Forum posts by Aunt Herbert

Polyvios, I hate to rain on your parade, but that is not a drawing tool, that is just Stan Prokopenko's sales page. The reason is is called Timer may have to do something with time limited offers. And yes, proko does a good job on most of his stuff, but I don't feel he deserves THAT level of advertisement. My suggestion for viewers of this page would be rather this course from him: https://www.proko.com/course/figure-drawing-fundamentals/overview

... and the comment that the free version is enough for most purposes. You can upgrade to the full version after you think you learned so much, that it is worth it.

EDIT: !!!

Ooooh, my bad. I missed the "Add To Session" buttons instead of the "Buy Pack" buttons under the first 6 entries. It is indeed a drawing tool. Mea maxima culpa, Polyvios!

Hmm, I think I see, why it took you so long. There is pretty much no difference in the amount of detail from the first sketches to the last, which probably means you paused a lot on the warm-up sketches. I mean, fair enough, you used the site to provide templates for drawing for you, and put in 90 minutes of work, which is good. But I advise you to test out the timed practice experience as intended. For the 30 second and 1 minute sketches at the start, try to not pause them, but rather really try to find a few essential lines that define the figure for you. Don't fret if you aren't done, you aren't working at museum pieces, but at improving your skills.

Line of action isn't the only way to find initial lines, but it's a good and tested starting point, and I would recommend to sticking to it for now, as good as you can understand it. A long curve vaguely along the spine, indicate masses, then joints, but when the image flips, you are done and start with the next image. Try not to hurry and start drawing hastier, so you get in more lines, instead draw fewer, but more meaningful lines.

This helps you to really get an eye for the pose quickly, learn a bit about analyzing your drawing process, and to prioritize what you are drawing. The first lines you draw often decide the quality of the end result, so separate them out, practise them more often than you practise finishing a piece, learn to keep stuff simple and to organise your sketch from the first lines. That is the idea behind the timing of these classes, and although it will feel strange at first, it does have its definite benefits, which you are currently missing out on.

From the figures you drew, it is a mixed bag. Some of them clearly show, that you already know quite a bit about the proportions of the human figure, on some of them the proportions are off, but in a way that emphasizes their expression. Which is good if you can do it with intent, but can become a road bump, if you can't control when it happens. Some of them, well...

You have quite a high ratio of searching lines, where you attempted one thing, then corrected it, and again. If you ever want to get to a clean looking finish, the goal should be to reduce those, so you don't have to constantly break your flow by erasing stuff. Part of it to learning to integrate the moments for planning and pre-shadowing your lines into your workflow. (pre-shadowing means, you move your pen over the paper without drawing first, to get a visual clue, if your hand movement succeeds in doing the line you want it to do, only then you draw the line. takes discipline to get used to it, better start early. The method is explained well on drawabox, I can provide links if you want)

Part 2: I actually hadn't done poses for a while, as I was more interested in portraits, so what I wrote above was mostly from memory. And the topic was: This is how I think the tutorial is supposed to be followed.

I just went and did a 30 minute class, to fresh up my memory about how I actually do it usually. First: Ouch, drawing isn't like cycling, I get rusty quick in solving specific drawing problems, when I don't keep up practicing them.

But, what I feel is most important about the "action line" part, and how I do practice it, isn't so much about actually studying the human figure, but about finding the balance between composition and details.

The old beginner's mistake of wanting to focus on all the details first is still in my blood, and the quick poses force me to find big lines first, to get an idea of the overall image sketched out, before touching any details with a 9 foot pole. So the problem I am focused on isn't so much: "Where does the tutorial exactly want me to put down those lines?" or even "Where would Stan Prokopenko put those lines?" but "How can I identify this pose with as few lines as possible?"

The quick poses are about finding shortcuts for the overall design. LoA, Proko, they offer general solutions for this shortcuts, but in the end, it is me, who has to work from these shortcuts, so I put them, where they help me to understand the pose. Following the advice of smarter people is generally a good idea, but when applying it to a concrete model, I often skip those advices, and just draw the most prominent lines, that I do see.

Having followed proko and LoA changed what lines my eyes are drawn to, but leaving the ladder you climbed behind you is also a valid move, as long as you don't forget where you are going to.

Now, when the site switches from quick poses to increasingly longer poses, the problems of the thesis are revealed. Quick lines can be thrown down without much measuring, and give a good impression, but when the time frame increases, all that is left to be done is adding more details.

And what details allow is to measure with a lot more precision, and suddenly the imprecisions in proportions are revealed. So the skill I am practicing is balancing details and composition.

If I plop down the base lines for a 10 minute or longer drawing within 30 seconds, the measurements are so far off, that the result starts to look crappy when I start adding in details. So for those longer poses, the initial lines have to be more precise, and measured, and without details finding marks to measure from is hard. Which for me means that during a timed course with increasing time, I actually switch my overall strategy several times, and the learning experience a lot comes from being aware of that juggling act between following a grande design, and using details tactically as a tool to successfully measure, instead of zooming in on a single detail from the start and losing all sense of proportions as a result.

Frankly, I don't focus on the action line myself very much, unless I spot one clearly. It is a bit of a part of theory, related also to Matessi's force drawing method, where if I watch someone do it repeatedly on a video, I start to get what it is all about, but I don't get why they have to describe it in these exact terms. To me it is quite metaphorical language, just not plain english. It kind of makes sense in theory, and it sounds like a very simple concept, but if you try to apply it to a random template, it can turn out to be way more complex then advertised.

My main reason for having the tutorial on is for getting a warning before the timing for the next image changes. But on the days when I want to focus on being a good student, the idea, as I understood it and practice it, is to find the longest simple curve, that you could fit into the silhouette of the template.

This is an extremely condensed shortcut of the form, something that would stick in your memory even if you saw a shadow of the template for a blink of an eye and only out of the corners of your vision. One line to describe a pose, I think the concept was originally developed by dance choreographers, who invented a way to note down choreographies in a simplified way.

To your practical example:

Your image shows two poses, and you use the word "sedentary" to describe them. I would agree for the girl in the wheelchair, and the action line for her to me would be almost curled up.

The standing girl I would rather rate as "static", and the action line would be almost a vertical from her head to the foot which supports most of her weight. It wouldn't be completely straight, as she isn't standing completely straight. Her hip is tilted to the side to shift her weight a bit, and I would try to tilt the action line to cross her hip bone orthogonally. If she would be standing in a more dynamic, off-centre way, i might decide to draw the action line from her head towards the extended foot.

If you don't find any convincing action line, in a pinch, you can still try to just guess where the spine should be, that is usually good enough for most purposes.

I find the action line a bit easier to understand, once you get better at the second step, allocating the masses: head, ribcage and hip. I mentioned proko.com before, and in comparison this site has an overly simple description (basically you are instructed to just draw two circles), that makes it harder to build on. Proko spends quite some time showing how to develop effective shortcuts for the ribcage and hip, and how they define the torso.

A typical, typical beginner mistake is to draw the torso too straight, with not enough angling between hip and ribcage, and if you train your eye on finding the action line, you often find more convincing solutions for the placement of the masses. But then, to get a feeling for what that darn action line is supposed to accomplish in the first place, you need some experience of having struggled with placing those masses.

The problem with the tutorial on this site, it abbreviates very complex concepts into just enough sentences to fit onto a one page description and a few pop up messages between poses. When I showed up here, I knew those (or very similar) concepts, explained to me in way more detail from Stan Prokopenski, and I understood, what they are talking about.

And it probably makes sense for the concept of this website to keep those descriptions so extremely short, but it feels like an ambitious kids cartoon explaining how the drive shift of a car is assembled. It is all technically correct, but a bit sparse for practical application.

About the photos on this page: Well, the wild west crazy times of the interwebs are past us, copyrights exist and are stringently enforced, so LoA can only work with photographers and models they can afford. And those are basically fellow artists, who do their best of providing us with useful templates for drawing. And with about as much of a mixed success as our own attempts at drawing. Being a bit heretical, quickposes.com has a very similar set-up to LoA, and frankly a lot of their poses seem to be just easier to draw from. LoA's templates indeed have a tendency to be rather challenging.

I think the #1 potential LoA has, is that it combines the timed poses mechanic with a forum. But it takes us as a community to learn how to successfully exchange our thoughts about our practice and art in general to grow this forum into a vibrant space.

Hi, Idon't know. I also think your models look great.

The tutorial here is decent, but quite short and toned down. I personally found great instructive videos on proko.com . The Human Figure Foundation course more or less follows the same basic principles as the tutorials here, but way more in depth, and explaining every step in short videos. There is a free version, and a paid version, but basically all the essential concepts are included in the free version. The paid version for me is more like a way to show your appreciation and getting a bit of bonus content for it. I highly recommend it.

About the images in wheelchairs: if you aren't interested in drawing an image, just click on the fast forward button. If you feel an image comes up annoyingly often, you can also block it either temporarily or constantly.

About the practicing or not practicing: what other options exist to get better? I could only think of praying for divine inspiration, but then I am unfortunately atheist. So the question can't be whether to practice or not, but only how to find the best way for yourself to practice. And yes, that is also a skill, that improves with practice.

My advice on testing out which way of practicing works for you:

a) ask around what other people do, get a feeling of what methods are on the market.

b) chose one that looks promising, set yourself a few conditions, Like, OK, I'll spend an hour per day for 6 weeks on doing this, or, OK, I will follow this course through to the end.

c) absolutely important: keep your first botched results for record, then after you are done with what you wanted to do, compare them with your final results, so you get a feeling of what changed in your style. It is a natural tendency for people to have their ambitions grow at the same or even a faster pace then their skills, which can give yourself the false impression, that you did not improve at all. Keeping your older stuff for comparison can somewhat help to counter that tendency.

d) once you are done with a few tutorials or courses and get the hang of how practice impacts your skill, start exploring your taste. What is it that you specifically would like to be able to do differently? Can you come up with ways to break it down into simpler parts, that you can practice individually? That is basically exactly what those tutorials do for you, and the natural growth path for an artist is to eventually be able to design their own practices.

I came for example for myself up with a game of drawing one detail in my sight in a recognizable way, but with as few lines as possible. That is so far a game to play by myself, I did it repeatedly for quite a time, and it became a practice, that improved my eye for interesting shapes.

My current practice plan is to go through the different head abstractions of Loomis, Reilly, Huston, Hampton and Brigman, repeat the basic construction until I can do them without looking up the intermediate steps from a script, then try to apply them to drawing from a template instead of from imagination. I don't know yet, what it will eventually teach me, but it whets my appetite.

You can get inspiration for what to practice by watching people debate and explain the different concepts involved in art, but beware of the consumer trap: It only counts as inspiration, if it leads to you actually drawing more. You wont get better at drawing from spending all day listening to people, or reading learned pamphlets.

e) make a habit of keeping some basic drawing tools in reach. So if you see something or hear something, that gives you an idea about what you could draw, your threshold to follow that urge is as low as possible. And the more often you follow that urge to draw, the more natural it will feel to just start drawing.

f) don't think of your drawings as master pieces. 99% of what you draw won't be exceptional at all. Those are just wood shavings, that fall in an endless stream from your workbench. The one piece you are really working at, is to hone your skills. Sometimes you will produce something, that really surprises yourself. Certainly keep those around, but don't beat yourself up if you can't immediately reproduce them. Nobody can be constantly exceptional, but if you keep honing your skills, at some level of practice the stuff you consider to be flawed and trashy will look exceptional to other people.

g) a final warning, to myself as much as to anyone reading this: honing skills is rewarding, once you get the hang out of it, but don't try to reduce art to one specific set of skills. One example for me is PeterDraws on youtube. I couldn't rate his skills in figure drawing or perspective, but watching him do what he does, he certainly is one heck of an artist, and watching him draw makes my pen hand itch to try something similar.

OK, that's a Loomis head, well done. I like how you designed the features of the face. Clean forms, clean lines. From the big eyes and triangular chin I sense a bit of manga/anime influence, am I right?

I find Loomis great for working from imagination, but applying him to draw from a model (let's not kid ourselves, from a photo) is tough. If you draw the face lines free hand, and then fill in the face, it works swimmigly, but if you stare at a photo, and try to decide where those damn circles have to go, to fit to THAT specific face, it suddenly turns into a puzzle box. I switched to Reily Abstraction of the head, which is kind of the same deal as Loomis but with even more additional lines, which makes my problem even worse. But it is always a fun visual puzzle.

If you want to stick with drawing from imagination, you could try to develop a few distinct characters, and then try to stick with always the same face, but from different angles and or with different expressions, so you could use them in a graphic novel or such.

Your foundational work so far looks solid enough to drop a thought about how far you want to go with rendering. If you just keep the head construction as is, but repeat the outlines and the features with a dark marker, that would absolutely work for telling stories.

The more you want to go into depths, shadows and texture, the more extra work you need to define the exact topographie of all the features of the face. There is a whole series of head constructions from different authors beyond Loomis, I know so far about Reily, Steve Huston, Michael Hampton and Brigman....

Oh, if you want to train portrays from a model, don't use the class feature, chose long repeat times (3600 sec is max, that's an hour), take your time, and switch the fotos from hand, when you are done. Portrays work a bit different from poses in that regards, don't let you get confused by the site features, they are more geared towards poses. which are easier to start from first simple forms. If you try Loomis heads in 30 sec mode, you won't get far beyond skull circle, browline, center line and maybe starting to think about where to place the side cutouts, before the photo switches

Ahhhm... impressions about what? I see two buttons (?) indicating images in your post, but there is nowhere to look at them or open them. A lot of people use imgur and link to that, if they want to show something in forum. It is really quick to set up.

I am not an anatomy expert, but I think there is also a shorter muscle above the clavicula, that looks like an extension of the shoulder muscle. If I remember correctly, one is for lifting the upper arm to the side, while the short one is to move the clavicula upwards towards the ears. And it's not the green neck muscle, that one is for moving the head to the side.

The important thing, on a really shredded shoulder, the muscle doesnt stop underneath the clavicula.

https://tse4.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.hw7_Suxf-xoHOE96qUKVnQHaEK&pid=Api



checking, if the link works

One thought about the top 1: The way you indicated the hip does not fit to where you then decided the upper joints for the legs should start from. Those joints are called hip joints for a reason. I don't know about the OG image, but I guess the problem isn't with the legs, but with the hip. You indicated it far too horizontal, with an almost straight spine.

Same problem with the lower pose, although it is less obvious. Spine is too straight, the angle between hip and ribcage should be more dramatic. I think it is less obvious, as you cheated a bit on both the hip and the ribcage. If the ribcage was at a steeper angle, the shoulders would be a bit less upright, and the way the lower arm protrudes from the shoulder wouldn't look as uncomfortable.

Wanting to indicate the spine too straight is a common beginner mistake. If you don't see other clear indicators for where the hip should be, the joints are usually easy to spot from looking at the upper legs, and their position towards the hip is pretty much fixed. Shoulder joints towards the ribcage are way more flexibel in position, but the neck should always be visible, and usually the solar plexus can be at least guesstimated to orient the ribcage.

Also, don't be afraid to pretty much always try to exaggerate the bend of the spine. It helps counteract the beginner mistake of normalizing it, which leads to stiff poses. Even if your bent is stronger than on the OG photo, you end up with a more dramatic pose, which usually looks great, anyways.

I am admittedly treading on a bit of thin ice here, as I myself haven't found the impetus to dedicate myself to drawing from imagination in a structured manner. I have been wanting to get there eventually, but for now I kind of always get stuck on yet another problem I want to overcome in drawing from observation first. I at least bought a mannequin, now.

But the general plan looks sound.

For step 1 I think the source numero uno that has to be mentioned is drawabox.com . Great introduction to the concept of line quality, short and crisp, and then goes straight into explaining how to solve the most important problems in perpective drawing. I also love the pedagogical approach, as they provide a good experience of how important structured training for art development is, and how fulfilling it is to watch your own fast progress.

Been there, done that, can recommend, would do it again, 10/10!

Step 3 I would recommend doing a course first. I personally did the Figure Drawing Fundamentals on proko.com . Stan Prokopenko offers free courses and paid courses, but the free courses pretty much include all the essential stuff. I think the idea behind his paid courses is rather, that if you found his teachings valuable enough, you can send him some money, and get some extra freebies as a sign of gratitude.

The human figure course on proko.com starts first and foremost by explaining what basically the torso does, "the masses", before he adds a more detailed explanation about the joints and limbs. I found his lessons and assignments convincing, easy to follow, and feel confident in applying what I learned from the course. I am pretty certain the principles taught apply equally to drawing both form observation and imagination, just I personally have been glued to one side so far.

There are probably other good tutorials on the topic, too, but proko.com is at least extremely solid, 9/10, I would say.

For gesture drawing from observation, you need stuff to observe. You are already on line-of-action.com, but I feel quickposes.com also deserves a recommendation. Very similar concept, just without the forum and critique aspect, but a different set of photographers and models, which actually makes more of a difference, than I would have expected.

The step 2, the mannequin... all I can say, quite a while back I experimented with just trying to draw a model that I could observe from one side also from all the other sides, and the attempt drove me nuts. Which is why I decided to get the mannequin, so I could solve the 99 problems with perspective, that immediately appeared. Now I just need the drive to rate drawing from imagination higher on my to do list, and to find the energy to finish my other projects quicker to get to it.

A quite popular author for gesture drawing seems to be Mike Matessi, who is associated with the Force method. I personally must say, he is certainly a heck of an artist, his style is amazing, and the results he and people who studied his method produce are top notch. But to be heretical, I personally just don't understand, what he is talking about, when he explains his stuff. Clearly a lot of the words he uses are quite metaphorical, and when I can watch him or an accomplished pupil perform their drawings on video, while rapping Matessi's explanations in an inner monologue style, I kinda start to understand, what the words are meant to convey, but to me, his private language just ain't simple english.

I finished Stan Prokopenkos "Figure Drawing Fundamental" course, and and also watched some random youtubers on the topic. I strongly recommend watching at least the free courses on the topic, the paid version is more a "go fund me" with some extra content for gratitude, it doesn't reserve any really essential informations.

If the method you try to follow is supposed to include the ribcage, then I understand even less, why you don't sketch in the ribcage. As I said, it is a rather simple geometric form, and best of all, it is somewhat stiff AND defines pretty much one third of where the spine has to go... right down the curvature in the center back of the ribcage. If you know where the ribcage, the pelvis and the head are, the spine is pretty much already defined. And the exact placement of the ribcage is also pretty easy to spot from the front. If you look at the dip in between the clavicles for the top and draw a short line down to the solar plexus, then you already know its exact orientation.

Caveat: I personally did not train following Hampton, so I am not familiar with the exact details of his method.

First observation: You are obviously already applying a lot of thoughts and critiques to your own drawings. This is great. (I should maybe do that a bit more myself)

Your lines look purposeful and clean, that is always good.

About your construction method,... I don't know how Hampton does it, but I personally found that my construction of the human form made good progress, once I found a good abstraction of the ribcage and pelvis first, and then the placement of the joints as a next step. I see you are using the pelvis, but so far you don't include an indication of the ribcage. Instead you mention the spine.

I guess the logic of focusing on the spine is to make it easier to progress from an initial line of action. I am a big fan of indicating ribcage and pelvis first.

a) Ribcage isn't a very complex geometrical form to incorporate: more or less a flattened upright egg, with the underside cut off along the lower ribs.

b) The ribcage pretty much defines the center third of the spine anyways, so finding the ribcage already answers a lot of questions. Add shoulder joints, head, and tissue (muscles, breasts, body fat, as needed), and you are already done with the construction of the upper body.

I am not an expert on cow anatomy, I can just say, that the hindquarters look perfectly natural to me, while I have some doubts about the physiology of the front side and head.

I feel like there should be some type of shoulderbones visible, to indicate how the neck, forelegs and torso connect, and the connection between neck and head also lacks definition.

It depends on your goal for the piece, whether that is actually even a problem. If you go for a children's book depiction, the flatness doesn't even matter so much, but then I would probably stylize the eyes a bit more to look a bit bigger and rounder, and generally try to fuse as many straight lines as possible into smooth curves for maximum cuteness.

If you aim for naturalism and/or perspective, the lines you chose for the front part do not sufficiently indicate the geometry in 3D. For example, the intersection of leg and head make clear, that the head is above the leg, but I couldn't tell, whether it is resting on the leg, or extended towards the viewer. I believe if the way the neck connects all the other animal parts was made clear, that flatness would be reduced a lot.

As I said, I am not an expert on bovine anatomy either, I just feel like my eyes keep searching for where the front shoulder would go, where and how the neck curves up to the head, and... shouldn't there be something from a right front leg peeking out somewhere, too? Can cows in that position completely hide that one leg by lying on it?

The tip of the front hoof also looks a bit off. Too small, or too pointy, maybe?

Your lines are clean and very deliberate and controlled, and I like your shapes. You seem to be struggling a bit with depicting body fat on overweight models for some reason. Just an observation, I don't exactly have a silver bullet recipe for that, but maybe just keeping an eye on that may help you find a solution.

The girl on the upper left side of your 5 minute page has an interesting mistake: you focused a lot on drawing her big hair, and as a consequence drew her entire head too big in proportion.

The 10 minute figure seems to have posed you more of a problem, than the shorter timed stuff. Maybe just bad luck in the random choice of image. Me personally, when on the final draft something shows up, that I don't feel confident with, I tend to use the forward arrow to get a different choice, so the session doesn't end on an anti-climax.

OK, got 3 more.

Bingo 4 is almost cheating. If that doesn't work I will have to reconsider some life choices:

13 lines, and there probably could have been fewer:

https://imgur.com/JJbGlDe

Bingo 5 should be clear, I think,... 21 lines

https://imgur.com/7PGfZYu

Bingo 6 I saw on the way to work, but only drew it on the way home. It looked a lot simpler, than it turned out to be. I pondered the old problem of when there is enough detail added, and whether more was necessary to clear up the context at around line 30, then I lost concentration on line placement and orientation and added a bit of a mess on the very left side. 35-ish lines total:

https://imgur.com/fG9BtLa

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Some general observations about finding simple shapes/pattern in urban environments: The simplest ones all seem to be either technical or architectural.

There are ofc also people and some animals in cities, but they usually aren't willing or able to hold interesting poses long enough to make good motifs for a stylized drawing. Unless you catch someone sleeping in a public transport or in a park, it is less a question of drawing from observation, and more a challenge of drawing from memory, which seems to be the next harder task after mastering the drawing from observation task.

With warmer weather the chances to actually find someone in a relaxed pose outside is better, but at -1 degrees Celsius with light snowfall, there is no chance at all.

And then there are plants, usually trees or brushes, and they pose a special problem: Being essentially fractal structures, it is very hard to find good shortcuts to actually draw them as individual entities. The usual solution is to jump to some level of symbolism to depict them, starting from the old classic child drawing of a brown vertical line for the stem, with a green circle for the crown on top. Architectural schematics usually don't go beyond that level of detail either, and the question of how deep to explore and depict their fractal nature seems completely arbitrary, and therefor not really well suited to go competitive in regards of line economy.

So, back to technical and architectural motifs, and one pecularity thereoff, that does have an impact on line economy, and that is repetition. There are tons of repetitions in both types of motifs, identical rows of windows or bricks, columns in a roster, etcetera, and while they cetrainly drive up the line count like crazy, (and make the draft process extremely hard, as you have to be extremely disciplined to echo the identical repetition, without inserting noise) on the reception side they do not make the motif look a lot more complex. To a viewer 3 columns of 4 files of identical window frames look hardly more complex than a single window. Don't know exactly, why I find this thought intriguing, but for some reasons it bothered me today.

A very related thought: If you zoom in just at the centre of the upper part of a modern glass window, complete with its integration into the stone wall of a house, you basically see nothing but almost a dozen of perfectly parallel lines, with only the shades, textures, colours and angles (the angles of the planes in between, relative to the point of view) between those lines varying.