Building blocks to better drawing

Whilst I'm waiting for the C++ book to arrive I may as well make a start on drawing.  As mentioned on a previous post I want to start by learning the basics to build up a good foundation.  This means drawing plenty of circles/spheres, squares/boxes, triangles/pyramids and cylinder/cones.  I wanted to start by drawing on paper but I need to invest in a sketchpad so I'll start by drawing in Corel Painter.

Before I begin, the images I'll be posting may very well be a bit off like a really odd shaped circle.  I have a Wacom Intuos 4 large and the nib's seem to wear down really quick so affects my accuracy to some degree, but as you'll see, I'm no expert when it comes to accuracy anyway.  You may be wondering why a nib on a 'fake' pen would wear and from what I've read the reason is to give it a natural feel, like drawing on paper.  I have to admit it does feel really nice to draw on but if you consider buying one make sure you budget for new nibs.

Okay, so after a few minutes, here's a few circles and balls I've drawn.

As you can see they're not the best of circles and balls but it's a good start.  The one thing I have noticed which I feel I need to get out the habit of is going over lines too much.  Every time I go over a line I draw it gets darker and thicker.  I did not see this as an issue but looking back at some of my drawings, most of them looked like parts were made out of blocks rather than flowing seamlessly.  Another issue I have is not drawing in a variety of ways.  I'll draw something then end up drawing the same thing all over again so I'm not really expanding my skill level.  Below is an example of what I mean.

I've quickly sketched 3 heads in different angles.  The left hand one is the the kind I draw 90% of the time.  There is rarely variety because I feel most comfortable with drawing a head looking to the right.  With this type of head I almost draw without even thinking and, again, 90% of the heads drawn this way look the same.  

The middle head I draw very rarely and I think it shows.  The nose is off to me but the rest seems to be roughly where they should be.  This is not always the case though as I often find the eyes or mouth hard to draw 3 dimensionally. The final head from the front I draw every so often but again, most of the heads turn out looking the same more or less. I'll draw some heads in these angles with more detail to show you how simply changing the angle will unveil the difference between drawing from habit and being forced to learn something new.

So as you can see here or hopefully see, the left head looks better than the middle and right.  The left is also the one I spent the least time drawing.  You can see how some of the lines are darker on the left as I habitually went over some of the lines without even thinking about it.  The other 2 are quite light as I drew what I thought looked reasonable.  You may notice the mouth is drawn pretty much the same in all three.  This again comes down to drawing the same mouth out of habit.  It consists of the line in the middle representing the opening of the mouth and a line to indicate the bottom lip.  I also put two smaller lines at each end of the mouth for the edges of the mouth.  No real thought went in to drawing the mouth, it was all down to habit.  

This is why I want to get the fundamentals down as a habit instead of drawing individual objects through habit.  It may very well be good if you only decide to draw the same things over and over again but I don't believe you'll expand your skill or technique.  

Another thing I realised about being able to draw anything is know what you're drawing.  I can draw a reasonable looking head from the side but if I wanted to draw it from another angle how would I go about it? I could start drawing the head in another angle and keep drawing it over and over until it becomes habit but I've not really understood the fundamentals of drawing.  I know most artists who draw humans in any pose are knowledgeable in anatomy.  I often watch video's of artists and you can hear them telling you the names of the bones and which muscle groups control different parts of the body like the arms, chest, legs etc.  As they understand the human body they don't have to second guess what the body will look like at a certain angle or pose.  I would ask you to watch a Youtube video of an artist drawing the human figure when you have time and not only watch what they're drawing but listen to what they say.   

I think using your mind's eye to envision what you're drawing can help as well.  For instance, I'm not too good at drawing eyes but recently I've started thinking about why they just don't look right.  The most likely reason is that I simply never paid attention to why the eye looks like it does.  I started to think about the eye ball itself and how everything wraps around it such as the example below.

The left eye I've just drawn flat without any thought.  The middle eye I've been thinking about the actual eye ball and how it affects the eyelids.  I've drawn it quickly so it may not convey what I mean so I drew a breakdown on the right to illustrate how I most likely should be thinking about what I draw.  The eye is a sphere so naturally the eyelids must wrap around the surface of the eye ball.  The eyelids can't be flat whilst the eye is spherical, this would clearly not make sense.  With this in mind do you not draw flat eyes sometimes and wonder why it never looked right?

My thought at the end of this post is that I must start thinking about what I draw instead of drawing the same things from habit or comfort.  It's clear to me that if I give some thought to what I draw I have a much better chance of drawing what I want rather than using guess work which would reduce the odds of drawing the way I intended to.