online
How to Improve Your Fantasy Artwork
Fantasy art is different than any other kind of art because it is often composed of things that don’t exist. These things come from your imagination and while you can’t grab a unicorn and ask it to sit still so you can draw it there are some techniques you can use that will improve your fantasy art.
Practice, Practice, and More Practice You probably already know that practice is the single most important key to improving your ability to draw or paint fantasy subjects. But did you know that there are two major kinds of practice and that you should be doing both? Drawing from sight is the first way you should be drawing. You should be spending a lot of time drawing familiar and real life objects. This can be anything at all and it will improve your fantasy drawing and painting even further if you choose related subjects. By related subject I mean that if you like to draw unicorns you should be drawing horses and if you like to draw dragons you should be drawing lots of lizards and reptiles.
Making the Connection between Real life and Fantasy The very definition of fantasy means you have artistic license to draw anything you want. You could draw a five thousand pound dragon that flies around with wings the size and texture of a butterfly’s wings. But would that make sense? Even though you are drawing fantasy creatures, objects, and scenes, you still have to do it in ways that make sense. Musculature moves in certain ways, bones and skeletal underpinnings cause bodies to move in expected ways, and to look certain ways. By drawing and understanding real life object and creatures you will improve your fantasy creatures and objects by making them look real even though they aren’t real. Drawing from mind is the second type of practice you should be doing on a regular basis. Get a blank piece of paper and let your imagination run wild. This is where the fantasy will come out. Draw things that are similar to real life objects and also try to create things that have almost no recognizable equivalent. Don’t be afraid to explore and try all kinds of crazy ideas – just let the visual ideas flow. This is an exercise in creativity and it will generate lots of ideas. These ideas and images can at a later point be hammered out into more advanced drawings and paintings.
Related posts
How to Find an Epic Fantasy Novel That You Will Love
Have you ever looked for a book on Amazon.com and before purchasing it you read through all of the reader reviews only to discover that some readers absolutely panned the book while others praised it as the next best thing since sliced bread?
You probably have done this and it left you a little confused. So is the book good or is it bad? You don’t want to be shelling out your hard earned money on a book that is going to sit on the nightstand collecting dust. There is probably nothing worse than anticipating a new world to explore and discovering you just don’t believe it or the characters just don’t interest you.
So the question of good comes down to what you consider to be good. You can read all the reviews and you can read through all the listings in the chatrooms but when it comes down to it your shoes are going to be the ones getting muddy in this new world so only you can decide whether or not it is “good”.
How do you do that?
Related posts
Harry Potter, Tolkien, and the Roots of Fantasy
The media circus around the release of the last Harry Potter novel is finally beginning to die down, but that does little to disguise the fact that the fantasy genre is alive and well in the twenty-first century. Hundreds of millions were spent to bring Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Rowling’s Harry Potter series, C.S. Lewis’s Narnia and others to the big screen, and the gamble has paid off.
But where did the genre originate? Many have the mistaken idea that the fantasy genre began with Tolkien. Though Tolkien brought fantasy into the literary spotlight, fantasy itself has been around for far longer and indeed in some respects dates back to the very beginnings of literature.
The Epic of Gilgamesh and Homer’s The Illiad and The Odyssey, while set in familiar realms, contain many of the aspects – heroes, warring gods, monsters, quest-related adventure – that has become part and parcel of modern fantasy. Much of the fodder for modern fantasy is taken from early literature, especially myths, legends, and religion.