Forum posts by Aunt Herbert

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.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on February 18, 2024 1:49am.

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.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on February 8, 2024 11:24am.

After you finished your session, in the session review, you can just right-click on the images you want to save and use window's save image option. Just tried it out to be sure it works, functions smoothly. If you want to put them several of them together into one file, you still have to do some editing, but you don't have to screenshot anything.

Hmm, let me start with the easier part. Watching videos of people showing how much they improved in a year has problems:

Someone who puts up a video has the intention to tell a story. They will always chose what fits the story. That isn't even evil or deceptive, you can't pack your entire experience over a year in a video that is still at a digestable length. But when watching that video, the fact that it is edited can lead you to false conclusions. That person documented their experience over a time, and they are proud of it, and they celebrate, "Look at the cool thing I achieved!" That does not mean, that they exactly planned from the get go to exactly end up right there, or that their development path is the one and only possible way to go, or that, if they ended up with a different result, they wouldn't still have found reason to celebrate their development and make a video with the content "Look at the cool thing I achieved!"

If you watch other people, be aware that you can only ever see their public side. That's like looking at everyone's Facebook page and wondering, why they are all happy and constantly do cool and interesting stuff. They don't, they just don't post about anything else. So if you compare yourself to them, you will always look bland and boring and stupid in comparison.

The "cool thing" is that they developed. If we are in a depressive mood and willing to beat ourselves up, we can misread those videos and look at everything that we developed differently and bash it as "wrong" or "wasted time". But that is mostly us being unfair to our own progress and development. The time we spend training our fine motorics, the thousands and thousands of design decisions we constantly make over our practice time DO have effects. I don't know if you have kept some very old drawings of yourselves around, if you have, try to look at them, and remember, that if you have kept them for so long, those were probably drafts, that you felt extremely proud about, when you made them, so probably some of the lucky strikes, that occassionally happen. And still, you wouldn't draft them that way anymore, because you evolved. And if you try to channel your memories from that time, and try to look at what you draw now, with those eyes you had back then, you would have been amazed at what you now consistently can do.

The grind part, well... I am at the moment not enthusiastic about my progress, or about my results right now. I set my goal to draw at least 30 minutes a day, and currently those 30 minutes can get awfully long. Drawing just to not break the chain is a bit stupid, yes, but it does keep me drawing one more day, and then one more day, and it will keep me drawing the day after that, and I know from experience, that my foul and toxic moods don't last forever, and I will find another wave of enthusiasm for what I do to ride for a while. I am not riding high now, I am just paddling along, but F ALL I won't stop paddling, because I been here already, and I know, that stopping now won't change who I am anyways, and over short or long I will be drawn back to drawing anyways, so I can just as well keep going and keep my eyes on adding +1 to the chain of days of uninterrupted practice.

Something that occassionally works for me, when I am absolutely in the gutter is "meditative drawing". Big name, what I mean is, I feel too wasted to concentrate on anything, so I just hunker down on my bed, put the pencil on paper and watch my hand follow its own routines. I don't even try to draw pretty or achieve anything, to the contrary, I try to draw as ugly as possible, and whenever my head turns on and starts to develop a plan where the drawing is supposed to go, I sabotage myself by turning the page by 90 or 180 degrees. I just don't stop scribbling, because then I would have to come up with another idea of what to do, which feels too strenuous, and I keep at the same page, because standing up and getting a different page would also be strenuous.

Strange thing, I spent a lot of time drawing very focused, and got huge stacks of finished drawings lying around everywhere, but the coolest pieces, those that I decided to put in a frame and hang up on my wall, almost inevitably started with these kind of self-hate scribblings. And it doesn't work for me, when I am in a good mood, because then I will only produce rather tame and boring stuff with that method, and I better do focused work instead.

Someone who's videos kinda help a bit with that approach is Peter Draws. Not because some specifique technique he uses, although he does produce cool stuff, somewhere at the border of thoroughly abstract and amazingly surreal, but more because he comments his drawing in a pleasant voice, and my own inner narrator starts to sound a bit like him after watching his stuff.

The idea is, if your jaw hurts after or during drawing, because you try so hard and feel like you constantly fail, you have to find a way to relax that jaw while drawing, or it will keep messing up your focus.

I would recommed patience, if I wouldn't remember that I used to have none of it myself, and being told to be patient with myself never helped me either.

Just, quitting practice is the wrong decision. Because you are who you are, and you will end up back here anyways. You are accumulating resources by doing it, and you will find them useful to have, when your mood shifts again, even if you don't see a stringent purpose in them right now.

We are currently also at the end of January, which is the sh***est time of the year for depressions on the northern hemisphere, because the days are so short, so it is quite likely, that your mood won't be all that bad in a month or two.

It's just a thing, that I increasingly observe. I don't know, if it has been that way forever, but LoA seems to take ages to load, compared to other sites, and I even regularly end up with "Time Out, Gateway somethingsomething" errors and can load the site only on the second or consecutive tries.

I haven't thought about it for a long time and just accepted it, but maybe you can check whether there is a way to optimize the loading algorithms for the site.

Whatever problem you have, I feel like I am definitely sharing it. I really can't give you "the solution" either, as I haven't found one for myself.

Around march 2023 I got so disappointed with my progress in drawing, that I decided to give up on drawing altogether. It turned out, I had pretty much organized my life so much around having enough time to practice drawing, that I found myself with an awful amount of empty time to fill. I chose to kill the time with gaming instead, but I don't have endless money to spend on new games, and I was looking for some kind of community exchange, so I went into one of those MMO games with a guild system. I ended up doing a lot of repetitive stupid chores to rank up my guild status, became esteemed guild officer after a short time, and then had a fall out with the guild leader and quit in disgust.

Two things I learned: a) If you make something the focus of your life, you will end up doing repetitive chores anyways, because whatever you do, it doesn't have infinite variety, and b) the one time I had a discussion with a girl in the chat, that became a bit flirty, my natural way of flexing in an anonymous medium was to find an excuse to drop a few links to some of my favorite artworks, that I have done over time.

So, if I want to impress someone, I naturally tend to do it by showing off the amount of time I spent on improving my drawings skills, which says something about where I get my self worth from. It seemed only logical to go back to THAT then to fill the god sized void in my life.

What I do, is to try to build up enough enthusiasm for a certain project or idea, and that enthusiasm can last some amount of time, sometimes days, sometimes weeks, even up to several months. And, well, I have a multi-faceted personality, with a lot of diverging interests, that draw me hitherto and fro, but in the end, I don't have an infinite amount of facets either, so the stuff I am drawn to tends to gravitate around certain topics, and even repeats itself. And in the end some clusters of experience formed, that may not be sufficient to compete with the world elite, but that are certainly noticeable enough for people, who just have less experience in that specific skill.

I try to keep up a minimum level of grind, just because the feeling "I have done it so often, I don't want to break the chain and stop doing it now" is a decent motivator in itself. And when I am not drawing, and I get in a situation, where I need something to direct my mind to, like, when I am thinking: "Okay, I am driving from a to b, and the last half hour I only spent getting angrier and angrier at person X, which doesn't help me at all, what can I think about instead", then I can go fishing in my memories for the moments of enthusiasm, that drew me over and over again to drawing, and sometimes something bites, and one of the old enthusiasms fires again and I get more days or weeks of focusing on drawing again.

It probably isn't a time efficient way to start a drawing career, but it helps me balance myself away from getting too entangled in other people's problems, and the fact, that it is still always me, with my specific pile of memory and experience, that has always been fascinated with form and beauty and drawing, that gives the whole conundrum some consistency and some overall shape.

I like this site, because I gives me a tool to keep the grind going, and I can occassionally have sort of conversations with people, who maybe have a similar outlook on the world. I don't know if this helps anyone, this is just the story of how and why I keep doing, what I do.

A practice I try to do, to transition from drawing from reference to drawing from imagination: I start with a session of drawing from reference, but I focus entirely on building the body from basic geometric forms, robot style, no details, no big flowy lines, nothing fancy. Then I chose the best result of the session, and try to draw it again, but with a 90° switch in perspective. It usually takes me quite a number of attempts and about 100 times as long to get it done.

I think drawing from imagination is related to drawing from reference, but it is just a different skill set, and you have to throw yourself into it and just start doing it to become good at it.

One problem I see for myself is, I am not a ballet dancer, a circus performer, gymnast or a martial artist, and I don't have a major in human physiology either, so coming up with entirely new, cool and convincing poses is a bit hard. So in some ways I will always work from reference, either from copying something from film or photography, or from another artist, or from my memory of what I have seen. Being able to correctly "turn" the pose to draw it from another angle gives me the artistic freedom to fit it into my composition as I need it, and working from a modification of a reference prevents me from being lazy and just copy pasting a small set of gestures over and over. I get the challenge of working from the outside world, and I can use the same mechanisms for error detection as I have acquired from working from reference.

I have been trying to walk through town with a clipboard and just make sketches after a single glance at some passerby. It has been an interesting experience, but I feel like the quality of results was shockingly low and it did not seem to improve noticably from practice. After a while I gave up sketching from a glance, and only looked for people who were resting. Which a) obviously lowers the range of poses, and b) is generally only viable when the outside weather is inviting enough to take a rest in the sun.

I am planning to repeat drawing from a glance once the weather gets better, but I feel like learning to capture, and then to consistently modify, gesture and poses from reference will give me some foundations on which to build up consistent quality from.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on January 30, 2024 10:26am.

The drawing is looking good, but if I take a critical look, the placement of the hip and the way the thigh attaches to the body is off on both girls. So, it might be time to brush up your construction of the torso again?