PowerPoint Construction Drawings

After some time I like to rejoin you more here on the forum.

In the last two years I startet to draw... or more "construct" drawings in MS-PowerPoint. This helped me to get a better understanding of shapes and was also a lot of fun to do...

It is more like playing around or making a puzzle for me. This strategy helped also to motivate me as an alternative way of drawing to keep my attention and interest alive.

I wanted to share this idea, practice and also get some feedback from you guys what you think about it.

For a better understanding some examples to view....

https://imgur.com/a/q7nS1VH

Looking forward for your feedback

Pastabrother

Well, that looks certainly interesting. For me personally, it's been a long time since I did digital drawings, I just do analogue and scan it in.

That said, PowerPoint is a peculiar choice. Yes, it has off course graphic options, but it is first of all a presentation software. Your works in a weird way have the charm of someone using a rolled-up newspaper instead of a brush to get color on their canvas. It produces results, and the fact that these results stem from a sub-optimal tool is obviously part of the design choices.

The boring and conventional advice on how to improve on your works would be to suggest using an actual graphic program. But that would off course ignore all the fun you are having with abusing PowerPoint.

I do remember a long time ago I toyed around with some CAD-program. I forgot the name by now, and I can't say I ever understood enough of it to do something actually useful with it, but it had a tool, that made toying around with Bezier curves quite intuitive, at least for me. I was member in a graphic novel/manga forum, where people regularly posted all kind of challenges and I answered to some of them with my Bezier curves comic strips.

The reaction was uniformly irritation: "Dude, that doesn't look like manga or marvels or anything, that looks like cheap 1980s videogames, why are you doing that to yourself?" I loved it, BECAUSE it looked like those videogames, but I didn't have the stamina to just keep it up versus zero positive reactions from anybody else.

I wish you better luck with your project, and well, you are doing a quite unique thing there, so maybe in hope of getting more of a conversation going, how about you try to say, improvise a mini-tutorial for what it takes to turn Powerpoint into a graphic program? How do you have to approach that, how do you conceptualize a piece and get it from start to finish?

Good morning, Pastabrother, and welcome to Loa.

Nice job on your Powerpoint drawings of hands and figures. But my beef with them is that the gestures and forces all are too bare. Would you like to please invest in yourself in a Huion Kamvas drawing tablet to draw digitally, or better yet, try drawing analogically with drawing with pens and pencils in notebooks, all thru our interactive drawing tutorials on our site?

The logical arguement behind this thing is because your poses and gestures can and will become less mathematical and more intuitive and human in terms of the blind contours and gesture drawings. For more info, please look into a copy of the Nicolaides book, The Natural Way to Draw, on Amazon.

My hat's off to you.

Thank you both for your feedback...

@Aunt thanks for your story about your expierience with the CAD program in the past ....

I have a WACOM drawing-tablet and I also draw with it digitaly. I also own real drawing programs (clip studio and others). Additionaly I create most of my drawings with artist pens, pencil or other tools...

So this strange passion with PPP is a small side project or a funny distraction of mine ... nevertheless i think I learned some things about space and form by doing it.

What draws me create things with PowerPoint sometime is exactly its limitations... I find it a fun and interesting challenge do not draw... but place the drawings ... like using stones and shaping stones ... this limit of the program forces me to use only simple geometric forms to construct the "drawing" ... this is something I struggle when i draw all free with my hands... so it is more about the process of creating something with this method ... and not really the resulting lock of it that counts for me in this pursuit...

Do you also have some odd practices like this?

I think I somewhat "conventionalized" my practises after getting deeper into drawing and doing some tutorials from dudes that actually knew how it works. Main influences were drawabox.com and https://www.proko.com/course/figure-drawing-fundamentals/overview, but also a lot of stuff that I either heard someone talk about on youtube or saw someone pull off on this here site.

But the experience you are getting from PPP is definitely valuable. Learning how to simplify complex forms, and learning how to start a drawing from the big forms instead of getting lost in details immediately is 99% of what most beginner tutorials are jumping through hoops to get into other people's heads. Well, maybe not 99%, but at least a solid 30% or so. And the experience to enjoy doing "stupid" things, and to just see what happens is probably at the core of most general creativity courses, for which people pay tons of monies.

Things I personally did and had fun with for some time:

-OK, I was quiet impressed by some old-timey book about drawing with ink and improving line quality, that Proko and Marshall had mentioned in one of their podcasts, but from which I sadly forgot author and title by now, but a good while I just spent time practising beautiful parallell straight and curved lines. It always felt hard to do and like I was making little progress, until I cleaned my room some day and found one of my first attempts at doing that, and realized how much I had actually improved in rather short time.

-I think I had a perfect streak of drawing daily on quickposes.com of over a year, but then the site had some organizational issues and was even down for some time, so I landed here, and am still struggling to get my streak of uninterrupted drawing beyond the 70 day mark.

-One "game" I came up with is line economy bingo. Ideally it should be played in an urban setting with several people, but I never found someone to play with, so I did it solo: Find any one object, detail or sight in the vicinity, don't tell anyone what you are looking at, and try to draw it, while counting every line via the CSI method. I stands for a straight line, C stands for a simple curve, and S stands for basically two opposing curves that meet - line an S, d'uh. Each one of those count as one single line, anything more complicated has to be broken down into individual lines and counted. The goal is to be the one that uses the least amount of lines to draw, what they see. If everyone else recognizes what that thing is, it counts as a "bingo".

The idea is, if you use very few lines to produce a recognizable shape, then a) you can focus very much on drawing each line especially beautiful, and b) you develop an eye for impressive and recognizable shapes.

-I got used to draw with a clipboard in my left and a pen or pencil in the right and spent quite some time "urban drawing". One especially daring attempt,... I was walking down the street, and whenever someone came towards me, I tried to memorize how they looked, then once they passed by, I tried to sketch them from memory. The results looked incredibly fugly, and I postponed the project until a future, when I would feel more confident with the human form.... well, spring is around the corner, if the weather isn't too bad, I might give it another shot soon.

-I spent quite some time "portraying" trees. So, not drawing nice symbols, that would easily be recognized as some tree, but actually drawing a specific tree, with the exact ways the branches and twigs and leaves are, like you would portray another person. Drove me nuts, but also taught me a lot about randomness and the problem with fractals. The original plan came from some childhood memory. A lot of people see faces in all kind of stuff, and children especially so, but for me it was so bad, that I was actually afraid of quite a lot of trees and walked quite long ways to avoid coming too close to them because the m****f**** faces in their twigs and branches looked reeeeeally sour and angry, and the way they waved madly in the wind didn't make it any better. I always wanted to be able to draw "that", so people would understand, what I was so scared about from those "harmless" trees.

-One project I tried about half a year ago, was to just learn the abstractions from Loomis, Reilly and some other guy, which name currently evades me, to get a perfect foundation for drawing the human head. Might take that up again, if and when the constant demand at work finally goes down a bit more.

I hope I didn't shock you with my wall of text. I love drawing, but I also love talking about drawing, and I am a big fan of any kind of stupid ideas in general, so if we can try to establish some conversation here, where we just brag or laugh about our latest fits of genius, I would be happy to post my 2 cents ever so often.

Don't worry about the length of the text... it was an interesting read, thanks for sharing. I draw for fun as a hobby so my time is rather limited ... next to work, climbing, skiing and the workload in the household...

The tree drawing sounds interessting.. It will probably influence how a look at them in the next weeks to come.

I often draw in the train to killl some time... 1h ride to visit my brother or friends. The CSI bingo sounds fun... I allready know that one but still never applied it myself. I think I will give it a go besides figure drawing and free fun stuff and my ppp project.

What i did in the past was something I called reduction.... a draw a portrait or figure and then reduce as much as posible but still try to catch the essence or my feeling of the person, animal or object... I may have to try that one again, this was 3 years ago.. and a got a little better since then... but my progress is a slow burn... with some bumps and hickups on the way... sometime motivation, sometimes time-restrictions and also accidents... disiplin was sadly never my strong suit... I try do draw every day... but it is like with meditation... harder to do then it seems to be.

I will share some of my stuff at the end of march in the critique section to get some pointers from you for my next steps...

Oh, btw, found the title of the old-timey book. "Drawing with Pen and Ink" by Arthur L. Guptill. Can be found as free pdf on the webs if you are curious. Doing the exercises from that book is also straight at the border between stupid and genius to me. I would say the skills that book teaches are nothing anyone expects from an artist nowadays in the digital age, but trying to practise them, and observing your own experience and progress has kind of a low-burn psychedelic component. Plus ofc, there are tons of incredible prints from accomplished masters of ink in that book, capable of lifting your vision of what is possible while crushing your self-esteem if you dare to think of your own skills in comparison.

With the time and discipline matter.... my dirty secret: having no life helps. I successfully survived on the dole without becoming homeless a while back, and I learned 2 lessons: Never pay money to be happy, and never pay money to find friends. And don't waste your life trying to earn more than you need, fight like heck if someone tries to make you. I ended up with a half-time job and an incredible amount of excess free time to get rid off, and free computer games get either boring or annoying after a short while. Learning to draw is perfect to fill the god-sized hole in my soul without having to self medicate with hard drugs or alcohol.

I am looking forward to see some more of your works, and I'll certainly add my 2 cents to them. May the ole spaghetti monster sprinkle your path with parmesan until we meet again!