An extract from a 30 mins class with only felines
© 2024 KoreleyFirst picture i upload here, i'm not sure how to go about posting, since i cannot show the original picture.
I'd assume people would need them to critique my proportions and posing.
Eitherway, i tried to give the 10 mins one more form by drawing 3d shapes, so that i could keep track of form in 3d space, i'm not sure if that makes sense, or is advised to do during figure drawing practice.
Polyvios Animations
Hello and welcome, Koreley. You know, I believe that you're doing a really great job on your feline gestures, silhouettes, and relationships. And I love how much they look and feel like cats or felines. Rock on, Koreley. But, I'm not getting enough of those organic gestures of those kitty-cats. How would you like to make your goal in making your feline drawings less stiff and more fluid?
The reason why is because, your cats can and will become more cat-like in terms of your perceptions of edges, forces, and gestures. Once you think you've mastered your perceptions of edges, forces, gestures, and spaces, so can and shall your relationships of your felines, while you can and will maintain your balances of straights and curves in your cat designs.
My hat's off to you.
Koreley
Thank you for the input! If you can, would you mind describing what feels stiff in these specific drawings? i don't think my eye is up there yet to see how to make them more fluid, and i'd love to improve on all fronts!
Posting the original reference is usually not needed, unless you have a very specific problem, that has to do with that exact reference. In the end, it's the result that counts. We want to become draftspersons, not copiers.
About "what is advised to do during figure drawing practice", there also isn't a single gospel. Figure drawing has at least a dozen of different subskills that need to be practiced, for each of those subskills at least someone found a good traing method to emphasize it, and in the end it's up to the individual artist to design their exact training routine.
Drawing 3-D boxes is a common practice when someone wants to improve their perspectivic drawing. It also has the advantage, that it is a good jump-off point to get from a focused, technical approach to drawing from reference, towards drawing from imagination, without sacrificing quality, as 3-D boxes are easy to amnipulate, and you can thus derive very exact manipulations of references.
Also, your cats look totally great and accomplished. Foundation, gesture, lines, everything looks comfortable and even professional. If I would have to give advice how to improve, I would say, push your ambition into an area, in which you don't feel comfortable yet. Unless you dare to make mistakes, you won't find room to grow. And the direction to push can't be really dictated by someone else, you will have to follow your own curiosity.
I gotta say, it's not gonna do well to my ego if i get my art called professional!
No but jokes aside, thank you for your input. The idea that what matters is the end result is so eye-opening. I've always though, and heard "if the reference's wrong it's not my fault", which has always led me to a more copistic style of exercise. I draw to learn "proper", realistic anatomy afterall.
But i suppose the real showcase of understanding is in the final product itself! really cool though ^^
I was considering forcing myself to lower the amount of lines i draw, draw one, or two, bold lines, and just go with that.
Regardless if they're wrong, regardless if they're wonky, i wanna force myself to learn to use and move my hands boldly. But perhaps there's no need to do that?
My objective with this exercise would be, essentially, to improve line economy, and learn to draw lines precisely where i wish. Does that make sense?
Ahhm, OK. Well, if your goal is to improve line economy, then 3-D blocks aren't as useful. 3-D blocks improve perspective accuracy, but that is just a completely different skillset than line economy.
If you really want line economy, then drop your perspective drawing training wheels, and be prepared to live with way more abstract or even surreal looking results. (Unless your sense of perpective is already strong enough, so you actually didn't need those training wheels any longer anyways)
The hardcore way towards line economy is to start counting your lines via the CSI method. A C is a simple curve, an S is a double-curve, an I is a straight line, and you actually count those while drawing, and start thinking about how you could drop unnecessary details or combine shorter lines to longer lines to get that count reduced.
Be warned, going that way will not make your results look prettier at first, to the contrary. It WILL open your view onto a whole new set of problems to solve, though.
Edit: Having looked at your drawing with the idea of line economy again. Maybe I was a bit too general in my last remark. Your outlines are already quite reduced. One thing you should definitely solve, just for clarification, is a way to make a difference between your foundations and the outlines. I think you are drawing digitally, then you could put your foundations on a different mask. Depicting them in a different color would also help.
And, one thing that stays true about what I said: Perspective accuracy and line economic are somewhat at different ends of a scale. If you really, really want to push line economy, at some point, you will have to make sacrifices in perspective. I mean, Myamoto Musashi was famous for drawing a bird with a single stroke of a brush, but if you put that drawing under a microscope, it wasn't exactly a super naturalistic depiction of a bird.