Feng Zhu is one of my art heroes. I discovered him through his Youtube channel probably around seven years ago and, since then, I’ve been a heavy consumer of his free content.
If you’re interested in becoming a concept designer for films and games, his YouTube channel (or his school in Singapore) is high up on my list of recommendations.
In this blog post, I wanted to talk about one of his videos in particular, and this is his ‘Just Draw’ video. In it, Zhu talks through what he sets his students to do in the first bunch of weeks of attending his school and uses this as a way to encourage people to not worry so much about perfection and to simply just draw.
At the end of 2019, I decided that I was going to go back to basics with my drawing. I wanted to draw more for myself and more regularly. I rewatched Zhu’s video and began to follow his course term outline, and watched a few other drawing tips videos to go with it.
The course outline he proposes is to draw:
10 Rocks a day, for 5 days.
10 Trees a day, for 5 days.
10 Animal skulls a day, for 5 days.
10 Bugs a day, for 5 days.
10 Large, hairless, animals a day, for 5 days.
10 Huts and other small structures a day, for 5 days.
The idea with this is to:
A) get confident with drawing by studying things that are easier to draw and make look alright, and then slowly ramp up the difficulty of this subject matter.
B) fill your personal visual library so that when you do need to come up with concepts on the spot in the future, you have a brain full of things you’ve studied.
Now… I have a job I have to be at during the day, so I never managed to hit 10 drawings a day, but certainly made a decent stab at it. I didn’t move onto the next subject matter until I hit about 30 drawings of it over however many days it took me to do.
What I found after a few weeks was that my confidence in drawing grew and I no longer relied on drawing in pencil first and then inking. I also got faster, which is very important in my line of work. But most importantly on a personal level for me, was that I started to fall in love with drawing again.
When you work as a professional illustrator or designer, there is a possibility that drawing for pleasure is something that wanes. It certainly did for me. So undertaking this ongoing ‘Just Draw’ practice for myself has become a way for me to find love in moving ink around.
Go watch Feng Zhu's incredible class right now: Youtube video
Here are my efforts both digitally and in my sketchbook (so far):
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| To be honest with you, I started out this exercise in Photoshop. Here is a small group of the tree sketches I did. |
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| A cluster of animal skulls. |
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| After the new year, I decided to hop to real ink and paper and begun filling up a little sketchbook of studies. |
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| The visual format soon evolved over time into this comic panel layout... which I love as it looks totally 'artist sketchbooky' |
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| I have Pinterest to thank for my reference hunting. |
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| Here I began to start the small hut studies which evolved into a study of Viking culture. |
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