Forum posts by Aunt Herbert

Hi Josefe, the good message, you aren't doing anything wrong, you have been following the tutorial very diligently, and I actually see your lines developing in a good direction.

The bad message, you probably can't see that direction at all and are confused. The reason for that, the tutorial on this site is extreeeemely abbreviated and condensed to fit into one page of text and a few pop ups between drawing sessions. Everything written in the tutorial is true, essential and important, but learning to draw from that is like learning to fly a plane by following the instructions on the back of a cereal box.

I recommend the Human Figure Fundamentals course on proko.com . The free version is entirely sufficient. It follows basically the same drawing concept as the tutorial on this page, but it takes itself 32 hours of videos, with instructions and practices to follow, to fully explain the concept.

I could try to give you individual advice on your drawings, and how to progress, but I would mostly quote from memory from Proko's course for these first steps, so it probably just makes more sense to point you towards the original source of most of my basic understanding of the human form.

Hi Euphony. The daily practice shows, your designs have improved a lot, although there are still inconsistencies between different attempts. The next steps on your art journey should be to develop your shortcuts of the individual parts of the body. How to show informations about where the head is located and oriented, ribcage with shoulderlines, the hip, the whole torso, the joints.

Do quicksketches, but don't rush to finish your sketches, just find good shortcuts and place them correctly. And I know, "nghbut then I nghcant finish the outline in time".... don't fixate on always finishing your outline. Design the features and get used to end with unfinished sketches when practice. That's not a bug, that is a feature.

OK, I see good and clean applications of the Loomis abstraction of the head.

Too be honest, I am at a bit of a loss about the logical path to progress from there. I am myself more experimenting around, then knowing what to do.

Concepts, ideas, I picked up so far: If we want to progress to a stage, where we can apply a lot of intense shadow, we need some solid construction to clearly identify the planes of the face, so we can always identify properly at what angle they are to the lightsource. (Or lightsources, if there are multiple)

Loomis clearly does not provide that. He gives a decent orientation where some prominent features like the eye sockets, mouth, nose, chin and ears generally should be in relation to each other, but not much else.

Reilly, as you said, adds a few more details mostly about the area around the mouth and the cheeks, which makes it a bit more difficult. And I am not sure, how much he ultimately gives in return. Maybe I will know more about that in a few weeks.

Loomis, Reilly, and other head constructions also have the principal problem of working from idealized heads. Which is somewhat at odds with achieving likeness to a specific reference.

To your drawings and your own plans of going forward, I would say, you achieved a level of skill, that makes your result look confident and comfortable with what you try to do. If you want to progress, you should probably try to leave your comfort zone, and define new goals to work towards.

Getting a more solid foundation for shading is only one possible goal, which came to my mind first, at it is the thing, that I personally would like to progress in, but there are other possible goals as well:

-your line quality is suitable, but not exceptional. you could try to push yourself towards fewer, but longer and better designed lines, for a more elegantly looking end result.

-I don't have the reference you worked from, so I can't judge how convincing the likeness of your drawings is. I think I remember some of the models on the images, and it feels like you are more working on drawing some human face with a few of the features of the reference, then on THAT specific human face. To improve the likeness, you need to become very good at measuring, and willing to deviate from the standardized features that working from idealized templates like Loomis or Reilly try to push you.

-so far, you are (like me frankly) mostly copying the reference. there is the possibility to go beyond that, and find ways to stylize your drawings.

-you could also experiment with how a different medium than always graphite pencil would influence your art.

Wow, a lot of that stuff is just goood, starting with a very effective selection of references, super clean and deliberate lines and shapes, etcetera... You clearly know quite a few things I haven't even touched on on my own arts journey,

The "what would I do differently" part will be getting really hard with you, as I feel most of the stuff, I couldn't do at all. Two thoughts are in my mind right now.

First one, the stuff you present on your artfol and instagram looks like fanart from a very dedicated and talented intermediary, which taught herself a lot, but is maybe lacking in a bit of technical foundation, this stuff looks really pro in comparison. Artfol/instagram sunkglier is copying a lot from other people's work, clear manga references, some comics in daily strip quality. What you show from imgur looks much more individual and shows a ton more skill, than your "public presentation" lets on.

What you might want to change is thinking a bit about the foot you put forward to introduce yourself, and to start with the greatest hits first.

Second one, digital media has some very effective functionality to smoothly blend colors and values, but I feel you should step on the break with that a lot. a) you use it so hard, that it looks like you try to hide own flaws behind technical gimmickry, and b) you know shapes, you know lines, but if you just mush with the hardcore softener tool over everything, you lose a lot of message.

Try designing the shape of the individual colors and values in your draft, and then let those shapes stay alive and tell people about your skill in designing them, about which planes and forms they represent on the subject you are working on. Maybe try limiting your color palette to, I don't know, exactly 8, or 16 or at most 32 colors, or some number like that, and don't allow yourself any blending at all between those colors.

That way your personal skill will be way more prominent on display than your ability to repeatedly hit the "smooth it out and blend it all together" button on your machine. If your technique holds up, it will look absolutely stunning, if your technique runs into a wall, then at least you discover areas for yourself to work on.

Sites doing art critique? Not really so far. There are some set up to encourage community critique, like this one, and I am here and a few others to try to develop it into a lively community. But I am not an arts teacher, I only play one on the interwebs :)

The problem with getting free critique is, that a lot of beginners are too shy to post their opinions, the intermediarys feel like they are doing something wrong, when they post basically the same tipps over and over again to different beginners, and the pros are somewhat too posh to give critique for free. Unless they are doing a promotion for their stuff, they want munies for their attention.

Buuut, as I said, I think this here site has the potential to develop into an actual community, if people just encourage each other to post their drawings, but also to critique them and debate general ideas about art and technique.

To the works you have posted:

Pro: Your stuff looks beautiful and expressive. My guess is, that you started copying one or two artists you enjoyed, and then you clearly kept at it, experimented how to expand on it, and found great solutions for yourself. Your lines are clean and decisive, you understand how important it is to effectively simplify forms, your shapes and outlines are extremely effective at communicating ideas.

Worries/suggestion/tipps:

a) You post a whole arts gallery to critique all at once. If this site had better emojis, I would post a line of tokens of me breaking out in tears. If I tried to do every entry in your gallery its due service, I would have to spend days, and produce walls of text, that I don't want to write, and nobody wants to read. Please find a solution to point out clearly which specific image or small series of images you want critique for. Maybe there is a good tool for that on the sites you already use, if all fails, just upload something to imgur.com and post the link here

b) From my guess about your arts background follows a potential future hurdle for you. These artists you admire, they very likely have way more of an academic background, than their stylized end products let easily show. Art fundamentals like perspective, human figure, posing, line economy, stylization techniques, shadowing, color theory, etc... They just effortlessly apply it and have developed it into their very own, very personal style. Backward engineering these fundamentals solely from analyzing their styles is close to impossible, which will make it very hard for you to expand on your experience from copying them.

This here site, line-of-action.com is mostly centered around one specific tool that is rooted into that academic approach to a degree, the timed gesture studies, and so a lot of people here follow that academic approach. I highly advise giving it a try, and just start a 30 minute class and see what happens. First attempt will most likely feel frustrating and strange, so post your results and ask around, what that was all about. You will hear a lot of tipps, that sound similar, so I will right away point you to a source, that explains and demonstrates a lot of the thoughts behind studying poses very well: the "Human Figure Fundamentals" course on proko.com There is a premium version, that asks for a lot of money, but you don't need that, just do the free version for now. The style Stan Prokopensky is aiming for is vastly different from your current style, but don't shy away immediately. I think you have enough artistic experience by now to extradite the basic informations you will be getting, and incorporate them into your own style.

c) Please, please, please, stick around, and share your experience with others by doing critiques. With your different style and approach you might not be too certain how to critique a beginner or intermediary, that is certainly trying something, that you yourself haven't tried yourself by now, and so you don't know what to tell them. Here is my two step approach to critique: First, look at whatever they have done, and try to find out what you like about it, and tell them. Second, try to understand, what you personally would have tried differently and why, or what they should focus more on practising in their next attempts, and tell them that, too.

There is also a forum here, where you can tell others about your current art project, what you are trying to accomplish, what you are struggling with.

To repeat my answer to your initial question: Anyone know any sites that do art critique? Not now, but hopefully this site here in the near future, and hopefully with your help and experience, too!

Well, don't be shy about critiqueing others. I am also not an art teacher, I only play one on the interwebs :)

But I think you got a lot of experience to share, and some to gain by sharing it.

I also dream a bit of turning this site into a lively place, where people actually dare to share their experiences, and debate them, and my life experience tells me, that such things only happen if you nudge people into what you hope them to do for you.

Hi Swampat. Looking at your sketches, my impressions:

a) you clearly understand the basics, and know what you are doing. Clean lines, beautiful shapes, systematic approach.

b) you are quite self-critical and systematically analyse your own drawings after the lesson. I should take quite a big bite from that myself.

c) my first kinda disagreement is the note to one of your figures: "Too slow", "Still too slow".

I think there are two different opinions about what the timed class feature should accomplish for an artist, the public one, which you obviously share, that it should teach an artist to draw gosh darn quicker, because speed will solve some qualities with lines? And mine, that this is a trap.

The timed feature helps to make sure you put more practice time into designing the first lines properly, and waste less time polishing turds by adding more detail to bad initial lines forever. It isn't supposed to make you draw quicker, but to focus more on practising first lines.

Like, the figure you critiqued as "too slow". I guess it took you somewhat above 3 minutes? Imagine you want to take that as basis for a full hour grande artwork. Will the final result look better, if you spent a few seconds less on the foundation?

d) I see way more people posting their artworks than people writing critiques. You are definitely at a level of accomplishment and understanding, that you could help some of the beginners way better than Polyvios or I can, and your systematic approach and analytical eye would also be interesting for more advanced students.

It also has a benefit for you, when the site mentions, that giving critiques to others offers you a new perspective and new approaches to advance your own art, that is absolutely true!

e) Your foundations are really good, I couldn't meaningfully tell you how to improve them.

But I know a way for you to find out! Break them! On purpose!

After you are done with a class, pick the foundation you like best, load up the image again, and then just keep working on that very image, add details, add shades, add background, whatever, until you either end up with a photorealistic masterwork ready for the art gallery, or more likely get to the point, where you clearly feel: "I don't know what the f I am doing. This drawing clearly looked better several minutes ago, and if I keep drawing, it will only become worse and worse."

Coming from that crisis point, you can come to conclusions, that no one else can give you by looking at your shorties. Either, you need to recherche some new theoretical backgrounds for the later steps (shadows are an entire science for themselves, and some crazy people even use colors!), or, you understand the steps going forward, but can't apply them to your foundation, because it doesn't properly indicate what you need for those advanced techniques. THEN you have found empirical data, what you need to improve with your foundations.

Yes, there are still some poses you occassionally struggle with, but I wouldn't wait until you mastered each and every possible pose, before taking a peek ahead into what you could develop your art into.

If you aren't looking for perfect high detail rendering as your ultimate goal, but rather want to be able to design your own poses from imagination, this would also be an opportune time to venture into that path, so you can learn, which exact aspirations your quick sketches have to satisfy to help you out in this area.

Idon'tknow, I guess it depends a bit on how flawed the line is. If it immediately bugs you out, draw another one. I mean, ofc you should try to make every line the best possible one, but I think while drawing, the focus should be mostly on finding and designing the next line to draw, not on correcting and repeating the same line over and over. Especially in the shorties at the start, you'll have your next attempt within a few seconds anyways.

If you plan to spend 10 or more minutes on a draft, it makes more sense to be self-critical during the first lines, but for me during drawing it is more important to keep your eye on the overall composition and designing the next line. Erasing and correcting what has already been drawn, for me has about even chance of making the drawing worse, by overcorrecting, by diagnosing the error wrong, by just leaving more noise and dirt on the paper, so I generally only do it, when I am 100% absolutely certain it will improve the drawing.

I think what I would most often correct is, when I twitch while drawing a long line. Like, I plan to draw a straight line connecting two specific points, but I fail to coordinate my arm muscles correctly, and end up with a crooked something, that misses the end point by an inch. That's an obvious mistake, and I would redraw a straight line instead. But if that happens more than once during a session, it is a sign, that my drawing motions got flawed, and I might interrupt the session to practice drawing long straight parallel lines into that specific direction to find a better motion.

Basically, if you get the head, shoulder line, ribcage and hip positioned and indicated properly within 30 seconds, that's a lot.

If you mean on the class I did, it's the upper row. Maybe I should have increased the contrast when scanning, they are a bit bad to see as I accidently used a quite hard pencil, that doesn't leave strong marks.

Oops, I think I answered your question about the topic in the Support & Suggestion forum, because I thought its the Practice & Advice forum. But the answer would be generally the same.

Aaahm, I am otherly convinced, that for expressions/portraits the timed class mode with the 30 sec and 1 mins shorties doesn't work well. I personally always change to the "All the same time" mode for that, select 3600 secs as time limit, and change images manually.

The most commonly cited basic head construction is from Mr. Andrew Loomis, first developed in "Fun with a pencil". You can still find the original pdf for free on the interwebs, and tons and tons of people expanding on it. Caution: Loomis invented a quick method to draw relatively impressive looking faces with little prior practice, but they are all "from imagination", in other words, a bit random.

If you want to learn how to match Loomis' heads with a specific reference, I advise to start with repeating his basic construction without reference a lot. That is exactly, why I think a quick gesture timed class makes no sense for it. You do your "shorties" basically offline, from "imagination", without reference. And drawing the Loomis construction properly will take you way more than a minute anyways, so if you tried a quick gesture mode, you would only ever end up with a few initial circles.

Also search for images of Loomis head, and you will find some highly stylized, robot head like looking derivations of Loomis method, that is what a lot of professional use for solving head placement, lighting etcetera.

After you repeated those offline practices often enough to feel confident with Mr Loomis construction, and want a reality check, try applying the method to drawing from reference. When you are confronted with a real person's face, with all its specifics and flaws, you will start the process to learn how to match Loomis idealized rhythms to reality. And if you try to do it on a timer, you will just revert to what you practised so far, and produce idealized, non-distinct features, which you could have done offline as well.

BUT: Setting the timer to infinity doesn't mean that you should ignore the basic benefits of quick sketching, you just have to do it yourself. For example, if you spent 5 to 7 minutes to do a head construction, and then 50 more minutes on embellishing it with a lot of details, to only then realize, that it just looks crappy and always will, then you wasted basically an entire hour to effectively practice head construction for 5 to 7 minutes, and 50 minutes practising to polish a turd, which is utterly useless. If you had stopped yourself in time, you could have done 10 simple head constructions and thus used 10 times more of your time on effective training.

As for good beginner practice for still objects and landscapes alike, one essential link: drawabox.com . Go there, try it out, do it, even if it feels strange at first, it absolutely makes sense, and is explained much better, than this site or me or anyone else could explain to you in a shorter time.

Ok, I did one session and scanned in all the shorties too, to give you an idea with what I mean with: you are drawing way way way too much in that first minute. (I probably should have increased the contrast while scanning, the shorties are a bit hard to see)



https://line-of-action.com/art/view/9071



You aren't supposed to finish the entire drawing in under one minute, the idea is to find a few lines to build a long form drawing upon. If you finish the draft in one minute, what do you plan to do with the rest of the time, once you go to 5 min, 10 min, 25 mins, or longer? Keep embellishing a flawed and hasty foundation? That way only lie tears and frustration.

There are 3 elements and 2 relations you need to get right, the head in relation to shoulderline/ribcage, and the ribcage in relation to the hip. Don't fixate on finishing the outline, don't mess around with drawing entire limbs. If head and/or torso are partially hidden behind limbs, you sometimes need to indicate that, but stick conceptually to drawing head and torso, not the limbs. If the limbs are stretched out in an epressive manner, that clearly informs the curve of the spine, use at most 1 line to indicate 1 limb. The foundational core of each pose are head and torso, and the short poses are all about focusing on only sketching out head and torso.

It also needs to be said, that for all my preaching, I myself still suffer from sloppy and hasty lines and constructions a lot. There are a lot of people, who do these first lines way more beautifully designed and executed with more intent, than I do.

Actually, you are drawing way way way too much in that minute. I'll do another class tomorrow and upload my shorties, too, so you see what I mean.

OK, one thing popped up for me on both images, and that is the way you indicated the... middle mass? I know the tutorial isn't very explicit about why that has to be there, and what it's good for. Here is the secret solved: It's meant to indicate the ribcage. (plus shoulders)

a) I recommend proko.com figure-drawing-fundamentals course, which has a similar concept like this site's tutorial, but way better explained. There is a premium version for money, but the free version contains all the important informations.

b) the ribcage is actually a pretty simple form, it is basically an upright standing egg, just flattened a bit, and the lower curve cut off along the lower ribs. I do recommend to use this as a shortcut for that upper torso mass. The peek of the egg isn't easy to see, because on top of it to the sides sit the shoulders and clavicula, (directly on top of it is where the neck starts, ofc) but if you know what this "mass" is supposed to indicate, you will have better luck deciding the size and placement it needs, to inform your drawing.

To let you immediately in on the secret of the lower body mass, it is the hip. A good shortcut for it is basically drawing a slipper underwear, and then indicate where the hip joints are, which are (other than the shoulder joints to the ribcage) always in a fixed position towards the hip, and can be easily spotted, as those are the joints, where the upper legs start from. Really indicating the hips correctly is often a bit more complicated, so for a starter I do agree with the tutorial, that indicating them with a circle will do for now, just try to make that circle big enough to fit the buttox into it.

The line of action, namesake of this page: I find it a remarkably complex concept, and I don't always use it consciously. The idea to find it is to think about the longest simple curve, that you could fit into the silhouette of the pose you are about to draw. I find it complex, as it combines the idea of indicating the dynamics of the overall pose, but often also helps indicating the placement of ribcage, spine and hip, properly. Which is a lot of information to pack into a single line, and I am personally meh about the pedagogical value of placing it so front and centre.

The idea with the timed practice is, in the shorter warm-up lessons, don't get hasty, but focus mostly on placing the torso correctly. You won't finish your drawing in time, and that is OK so. Getting the first lines that indicate the torso right is most important for the final result, so the short timing only allows you to draw those lines, and thererfor get more repetitions in for the basic construction, than for limbs or even fancy details at the end. So, don't get hasty, just draw a few lines before the timer runs out, then repeat finding and drawing those very lines with the next pose.

-Pencil control, I think there is one site that everyone agrees teaches that best, and that would be drawabox. If you go there and read the description of what you are supposed to do, and you feel your eyes glaze over, shake that feeling, actually doing it isn't as boring as it sounds. On the other hand, you won't be able to avoid a bit of repetitive grind. You are basically training your hand-eye coordination and your fine muscle skills the way a bodybuilder trains their abbs. Try to experience it in a meditative mood, keep your initial attempts as control samples, and cherish how fast you will see actual improvements in contrast to those meager beginnings.

If you can express your idea with fewer lines, you can put more attention towards placing and designing each individual line, thus increasing your line quality.

For example, imagine the outline of a limb, say, an upper arm. If you use four or five short lines to indicate its outline, it will look ragged. If you instead find one smooth curve, that incorporates three of the shorter lines, and another line, that summarizes the two remaining lines, the lines themselves will look smoother and less often interrupted, because they are, and the viewer's eye will have to process less individual informations to pick up the form, so they will perceive your drawing as looking more elegantly.

As everything in art, line economy is a rule, not a law. If you draw an old man's face, or the muscles of a trained bodybuilder with very little bodyfat, well, the reference themselves are a bit ragged and show a lot of details and texture, so you can get away with more lines and still look decent.

Worst case is a young and pretty girl. Female anatomy has a higher body fat percentage then males, which smoothes out all the lines. If you draw a young girl with too many individual lines, she will always look like she is either severly dehydrated or suffers from connective tissue weakness. Ever heard someone wax lyrically about "female curves"? I am quite certain, this is were the trope originated.