So what actually are the basic tools art?

The actual "elements" of art are: Line, Shape, Form, Space, Value, Color and Texture. Most traditional courses start from here, but I think this is actually a mistake. There's a few more basic things you should focus on, before you learn these fundamentals.

List of Tools for this stage:
Literally any pencil - Softer lead is better, but my animator friend just uses a .03mm mechanical pencil.
Literally any eraser
Some paper, although a sketchbook is nicer to work with than printer paper.

If you want to do the Edwards Stuff you'll need:
Plastic Transparency Sheets
Card Stock
Wet Erase Markers

I cannot stress enough that literally any pencil and eraser is fine when you're beginning. Just like having the best software doesn't magically make you a better programmer, having expensive pencils or paints will not make you a better artist. </stress>

How to see:
This is a huge part of learning to draw, and it's often overlooked. Many even think of this as one of those "you have it or you don't" principles of art. The best resource for learning this, other than the above-linked tutorial from Nsio, is Betty Edwards' Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. This resource focuses on shifting your thinking about drawing from the symbolic left side to the expressive right side.
Primary exercises:

• Self-Portrait to see how bad you are right now
• Pyrolettes/Vases-Faces
• Blind Countour Drawing
• Contour Drawing - Using an image plane
• Negative Space Drawing (still using an image plane)
• Proportion and Perspective (still using that image plane)
• Putting it all together by drawing a profile portrait
• Re-doing your self-portrait by turning your mirror into an image plane

These are a good set of confidence boosters, and a good place to get started. Once you've finished them (should take you around a week, if you do about an hour a day), you can start moving toward actually developing a practice regimen.

How to Practice and Learn:

Linked above is one of the best articles I've read on how to practice. Take some time to look at his other tutorials, especially the "How to Practice" set. Some other really good tips from there, though, that are more universal:

• "Create a library of art that looks like the stuff you want to do."
• "List out the skills you need to learn in order to draw like them." Utilize other artists to help you identify what makes particular artist's style unique
• "Choose one skill to study."
• "If you are starting out, focus on Construction or Design."

I'd add one more thing: Determine why you are learning to draw, and what skills are required to be at that level. If you're just wanting to develop a bunch of prototype assets, you don't need to be nearly the same skill level as, say, someone who wants to become a professional character artist.

A more comprehensive set of warm-up exercises (do at least some of these every day):

• More Pyrolettes - Shifts from verbal to non-verbal modes of thinking
• Gestural Drawing - Use a site like Quick Poses to try to capture the action lines of a pose.
• Upside Down Drawing - Helps you to not think about the symbols of what you're drawing
• Automatic Drawing - Just kind of doodling and letting your hand fly around the page. Helps you get pure lines.
• Negative Spaces - Gets you thinking about space generally, and helps you to forget about the object.
• Non-Dominant Hand - Helps you loosen up
• Primitives - Lines, Triangles, Circles, Squares, Polygons, Cubes, Pyramids, Cones, Cylinders and Spheres Planes
• Line Exercises
• Drawing Primitives in Perspective - start with planes
• Perspective Grids

Next, we need to pick a skill to develop, and study it. This is the time where you'll want to look at art you like, and start breaking it down. My recommendation, look at this list by Brandon Dayton, and look at his suggestions for studying a single image. Focus on things that help you develop the skill of constructing objects by using primitives, or the things that make a piece of art look interesting. How does the artist construct his/her shapes?

Another thing that's really helped me figure out construction is Chris Hildenbrand's excellent tutorials on Programmer Art. He focuses on using inkscape and playing around with nodes and vectors to create robust art for video games.

This wouldn't be a bad time to instead look at tutorials and read books. Draw With Jazza is a fantastic resource, as is the collected works of Andrew Loomis (used to be free, apparently the Loomis Estate is reprinting them). Deviantart has a host of good and bad tutorials, but here is the list that I like. These focus on construction more than anything else, although there are a few that are on things like value and color theory.

Finally, take what you did in your study phase, and try to apply it. Draw something with it. Test your knowledge of how a thing is constructed. Play around with it. Try breaking the rules, and try to understand why they're there, and when you can break them.

This should get you started, but the biggest thing is, you can't just run through a bunch of tutorials and suddenly be able to draw. Work at it every day. Eventually, you'll get to that point where you can "draw from life" and "draw from reference."

Next entry is going to hopefully be some documentation of where I'm at right now, and what I'm trying to accomplish. I'll list out my artists that I really love, and the skills that I need to build.

Art Rant

Learning art is hard, if you're not already an artist.
I just started learning to draw for two reasons:

1. I want to be the programmer version of Dean Dodrill (Maker of Dust: An Elysian Tail), and make a game entirely on my own.
2. I'm a graphics programmer, and I feel like understanding art is just as important as understanding the physics of graphics.

With Programming, there's well-defined basics: Syntax, Variables, using functions, Decision Statements, Loop Statements, Declaring and Defining Functions, Objects, and Pointers. Any tutorial teaching these is, by definition, a basic tutorial. Most tutorials that assume you know these things, state as much. When you look up "basic programming" or "c++ tutorial," you get these same principles. When you look at more advanced tutorials, the better tutorial writers are able to list prerequisite knowledge required, and teach a very specific skill.

This is actually reflected in 3D modeling, which has more of a parametric, programmer-like way of doing things. When you learn the basics, they actually seem to follow this idea of building up a basic set of skills and tools to be used to shape models: Creating Primitives, Selecting and Editing Meshes, Selecting and Editing Vertices, Edges and Faces, Extruding Faces and Box Modeling, Using Modifiers, Setting up Reference Images

I'm probably forgetting a bunch of things, but the idea is that you're able to build a bunch of skills up to a point. That point being that last point: Reference images. If you want to get to the point where you're designing your own characters, environments, and materials, you'll need a foundation in traditional art.

This is where I start to have a lot more trouble. I mean, there's plenty of tutorials for Inkscape, Photoshop, Illustrator, ZBrush and Flash, but those are tools, like a pencil or a set of paints. Most basic tutorials focus on similar ideas to the 3D tutorials, essentially how to use the tools, but not how to actually draw.

Tutorials on deviantart and otherwise tend to have a fairly specific thrust toward how to draw specific things and characters, not the basics. When they do talk about basics, it comes to a few really annoying principles: 

"Draw from life, draw from reference." 

Okay, how do I do that? 

"Draw what you see."

When I draw what I see, it looks like this:

[insert one of my beginner drawings]

"Well, just keep practicing. You'll get better. Maybe choose an artist you like, and copy their work. Practice some gesture drawing."

Translate these into any other medium, and you're no longer talking about the fundamentals. "Look at other people's githubs, and copy what they did. Make programs out of typical processes you do every day. Practice by just randomly making things as fast as possible." Not only are these bad habits for a complete and total beginner, they would often make beginners completely discouraged and make them think that programming is simply a talent, and you either get it or you don't. Sound familiar yet?

So what are the basics? How do we, the art dunces of the world, start to learn how to see like artists? This is the journey I've been on for the past few weeks, and I wanted to document what I've learned so far, and what is needed, as well as my progress. My goal? I need to come up with a number of characters, weapons, items and tile sets for a game I'm working on. This encompasses both environmental design and character design.

In my next post, I'm going to catalog all of the sites and tutorials I've found, and try to organize them into a regimen that can actually be used.