skills.
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These are the things I draw very well and need no improvement:
– Money from the bank
– Blood
– Wrong conclusion
– Water from the well.
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and
– A blank.
You might get better responses asking in an illustration forum.
Nope, Graphic Design is where I wanna hear from. But I have to admit the replies above are not what I expected!!
Bank, blank and wrong conclusion definitely
What did you expect?
My drawing skill are pretty amazing and I’m learning and trying to draw stuff soon and one day I would learn from the best.
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I draw maps in Illustrator for some of my clients. I just did a map for a cemetery. I would say I’m an intermediate level on drawing in Illustrator. Sometimes I do pencil/paper sketching and cartoon drawings for fun. I would say that I’m a year one on that, and I never developed my skill, so that’s where it’s stuck. I don’t mind because pencil drawing isn’t a required skill in modern day graphic design. Graphic design is different from illustration.
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I don’t do anything on a daily basis to improve drawing skills. I’ll go through a phase now and then where I draw things in a sketchbook. I love Lynda Barry’s books on drawing comics. I will go through the exercises in those, but I treat it more as a general creative exercise rather than professional development.
What kind of replies did you expect?
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My drawing skills are very high, because I started my professional career in the 1960’s and everything I produced as an art director were always strictly done by hand. It’s a skill that is becoming more rare every day in the business these days. What a shame!
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I guess I was expecting professionals to have great drawing skills. Just working through the design process you would need to document and visualise so many elements. I guess I’m just surprised that’s all.
It’s not a requirement in every field of graphic design. I mostly fell into doing page layout, books up to 3,200 pages, magazines, leaflets etc are things I specialise in.
I’m not really into creating logos - in 25 years I probably designed about 20 logos.
I don’t do illustrations.
And I would imagine those that specialise in logos/illustrations don’t do a lot of page layout.
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I draw and can do calligraphy. But sometimes it’s a long and painstaking process depending on how motivated I am. Photoshop has been both a boon and a bane. I love it cuz I can mask areas to keep the crosshatching inside where I want to to stay inside and I’m much faster with it. But it just isn’t the same as pen and ink.
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As I mentioned, as one gains experience, visualizing the end result in one’s mind becomes easier and more efficient than a sketch in most instances (with the exception of logos, I suppose).
For example, I design lots of publications of one sort or another. I think through the issues and know where I’m going before I begin the actual layouts. That being the case, I open up InDesign or Illustrator and dive right into it while making adjustments and working out the details as I go. A preliminary sketch would serve no purpose.
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