Forum posts by Kim

Hi Paladin! I (site owner) share basically all of your concerns. :)

One of the big goals going forward is not just more gender equity, but a wider range of body types, ethnicity, and age. Also we are trying hard to discourage "sexy" or "glamorous" poses and preference more everyday or classical art poses. This is a little hard, as the majority of photographers who have contributed photos seem overwhelmingly interested in photographing young, white, skinny, female models.

The fundraiser unfortunately did not reach the threshold that would have allowed us to schedule our own photoshoots immediately. However, we've been working on alternate ways of sourcing more photos in the meanwhile.

Time tracking and achievement features are not just planned, but already built - they will be available after the site relaunch happening in September, along with a plethora of other improvements.

There are a TON of posts up about what we're planning and how the execution of that is coming in the site news section, including stuff that addresses all of your questions, so I would suggest browsing through those if you're interested in knowing more.

suggested that you should draw something 5 to 10 times with reference and then put all your studies and references away and then draw it from memory.

This is a great idea for an exercise! :)

Hey SlugGirl,

Your topic had erroneously been caught by our spam filter. I just found it and approved it, so even though it's a few days late, it's up! Sorry for that delay. :)

I can definitely confirm that when I practiced only via "what I saw," I had terrible troubles drawing from imagination. Instead of being a study aid, references became a crutch I needed all of the time and couldn't escape from.

And of course, I got to that place because when I started drawing what I saw, I did at first have big leaps forward in my drawing ability, so I kept doing it as much as I could!

But I eventually discovered it could only take me so far, and was in some ways a backwards way to study, starting with the details of shading and individual features rather than the bigger picture of how the thing I was seeing was constructed overall.

You're welcome! I suspect over the next few days you may get more advice from others as well. There are some really amazing people in this community! :)

Welcome to the site! Really glad you are enjoying it so far. :)

You seem to be focusing on the contours of the figures - that is, the outer lines of the shapes that make up the body. This is very tempting and what most artists are tempted to spend all of their time on, because it feels like that's what will make your work "good."

However, if your goal is to improve at drawing and general anatomy, you need to let go of making "good" finished pieces and put a lot of energy into doing exercises that aid your understanding of what's behind all those contours.

To start with, I don't see any construction work underneath your drawings. I would say start with a line that describes the general action of the post, from head to toes if possible. Usually the spine is a big chunk of that line, as a clue. This is what the 30 second poses are for helping you practice, although it should be the starting place for almost all the work you do of any length.

Then, try to put the hips and and ribcage on top of that line. Remember that both of these are 3D structures, so the "shape" that will best represent them in your 2d drawing is going to change depending on the angle you are seeing them from. Your one and two minute poses is where this will usually come in. It's okay to be wrong, just make your best guess. You will learn something either way. One thing I also like to do is to draw a line through the pelvis and the shoulders that show how those structures are tilted compared to the main line of the body.

Try to identify the major body joints and how they are connecting to the hips and ribcage. Also, what parts of the body can you NOT see? WHY can't you see them? Does one arm look particularly "short" because a hand is reaching toward you, for example? You can start to work on these questions in your 5 minute drawings.

One of the goals of under-construction is to make notes about what's going on inside of the body, to inform those contours that show us the outside of the body. This is much harder than drawing the contours, because you can't see it directly. But it will make your contours so much better and eventually enable you to draw from imagination instead of reference with relative accuracy.

It is 100% okay if these pieces don't look like anything, or if that under-construction makes your 10 minute piece look quite messy. You do not need to be making finished drawings to show off of during practice time, you need to be learning new things. :)

I have no idea, but I cross-posted this to our Facebook page just in case that helped. :)

https://www.facebook.com/lineofaction/posts/1752185881496287

It doesn't look like you posted any image, tafazulmattoo :(

There’s currently no image reviews or directory available for easy browsing.

This is because most of our images so far (especially in the figure study tool) used in the gesture drawing tools were provided by very generous photographers interested in helping to train fine artists, but some of them specified in the licensing agreement that their images were not to be displayed in any kind of archive or list. Out of respect for their artwork and their legal rights, we have complied and not added an image archive/review to the site.

As Ghostly points out, people have found a few workarounds though!

I was going to say that I think your next focus of practice should be looking at the figure as a whole, in order to improve proportions, but it looks like you've already got wonderful advice and committed to that as your next practice goal!

So I'll just say this instead: Your practice schedule sounds great and your attitude about getting to practice the "right" way is perfect. Keep at it! :)

Hey Abi,

Do you have a specific goal for what you want to improve? Or is your goal to just "get better"?

Since there are hundreds of things you could work on improving or noticing in any given drawing, not have a really specific goal for what you want to be improving this time very often leads to your brain being overwhelmed and not focusing on/improving anything.

Pick something really specific -- more expressive use of line weight. Being daring with color. Picking up on the subtle variations in different noses. Focus on that one thing for your daily practice for at least a week. Improve on that one thing. Continue onto a second week, or pick a new thing. But definitely don't try to "get better at drawing."

In general, there's no one right way to do your construction. Is there one method that feels better to you or makes the most intuitive sense? If you are getting started, it may help to just pick one method and keep at it, even if you are confused; practice is the only true way to make progress, after all! It's hard to learn everything at once, so definitely break it down into bite sized pieces by limiting the scope of what you're focusing on learning and improving at any given moment. As you're working, try to notice what you're doing better for that stated goal, not the huge range of other skills you might work on next.

Once you're feeling a little less confused with the basics of one method, you can challenge yourself to try another.

Remember: It takes a lot of energy to learn a new skill, and your body is fine-tuned to survive by not wasting energy you don't have to. That frustration you feel is your body asking you, are you really sure this is important enough to you to spend this energy learning it? Tell it yes, you are opting in, by keeping at it!

Thanks for your interest and your offer! I am unable to accept this type of help. The site is not open source, and we need to treat the security of our users seriously. Thank you though. :)

Yikes! Thanks for reporting that! :)

first of all, you have a wonderful site. I really like quality of the images and the UI so far. And I just happily contributed $5 to the funding, but some things about it put me off a little bit.

Thanks! :) I am thrilled you like it and I deeply appreciate your financial support.

First is the subscription thing. Even knowing that contributing gives me some subscription time along with it, it sounds counter intuitive to me, paying now, so you can build stuff that I’ll have to pay again to access some time in the future.

It's not an unusual funding strategy; you can see it commonly among game kickstarters especially. It's a way to fund the work that needs to be done to keep the site up and running for years to come, to utilize that solid new foundation to enable the many features that people have wanted from us for ages, and to create a way for the site to thrive into the future; being a 100% free site with no premium options for the last decade has meant we are held back from the features and photos people most want. Our core offerings also suffer as surging demand results in slowdowns and even complete site downtime, without the resources to put a better foundation under us. I don't want to have to repeat this fundraiser in a couple more years, and instead hope to give the site premium offerings that let the entire community (even the free users) see the site remain strong and improving for another decade. :)

Also there’s no pricing as of now for the subscription, so that makes it even more uncertain.

I'm still working to finalize the pricing; I should have it out very shortly, and I'm sorry there's been a delay on that! It is definitely weird to have the one without the other, you are totally right.

Another thing is about the features. I don’t know if there was a research to which features the users asked the most or any metrics about user behavior

The features to include and what order to put them in our fundraising goals was picked based on several thousand emails from the last couple of years as well as two recent focus groups conducted among art students starting to graduating from art school, some of whom had used LoA before and some who used another tool.

Another thing is the link at the end of the session, when the asking for contribution appears being “No, thanks. Line of action doesn’t help me”. I don’t know if that’s supposed to be a joke or to make people feel guilty on purpose, but it’s annoying specially when you have already contributed.

I'm sorry you don't like these reminders; asking people to take a serious look at whether or not they value the site at least a one-time payment of $1.49 worth, especially given that many use it daily and have done so for months or years, has by far been the most effective at getting people to participate in supporting us. With 31k consistent users per week, the realm of possibility for what we can achieve for the site together is huge!

I'm sorry it continues to nag you since you've already contributed; please bear with me for a week or two more. :)