Forum posts by Aunt Herbert

Well, you did it super accurately, as always. I am way to sloppy a draftsman myself in comparison. I am fully content, when I see on a reference that curve between neck and shoulder. When I do sloppy quick sketches I almost treat her as just a bit of a single bent line from the center of the neck towards one of the shoulder joints. After all, the only thing usually visible is that typical shadow bump, caused by the upper edge of the clavicula pushing against the skin. And when I have more detailed questions, I just touch my own shoulder and feel for example how much the clavicula moves, when I move my arm (usually not so much, as the connection between clavicula and the shoulder joint is quite mobile.)

Well, you don't see the shoulderblades when drawing from the front, and you don't see the clavicula from the back. What IS visible from the front is that one slightly tilted curve underneath the neck that leads towards the shoulder joints. (or rather the pair of them that lead to both shoulders from the centre)

You only ever have to draw both shoulderblades and clavicula in a rather odd pose, where you get a glimpse on the shoulder directly from above, and in that case they just form sort of a rounded v-shape.

If you draw the shoulders from the back, the shoulderblades are often quite easily visible, and they don't have a very complex shape either. Knowing about them will just help you understand where those bumps and shapes you see on the backside of a model come from.

If you told me to draw an anatomically correct clavicula and shoulder blade, I would probably mess up quite a bit, so you don't have to worry so much about "drawing them correctly".

Just if you look at a body and think about why it is hard to identify where the ribcage is underneath all those muscles you mentioned, those shoulderbones are where the upper side of those muscles end. Knowing where they are and how to look for them helps you connect the ribcage to the outline of the upper torso. They are basically the missing link. The outer border of the part that you can't see through, in a common pose from the front.

If you insist on worrying as much as possible, you can probably spend a few hours to practice drawing those until you can publish them in an anatomy book, and time spent drawing is never time spent wasted when your goal is to improve your drawings, but in practical terms it is entirely sufficient to be aware of how those curved lines and the ribcage relate to the outline of your reference.

Pheew, explaining how to visualize something is a bit tricky. But here is s 3d-model I found of the clavicula and shoulderbone: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/coraco-clavicular-ligament-42689ac0f46d4c28854af990733ad487

The clavicula are two shallow curves, extending from the center top of the ribcage outward towards the shoulder joints. If you understand their level of mobility, you understand basically all the ways the outline of the upper torso can transform.

And, yepp, when drawing an entire torso the ribcage is a simplistic shape, nobody can really "see" through the body, because we don't have x-ray eyes.

You don't have to be able to literally "see" everything, or to practice to draw everything perfectly from memory, but having a general idea of how that stuff looks can give you an idea if you drew an outline of a shoulder or a neckline and something looks off, but you aren't sure what's up.

You find good abstractions for the flow of the pose. What I find iffy are the uppermost sketches, where you seemed to have been searching for the one perfect line like a dozen times or so for almost every curve or circle. At this level of abstraction, I don't think the difference in quality between each attempt is big enough to warrant the amount of time trying over and over again.

First, big applause for chosing ink. Second, yepp, looks like you got the shape of the ribcage down. That should be helpful for designing the masses when drawing pose.

If you are interested in more bones, I would advise shoulder bones and clavicula next, that way you basically got the complete foundation for the upper torso.

Very cool and dynamic shapes. Not super naturalistic or perfectly measured, but narratively strong and just the right kind of funky. Brush pens are quite lovely to work with, unless the ink flow starts to develop hiccupps.

The face itself is super well done. Your lines emphasize natural shapes and depict clearly readable emotion

You avoided the trap that I constantly run into to overemphasize details, and you keep the different shades very distinct. Super clean brights, smooth transitions to shadows.

The eyelashes could possibly be more expressive with a bit more detail, and I would probably have chosen sharper lines around the iris and the light reflections inside. Eyes are just such a natural focus point for the viewer, a bit of extra bling there can improve the whole image a lot.

The neck looks quite spotty, like you ran out of gas drawing it. That's less a problem for the shoulders, were your decision to keep the texture somewhat abstract makes graphically sense and looks deliberate, but with the neck, especially the shadow right under the chin looks unfinished.

The hair isn't bad, but I would advise to get a bit more daring with it. First, you aren't under such pressure to measure correctly as when you depict the features of the face (if the nose is a half inch off, the face will look like a super mutant, if a hair quill is positioned differently, no one will ever notice), and second, healthy hair are shiny, so they have a lot of contrast between shadows, mediums and highlights. I always find it quite easy to get hair to pop really voluminous by chosing nice, simple, but wavy, shapes for the highlights and darkest shadows and then eyeballing the rest in.

On the other hand, the way you draw the hair looks more subdued, which has the benefit of leaving more prominence to the face itself, so it is ultimately a style choice.

I wish I could draw that. I so wish. But I don't seem to get closer to finding any solutions.

I don't see the "completely unrealistic shapes" you are complaining about. If anything, you are overdoing it a bit with several tracing lines to indicate the geometry of each and every tube, I don't think that is always necessary.

I am thinking of a line of a song by Gotye: "You can get addicted to a certain type of sadness." Your level of self-critique seems to be in that region.

You are constructing very neat and detailed foundations for drawings, just that you use extremely thick lines for them. Just tone down the foundation lines quite a bit and start using them as guides to draw a finished outline over them. And yes, if you sic a cantankerous stickler on it, they might find some details, that digress from the reference the tiniest bit, but you don't need to immediately nail down that amount of perfection. Perfect is the enemy of good, because perfect never gets done, and your drawings are by far good enough to proceed to further steps.

I would say your perspective foundation is where it needs to be for now, switch to other aspects, like line economy, and flow. You did all the preliminary studies that make sense, just try out the difference your preparations make if you return to naively drawing outlines. Confidence comes from doing, not from endlessly hesitating before the next step.

Neat vertical rows of shining red facets assemble to a bright disc, almost perfectly circular, with just the tiniest bit of perspective foreshortening turning it into an upright oval. A pattern of glowing parallel red curves is reflected from the tunnel visor, just above and to the right of the disk, a cut off limb of the pedestrian signal peeks through the darkness lower and to the left. The shining red is echoed by the matrix of brake lights and rear lights between my eyes and the vehicular signal, and reflected by the spray of rain drops that repeatedly begins to cover the windscreen, before the windscreen wiper returns with a rubbery groan to clear the view onto the street again.

All the red lights are surrounded by a faint corona, from the watery film on the windscreen and a slight oily film on my glasses. A corona of red concentric circles around each drop of red light. And shining red star streaks from every drop of red light, slightly assymetric around each court of light, but in the same pattern repeated around all of them. Shadows of the boundaries of my glasses, and the sides of the tip of my nose frame the view, the rear view mirror is also shadowed and doubled into an abstract apparition, that partly overlaps the neatly accurate matrix of the red signal.

As I refocus on the mirror, the reds vanish into a phantom of doubled background fog, and the mirror frame opens up into the deep tunnel of the street behind me. Yellowish street lights reflected on the wet asphalt, dark squares and rectangles from the houses around, and irregular rhizomic black lines from the naked branches in between. Behind the inked pattern of the city, underneath a dramatic flourish of grey sirling clouds, there is a small sliver of blue shining sky, that neatlessly turns into an improbably intense yellow above a brumble of more black branches.

The signal in front of me turns from red to amber to green, foot hits pedal, my palm direkts the gear box along the humming of the engine, first gear, second gear, third.... The neon arrow on the tachometer climbs towards 50, fifth gear, the engine settles for a reliefed hum. The rear lights ahead are a comfortable distance away, white pairs of lights from the oncoming traffic, paired again by the shiny reflection on the wet asphalt, indicate tons of steel barrelling towards me, then passing narrowly to my left and vanishing behind.

Got a bad case of that right now. My hope at the moment: It is winter, short days, I had to do lots of extra shifts for sick co-workers and am mentally and emotionally exhausted... there will be better days, when I can hopefully return to experiencing beauty. I had bad times before, they passed. Spring isn't far away,...

I don't think I can be helpful, but may I indulge my curiosity? Because, when you say "I can't draw comics anymore", there are two possible interpretations: a) People don't let me draw comics (to publish) and b) I had actual skill at drawing comics, that I can no longer access.

Or, given how ambivalent your description of the problem is, c) a somewhat complex mixture of causality and interference between a) and b)

The reason I try to make the distinction is, because problem a) and problem b) seems to ask for completely different solutions, a) boils down to basically a public relations problem (or a problem of how to sell your soul in an adverse cultural environment), while b) seems to be a very personal quest to regain lost creativity.

And sticking with the theme of me asking clueless questions: What is the actual difference between drawing an illustration (which you clearly still seem to be capable of) and drawing a comic, if story line and camera angles aren't the issue? (Which I would have naively guessed to be the biggest hurdle to overcome).

And, if you were once able to bridge that gap, and now no longer are, do you still have memories of the time before you lost that ability, or memorabilia (your art from back then?) to help you restore that memory?

About the 5 boxes a day,... I didn't go especially quicker, especially when taking in account the time it takes to measure how accurate the result was. If I understand drawabox right, that isn't a bug, but a feature. The idea isn't to get the 250 done and be over with, but to adapt correctly measuring a few boxes every day into your practice.... which I personally totally have been slagging on for a time now after I done my 250, and I should probably pick up again.

Another guilty challenge is keeping an actual collection of surface pattern going....

I highly disagree with the "never a straight line on gesture" part.

One cure for a balloon body problem is to make sure, to counteract curves with straights on the limbs, for example.

Also, "flow" isn't the only possible focus for gesture drawing. If you want to emphasize perspective and massively simplify geometric forms, you will use tons of straight lines.

There must be 1000 other good reasons to use straight lines on occassion.

I can tell you, what I am trying to do, can't guarantee it's the best way, as I feel like I am not done with it to the amount that I can give a final judgement.

Step 1, I try to focus on simplyfied geometric forms when drawing from reference (over for example fluid dynamic lines or beautiful shapes, or exaggerated poses). I am almost more drawing a posable artist's mascot than a human being, except that on overweight people I also add paunch, breasts or massive thighs as independent "masses", if they are voluminous enough to decisively influence the outline of the body.

Step 2, When I am done with my daily practice, I chose one or two poses, that I like most

Step 3, I try to draw the same pose, but from a different angle. like 90° turned to the left or right, or turned up or down by 45°. I am keeping the OG for comparison, to make sure, that I keep the size and relations identical.

From experience I feel, like this taxes my perspective thinking quite a lot. I think I get the benefit of drawing from reference that way, namely avoiding to settle down on a small range of same-y poses, but I also get the challenge of drawing from "imagination", in that I have to develop a really distinctive concept of the underlying foundation.

The goal is to learn to be able to manipulate a reference, to make it fit my artistic vision.

ATM the time and energy it takes me to "manipulate" a reference in this way feels like 5 to 7 times higher, than straight up drawing it. I hope that practicing this will lower the difference a lot, until manipulating a reference feels natural.

Once I feel satisfied with my practice in this regard, I'll have to check out, whether this solves my problems, or whether I will have to come up with an idea to deepdive more into physiology in regards to human range of motions and body mechanics.