Forum posts by Aunt Herbert

You are doing them well. And, you aren't in for a sprint, this is a lifelong marathon, so you will switch between improving in different skills all over and over. Getting better at one thing will also help you improve in other things, so switching it up from time to time can only be good.

If you are especially interested in perspective and line quality, I think drawabox.com is universally seen as a good source for that. It's another incredible time sink, but absolutely worth it.

You don't HAVE to always use the class feature ;) The option "All the same length" is a real option, and it is not considered cheating to use it, when it fits your practice goals better.

Your animal sketches look cool. At some point you'll discover that drawing (most) animals and drawing human figures isn't so different as it first feels. Find head, chest, hip, and you will have found the gesture. Only that head, chest, hip look a bit differetly and are placed differently.

My only feedback is, that I share the problem, and it might be the same for a lot more artists. There might be occassionally a methodical solution to a specific period of lower quality output: may be you are currently focusing on a different problem than before, and neglect some fundamentals, that you already felt they were sound. Maybe you have been focusing on a single problem for too long, have reached a plateau, and might have more success by introducing some variations to your practices.

But the amount that your general mental disposition can impact your art also can't be underrated. I know for me, it is sometimes rather easy to be fascinated with a specifical type of graphical problems, I am already looking forward to drawing, when I am away from the desk and mentally go through all the options, that I still want to try out, and when I get to the desk, concentrating on drawing for hours just seems to be the natural way to follow my interests, and the results I produce amaze myself.

On other days, it is just a grind to even get through the basic practice to not break the streak, one out of 3 drawings looks halfway acceptable, and when I try drawing anything beyond a few minutes, the time just seems to drag on forever, and everything just feels hard and complicated to do. A lot of that just seems to come from non-drawing related stress factors, beginning with the weather, health. the quality of sleep or nutrition, over family, job, other conflicts and worries, etcetera. Sometimes the batteries are just empty. General life experience shows, that such phases pass. Which is still rather little consolidation, when I am right now immediately in one.

I actually don't have a favourite resource for anatomy, but one observation to your post: If your main problem are models with "curves", then it is not about understanding muscles, (which most anatomy resources will focus on), but about body fat.

I personally find it helpful to treat the paunch and on female models the breasts and occasionally the thighs as additonal "masses" when sketching out "the main masses" (head, chest, hip). They aren't as decisive for the pose itself, as they usually don't influence the position of joints, but they can just hide so much of the construction and influence the outline so much, that sketching them in individually helps me a lot to find the OG main masses quicker, and stick more consistently to uniform shortcuts for them. The forms of paunch, breasts, thighs, aren't spectacularly complex either. Just being aware of them and treating them separately in the main construction has helped me at least a lot when sketching overweight models. So something you might want to try, to see whether it helps you, too.

EDIT: If you don't use "curvy" as euphemism for overweight, I still believe, that the problem might be not with anatomy, but with shading.

Thing is, the models, were you really need anatomy for are those really ripped ones, where you can literally make out every single muscle. With "curvy" females, the issue is still body fat. Namely, that for example females have on average a higher body fat percentage than males, so unless the connective tissue is degraded by age or desiccation, there are a lot fewer details visible on the body, and if you don't draw accordingly, the model may appear somewhat unhealthy.

So you either need to consciously reduce the amount of details, by focusing on long curved lines, or if you actually insist on rendering full detail, you need to be extra extra careful with sorting out the values. Make sure the values are consistent over the whole model, the lights are "clean", i.e. shadows are terminator, core shadow and reflected light, while lights are halftones and highlights, and asl the halftones are part of the light, they MUST be brighter than the shadow w/ reflected light, even if local contrasts want to leave you astray.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on January 20, 2024 10:44am.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on January 20, 2024 3:11pm.

I love how you are developing your figures from really snappy and energetic looking curves, and that you successfully stay away from getting lost on unnecessary detail.

Generally, I try to include in my critics some ideas about what to change or to try different, but I am mostly drawing a blank right now. The result looks great, and it looks like you are having fun doing it, so the best advice for now is probably to just rock on.

Hmm, maybe contrasting your curves with straight lines and hard corners could broaden the dynamic spectrum? Just an idea, though.

An observation for the second portrait: as the browline is generally establshed from the brows to the tip of the ears, the angle of the face indicated by the browline and the angle as it is shown by size of chin, mouth, etcetera are diverging from each other. Probably the problem is simply, that you drew the ears too high.

If the ears were on the reference, where you drew them, then you would have to redesign the lower part of the face a lot, as the woman would basically look down onto the ground, and the lower features would have to modified by an impressive amount of perspective shortening. This would be a mistake, that can happen easily when uncritically applying Loomis or Reilly abstractions to a reference, without checking first, whether the angle of perspective actually matches.

Yes, lots of errors, mostly in measuring proportions and relations. I think the overall drawing process you are following is basically correct, building a foundation from simple forms, but those 10 minute drawings push yourself way beyond your capabilities.

It looks like you try to learn juggling by immediately picking up 10 balls and trying to keep them all in the air at once.

That is certainly courageous, but you will probably progress faster, if you stick to shorter drawings for now, where you only try to solve a few problems at once, until you are comfortable with solving them. Like learning juggling by focusing on 2 or at most 3 balls for the start, before you add more.

Good thing about the 10 minute experiment, you get an initial idea what your shorties will eventually lead to. But for now, probably better focus on getting used to place the head and torso correctly, exactly like you would do at the start of the 10 minute drawing, but stop drawing after 1 or at most 2 minutes, before you start the next pose. That way you train that first initial steps 5 to 10 times more often in the same amount of daily training time.

Also, you probably get a better feedback on your progress that way, for now. You are working at fewer different problems, always the same type of relations and proportions, so you will have the same types of mistakes appear more often, you can identify them sooner, and your next attempt to correct them will follow sooner.

Once you are comfortable with the head and torso, you will have a solid foundation where the major joints need to be. Then you can start worrying about where the limbs need to go. Don't start adding more balls, while you are still struggling with your initial ones, that will only drain your energy for little gain.

Yes, maybe don't read too much into my warnings against too much exaggeration.

I just had a recent experience with drawing a kind of sort of Tai Chi pose, where I pushed the bending and twisting of the torso to the extreme, and ended up with a very cool looking action pose, that sadly had not a lot of resemblance to the somber, relaxed and collected expression of the reference, and I had to backtrack the exaggeration a lot to fix that.

I just wanted to tell you, exaggeration is a rule, not a law. A law you always follow, no matter what, a rule you always follow, except if there is a clear and obvious reason not to.

One more thought, one little trick I added to my inventory, and on some poses like #10 on the first page and #2 and #4 on the second page, I think you are somewhat starting to develop it anyways, but aren't sure yet what you are doing.

The idea of the bean is to show "the main masses". Especially when drawing very overweight people, I find it somewhat useful to add one or two (three ?) more masses, namely the apron of fat and on women the breasts. Other than head, ribcage, pelvis, those masses do not determine the placement of joints and limbs, but they can obscure the marks for ribcage and pelvis a lot, and especially modify the outline of the torso a lot.

Making a distinction between apron, breasts, and torso helps me to standardize ribcage and pelvis towards their skeletal foundation, and get a better eye for where those are. The apron's form is usually simple enough, for the breasts I often indicate the underside of both breasts in one curvy w-shaped line.

After separating those forms from the torso, the catalogue of possible body types just narrows down to a much clearer taxonomy of simple repeating forms and shapes.

Well, the orientation of the bean is determined by the position of the ribcage and the hip, so you "only" need to find the landmarks, that show that.... which is admittedly hard enough to do, especially when major landmarks are hidden by limbs or just muscles (shoulder...) or even body fat...

To me the upper part of the bean became a bit clearer once I started to more consciously differentiate between ribcage and shoulderline. This means the ribcage isn't as rounded on the top as you still draw it a lot, it is formed like the peak of an egg, with the neck marking where the tip of that egg is, and then the shoulders sitting somewhat independently on top of that egg. The tip of that egg usually isn't visible, at it is obscured by the shoulders, but drawing the ribcage as an egg rather than as a sphere helps with the rest of the anatomy a lot, as it leaves the correct space for the shoulder joints and bones and muscles to fill.

In reaction, it is on some poses easier to understand where that ribcage hides, AFTER you draw in a shoulderline, just as one single line along the clavicles for orientation.

Finding the one perfect shortcut for the pelvis is a chore, especially as the visibility of marks varies quite a bit dependening on pose and point of view.

In a pinch, look at the thighs to triangulate where those hip joints have to be. Other than the shoulder joints, they are 100% fixed to the pelvis, so you can always backward design from the thighs, if you find nothing else.

If the belly is visible, it often helps to trace a curve along the centre of the belly muscles to exactly locate the groin. On a back view, the spine may be visible for that purpose.

It's also a question of what you want to develop the drawing into, which shortcut is the most useful. If you want to improve perspective it's useful to very consciously start with a box, from which you cut out curves to leave space for the thighs and the belly. If you want to focus more on flowing lines, sketching a pair of underpants is often easier and more useful. If a big buttoc muscle hides everything else, just a big circle, or the upper form of that thigh might be the best way to do it.

Oooh kay, so much for useful landmarks, and now to a topic, where I personally disagree a bit with Proko, and that is the Line of Action. The way he sells it is, that it is a single line, so it has to be an easy starting point. I don't find that single line easy at all, because he attaches so much purpose to it. I try to consciously remind me to use it every now and then, but in the end I almost as often don't use it, and in some poses I just don't feel it helps a lot at all.

The exaggeration of the pose part to me is also a bit more complicated than advertised. On a very basic level, it just counteracts a typical beginner's mistake, to unconsciously straighten the torso, and thereby produce stiff poses. So, if you see, that the bean is slightly bent, it is generally a safe bet to draw it bent a bit more. If you see, that the bean is twisted, it is safe to attempt to twist it just a bit more. That is the very base line level of that advice.

But it carries a second layer, namely that exaggerating the pose is also a first step into stylizing the pose, and as with all styles, that is an aesthetic decision, which should be made from the context of your artistic goal for that pose. Exaggerating adds more dynamic to the expressed motion, but sometimes you also want to emphasize calmness, in which case just exaggerating contradicts your goal. It is good to be able to exaggerate, it is better to understand how it impacts the result, so you can do it consciously.

For now, for practice, you probably should alway try to exaggerate as hard as possible to counteract that beginner's tendency to draw stiff torsos, but it is a rule and a stylistic choice, not a law.

Also: If you ever look at your finished drawing and get the uneasy feeling: Somehow the pose looks stiff, but I don't know why, here is your number one suspect to interrogate: Did you bend and twist that torso enough?

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on January 10, 2024 2:20pm.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on January 10, 2024 2:25pm.

I do find a lot to love about those lines, you are focused on the right priorities, your shapes and forms are clear and easy to read.

My advice would be to investigate that feeling of "not being thrilled" a bit more, and try to put your vague artistic ambitions into clearer forms. Do you have any older sketches still available, which felt more promising? Maybe put those next to your newer ones and try to find the essential differences. Could be, you just got a bit rusty and will be back to going forward in no time, but could also be, that you shifted focus on some other aspects since then, and might want to readjust that, and retrain some fundamentals, who turned out to be less solid than you assumed them to be.

Or another thing you could do is practicing critiques by giving a bunch of beginners feedback on how to improve their stuff. That way you get used to defining the quality of a drawing by various measures, and then can apply that practice to your own work, to get clearer ideas about which boundaries you yourself want to push next.

A third option would be to put your shorties to the test, and try developing them into something, that makes you clearly leave your comfort zone. Using one to do a really long time drawing sometimes can turn a vague feeling of "something ain't right" into a clearly visible flaw, that you then can work out. That would be an option if your long term goal is mostly to get better at drawing from reference. If your long term goal is more about drawing from imagination, I found a trick to test your shorties for perspective: Try copying the same pose, but from a different angle. That will put your understanding of spatial relations really to the test.

TL;DR there are no obvious and objective clear mistakes to find on those drawings. Putting your finger on the source of your worries OTOH is clearly a very personal task for you, that will pretty much define your identity as an artist.

"Did you mean that I have to just draw the bean with the head without the hands and feets ?"

Actually, kind of yes. Those 30 sec and 1 min shorties are there, so you can practice the first lines of your drafts a lot. And basically starting a pose with sketching in the bean is a good way to start. The bean doesn't only define the torso, it also tells you a lot about the limbs, because the placement of the hip defines where the joints are, that the thighs start from, and the ribcage, neck and head give good landmarks to find the shoulderline, that tells you where your upper arms can and should start from.

Getting that correct from the start is way more important than deciding whether that hand or that foot needs to be placed a few inches to the left or right. If the extremities are placed slightly differently, the pose will usually still look natural and convincing, if the torso is too stiff, or the major joints just aren't where they need to be, no amount of polishing will save that turd.

It's only a kind of yes, because the bean isn't the only technique to capture the main masses, but it is a good one, and the more practice you get with it, the better your results will look. Therefore, yes, try to focus your shorties as much as possible on designing the head and torso well, and take your time to fiddle around with the limbs in your longer drawings. If a single line, that shows the lengths of a thigh or an upper arm helps you place the torso better, draw it, but the focus has to be on the torso first and foremost.

BTW, that is also the secret of the much misunderstood line of action. Yes, it usually follows roughly at least one of the limbs, but it isn't meant to fully define them, therefor, it is only one single long curved line. It's purpose is to help you align the torso and head correctly. It is more often than not a few seconds well spent to draft it, especially on very dynamic poses, but if you just can't find it, and instead see a more convenient way to design the masses correctly, skip it. On some poses it just doesn't help a lot.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on January 8, 2024 12:44pm.

It did work, I edited my post above.

OK, after looking at your stuff, I don't think you are doing so badly. Ever heard of Dunning and Krueger? They found out, that the people, who are most confident about their skills are the people, who have no clue at all, because they don't know how bad they really are.

And the worst moment when acquiring a new skillset is, when you just got a tiny bit better. Because then you start to realize, how long the way ahead towards your goal really is. I think, that is where you are right now.

Your main task right now is to get through that bump in self esteem. So, here are some pointers from me, where you are probably a bit too critical to yourself right now. Yes, the 30 second shorties don't look like much. Thing is, that is not a bug, that is a feature. They aren't meant to look polished, they are just there to train you in structuring your work process, by looking at the gesture first. I have seen people on this page, who developed completing 1 minute poses into an art form in itself, but that is not what they are meant for. These are just about focusing your first thoughts for longer pieces.

I would personally recommend to ignore the limbs at this stage, and try to focus more on head, ribcage, hip as first lines, but you aren't off by a mile.

And if I scroll through your pieces, the pose before the last, the guy balancing on one hand, that is really a complicated pose to get right, and you almost nailed it, you just did not find a good solution for the head.

On the very last pose, to me it looks, like you got too impressed with her huge boots, drew her legs and feet too large, and then overcorrected and drew them much too small. Been there, done that.

One part of the learning process is to develop a deeper judgment of your own results than just "looks good" and "looks ugly". Try to understand, what went well with the drawing, and what went badly, so you can find and correct specific mistakes and come up with ideas what to focus on in your next drawing session.

Another, maybe even more important part of the learning process is to get used to constantly producing one draft after another. You aren't working at drawing the one professional looking piece, that will earn you your place in a gallery, you are mostly working at your own skills, and the drafts you produce are just the endless stream of wood chips, that fall from your work bench.

You have approximately 5000 really crappy and flawed pieces inside you, and the only way to get them out is to draw them all. Each crappy drawing that you successfully brought to paper is another one off the stack.

Keep them around, mark a day in two to three weeks in your calendar, draw every day until then, then take out those crappy pieces from now and compare them to your latest work then, to see where you made progress. Comparing yourself to yourself a few weeks ago is a fair comparison, comparing yourself to a professional craftsperson, who spend their last 10 years drawing 8 to 10 hours every day is just begging for punishment.

So, to quote a youtuber, who is more a martial than a graphical artist: "Get out there and train!"

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on January 7, 2024 11:30am.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on January 7, 2024 11:49am.

OK, I only saw the first image, and was somewhat confused. Then I scrolled down, and realized the scope of your project, and what you are doing. I can just say, you seem like a feint point at the horizon of my artistic ambition.

Thank you for sharing your work, as an orientation point to work towards.