Design Drawing

I don't know if other students are going to be looking at this, but I figured I would post this page I found about design drawing.

Books on design drawing.

Lance Rake, one of the ID professors here at KU, spoke at our Monday lecture about drawing, and very clearly pounded it into my head that I need to be constantly practicing these skills.  All this was backed up with research statistics from Michael Roller that arranged desired skills according to importance as desired by possible employers of junior designers.  In fact, the researcher is from the University of Cincinnati, where I nearly went to school for Mechanical Engineering, and is my father's Alma mater.  Maybe I'll go to grad-school there?

Anyway, I've got a nice new set of Prismacolor markers, and I have to pump out 10 design concepts for pressing garlic.  I feel the best solution is just to chop it with a knife, but this should be fun anyhow.  I'll post those drawings, and maybe some of my sketches of the garlic press that I picked out.

But here we go, design drawing starts now.  I'm going to try and mimic Carl Liu, which was who I was researching when I found the above link.  Carl Liu and Lance Rake also, he showed us his drawings and they were quite excellent.  His 3D arrows were really nice and I will definitely try to appropriate them into my drawings.  Carl Liu uses circles to highlight what he thinks is the most important among his other sketching, which usually shows his short mental research to get to the main idea.  I'm probably getting ahead of myself I suppose.  I'm not ready to just put pen to paper yet.  I'm going to start all of these with pencil, then ink it, then erase the graphite and bring in the markers.

I look forward to seeing my skills progress throughout the year, which, I suppose, is kind of what this blog is about.  After reading Core77's design school advice, one of the biggest points people kept driving home is to keep track of everything and record all your steps with cameras or sketchbooks or blogs.  I've been talking about doing this for a while, and I must say, it's nice to be required to do it, and we'll all get to watch me get better at this.  I fully plan on updating well beyond this first class.

One last thing, I have to say, I haven't done but 4 or 5 drawings since I took drawing class at OU in 2003.  I'm very happy to report, it's not been hard to get back on the horse.  I really think, with practice, I will not only get a lot better at drawing, but good at drawing things in less than 20 minutes.  It's funny, I kind of assumed drawing wasn't that important anymore, but it sounds like it's going to be a huge part of the rest of my life, and I'm going to embrace that, and become a drawing machine.

GeorgeP