Learning to drawn and sketch: - websites (1)

There are quite a few websites around with communities who are helpful to people learning to draw and sketch. This post contains a couple of such website communities for people starting out.

Everday Matters: This is the name of Danny Gregory's blog, and also the name of the associated yahoo group and various other groups and sites which have spun off from the original site. The Yahoo Group explains its identity as follows

An ongoing discussion about creativity, drawing, journal making and seeing more clearly. This group grew out of Danny Gregory's weblog, Everyday Matters and his book, The Creative License. We have a weekly drawing challenge and also a secondary gallery site here and a Flickr group and a Frappr map site that records members' locations for get-togethers. too. And NEW! our pbwiki site for further sharing, discussing and what-have-you.

It's big (over a 1,500 members) and has been characterised as being a friendly, welcoming broad-based group for people of all skill levels who are interested in drawing and illustrated journals. In keeping with Danny Gregory's philosophy, the focus there is mainly on drawing for its own sake and as a meditation on one's life, rather than as an activity with other goals in mind.

I know that on my travels around art blogs I see lots and lots of blogs which participate in the EDM weekly drawing challenge. And for those people who are worried about going sketching in public for the first time why not take a look at the EDM sketchcrawl activities?

Wet Canvas is an extremely large website with a huge number of different forums. It boasts as at today's date more than 78 thousand members but the number who are active posters is much lower than this. This gives individual forums a feeling more akin to some of other websites for groups of artists or would-be artists where people have a chance to get to know one another.

The Drawing and Sketching Forum is one such forum where people are generally very supportive of the efforts of new members. The incomparable 'JayD' (I'm a big fan!) started a self-help approach to learning how to draw back in October 2004 - with "Drawing 101: Class 1 - Drawing Basics" and has developed it from there latterly with the assistance of some guest tutors up to Class 34.

They've just started Basic 102 - and have got a class going on at the moment on Intermediate Perspective. All classes are based in "The Classroom" a sub-forum of the main forum. I personally know a lot of people who have gained the most enormous amount from the classes and whose work has improved in leaps and bounds as a result!

Techonorati tags: art , drawing , sketch , sketching , sketchcrawl