Forum posts by Aunt Herbert

I would say yes. If you only have silhouettes to practice from, that's certainly a problem, but as one more spice in the soup, it's certainly welcome. If you want to learn to draw better, you need to challenge yourself with a variety of problems.

Silhouettes are an artistic reduction, focusing only on distinctive outlines. Extreme beginners sometimes focus too early on outlines over construction, in hope of having found a shortcut, but at the very least at the level of an intermediate draftsmen, outlines themselves do become important again, as they determine a lot of readability and first impressions. Graphic novel artists and animators from famous studios are known to have spent a lot of energy into maximizing the readability of the outlines of all their figures, as those are what the human eye picks up first. You can turn any Disney figure from any movie into a silhouette, and will still be able to identify both their identity and their action. The famous spiky hairs on a lot of anime characters are a direct result of trying to transport characterization with only the silhouette.

To make it even more succinct: Photos of silhouettes can be very beautiful and impressive. If you can answer the question with, whether a photo is beautiful or interesting, with a determined: "Yes", then that is also the answer of whether this is a good photo to draw from. The end goal of learning to draw is to learn to create beauty and/or to raise interest after all.

The blue drafts show how you work mostly from a circular motion, which gives your drafts a very aestethique appeal. In your red drafts I feel like focusing on the masses of the torso more (skull, ribcage, hip) would help you solve some problems better.

You draw out of a circling motion, which gives your lines a smooth curvation. It looks pretty, but maybe experimenting with introducing sharp angles could provide an interesting contrast?

If you feel that these are "rushed", well, it's 30 seconds. If you want more controlled lines, you would have to reduce the figures even further. Maybe introducing deliberate "breaks" into your rhythm, while you consciously take a single breathe, meanwhile only looking at the reference and planning your next mark, could heighten your sense of control.

That is just a suggestion, that might work. I see 30 second drafts just as a step towards "real" drawing, so I don't have a lot of experience in trying to "master" them myself.

I am not so sure, whether you can get much helpful critique here. I mean, from what I see, you know the techniques. Doesn't mean you already mastered them (whatever heighty goal that may describe), but you know them already, you heard of em, and you at least tried them out and put in the hours to practice them. Nitpicking your drawings and telling you out on every slip-up won't teach you much valuable things, because frankly, there aren't many slip-ups anyway, and they hurt your eyes probably more than mine.

I love the effect of black and white chalks on a grey background for sure, maybe this will inspire my next art supply run.

Maybe the next step for you should be to stop worrying about technique and start thinking about audience. Who do you want to draw for, what could catch their eyes and their imagination? Try out a social media site maybe, DeviantArt, Artstation, Instagram? post your stuff there and keep an eye on which of your drawings get the most reactions and the most likes?

Or dig out those memories of those images you wanted to draw, before you started to practice so hard?

Or maybe giving critiques to other artists may be more informative for you, than receiving critique at this stage, unless you find someone who can really make your jaw drop.

It's a bit of a trick question, as the best lighting is a variety of lighting situations.

The majority of reference pictures already in the library is well-lit with a somewhat neutral studio lighting with a bright ambience. That IS useful for a beginner, who is mostly interested in getting to grips with basic anatomy and proportions. But, it's also a bit boring and repetitive, and it's by far not the only useful form of lighting, depending on what is the focus. Chiaroscuro lighting, with stark, well defined shadows, for example, can lead a beginner towards seeing the human body more as a sculpture, and can help break down the human figure into geometric forms as defined by its planes. You have a well-defined body with low body fat, which would probably lend itself well to experiments with cast shadows. Some of your outdoor pictures already had very beautiful strong shadows, which were very interesting to capture in ink.

Once people venture into learning about values and trying to divide up the figure into darks and lights, and then to subdivide into core shadows, cast shadows, reflected lights, lighted areas, highlights, etc, a broader medium light spectrum becomes more important. Ambient studio light can make it hard to find good separating borders for shadowy planes, on the other hand stark spotlighting doesn't lend itself very well to finding intermediate values, so for that probably a middle ground would be best.

So, really, a variety is best.

Can I also ask you for a favor? I know, you mostly focus on figure, but the portrait library is still a good bit smaller than the figure library. And worse, it is even more uniform. Pretty much all of the portraits I can imagine the fotographer telling the model: "Sit on this chair, now, look to the left, look to the right, look upwards, look downwards, look angry, look sad, look happy, look this, look that" Someone gave me the tip to use the figure library for portrait drawing, and I found it an improvement, mostly because the models arent all sitting on a ***** chair, with shoulders almost parallel to the frame. They are posing, they even try themselves a bit into acting, and the fact, that shoulders, chests and necks are in actual motion, and they balance their actual body weight instead of just focusing on their eyes and mouth often makes their impressions way more lively and interesting. Drawback of using the figure library for portrait drawing is off course, that the head is relatively small and its harder to make out details.

So, while you pose for figure drawing, can you ask your photographer to occassionally just zoom in on your head, and then post those pictures to the portrait section?

My most inspiring references for well-lit images btw often came and come from movies or series with a film-noir touch. Gritty gangster flicks or dystopic science fiction, with badly lit rooms, where the actor suddenly ends up in front of a bright light source, or strangely lit from just a single neon light, or even just from the lighter, with which they light their cigarette. In the end, as long as we work from reference, we draftsmen are second hand artists, we just re-interpret the photographer's art. The best reference for an inspiring draft is an inspiring photo.

Also, I remember from Croquis Cafe, one model from which I didn't expect much, which totally blew me away. It was an elderly somewhat overweight woman. Her trick was to use the poses and props to do small stories. I think in one session, she woke up in a dark room from an unexpected sound, lit a candle and started to investigate, and ended up discovering something very harmless (I imagine it was a cat), in the other session, as far as I understood, she prepared for her lover returning from war, looking at his picture or letter, smelling a rose, doing her hair, then going to the window frame, from which she waved to him with the flowers as he marched by underneath the window in a parade (at least, that is how I interpreted her poses).

I would try to reduce the bundles of lines you are currently using to single lines. This will lead in the beginning to less satisfactory results, as it means, that you have to learn to live with mistakes in your drawing. Your goal can't be a single perfect drawing right now, but a constant stream of drawings, that gradually improve with experience. Getting used to clear bold lines early on saves you from having to relearn your technique later on.

Also Misterglitch advice is really valuable, learn to ignore details, and try to see and use big geometric shapes.

Also, start each drawing by looking for relation and proportion of skull, ribcage and hip. These three masses determine the shape of the torso, and are key to natural poses. Drill it into your habits to always prioritize them right from the start.

It's a question of how much you want to go into detail, and how much detail you know to avoid. First step is to get the proportions and relations of skull, ribcage and hip right, to get a convincing torso, then you need decent shortcuts for major limbs, joints, feet and hand. At that level you will be able to draw quite convincing outlines of pretty much all figures, which is not a small feat. If you are able to do this with clean lines, you will be at the level, that is used in a lot of older comic books.

It's only once you want to add a lot of details and shading, that you get into the problem of having to understand in more detail what muscles and bones underneath the skin exactly cause all those little bumps and ditches to appear (and then you also need to look into details of lighting, like core shades, reflected lights, highlights, etc.). Adding more details also gives the viewer more comparison points to spot where your proportions are slightly off. It looks great if you can pull it off, and probably everyone dreams about being able to add a thousand perfect details, but it's also the way to ruin perfectly decent drawings by "overworking" them.

Learning landmarks and improving your understanding of anatomy is essentially the same process. If you really have no clue at all how the bone structures look, that these landmarks indicate, you should probably look them up, and maybe try to simplify and draw them a few times just as geometric shapes from several angles. If you have troubles simplifying them (the hip bone is a bugger for example) search for other artists simplification.

Finding those landmarks on the reference, and starting to visualize how the underlying structure must be placed, still takes a lot of practice, and starts with quite an amount of guesswork. The end goal isn't to draw pretty landmarks, but to improve your understanding of anatomy by searching for them. Most of them won't be visible anyway once people wear clothes, or when they are simply behind other parts of the body, etc. So, when you feel like you have troubles learning the landmarks due to lack of anatomy skills, you are approaching the horse from the wrong side. Landmarks are just a tool towards learning anatomy.

I am not 100% certain, but I think you are drawing on a pad, and aren't quite used to/ comfortable with how it feels, yet? Straight lines seem to work OK, but you probably should also spend some practice time just drawing circles, ovals and curves. Like, put 3 points down and try to find a smooth oval that connects them. Or just draw two lines, then fill the space in between with a row of ovals, that exactly touch each other and both of the lines. It's boring and frustrating, but it helps with manual dexterity, and if you fill an entire page, it actually produces decorative patterns.

You do follow a methodical approach towards figure drawing, which is actually good, but the resulting lines and the 25 minute time both give the impression, that something intimidates you. Just drawing a lot, and then after a session sorting through the results and enjoying the best ones might help, but if you draw digitally, that means off course, that you have to save all your results until the end of the session for comparison. The reason why I mention the 25 minutes is, that if you cut down the time per attempt, you will probably learn more atm. I think 2 30 minute classes would be more useful for now than the 1 hour class.

Your end result isn't that bad. One more line for the neck, to connect the head with the shoulders would have given the upper torso more logic. Obviously on the model, the neck was obscured by the hair, but the neckline would have been very close to were you indicated the outline of the hair.

The belly is actually better on the second layer than the third, you didn't trust the construction here, and fell back on falsely "correcting" old habits into the draft.

The way the arm connects to the ribcage indicates that you missed the shoulder joint a bit. It is somewhat independent of the ribcage, and not just a point in space, but an actual object, which can be shortcut as a fistsized ball.

I would recommend extending your focus from the eye to the complete eye socket in the skull. a) it helps positioning in the face, and b) it takes account of most of the muscles, wrinkles and tissue sacks around the eye, that make up the expression.

It also follows the general best practice to start constructing the head from the underlying bone structure. Huge help once you extend towards capturing the planes of the face to get towards proper shading.

After two weeks is maybe also a good time to go back to full portraits. Your eyes and noses aren't perfect yet, but you probably learn more by applying what you learned so far, and returning to more detailed problems later.

I am definitely jealous of your tight and clean finish.

The guy sitting in the middle's upper torso looks a bit "assembled". His shoulders are a bit too high up, and the way his shoulder muscles show, look like he is leaning forward, while his belly section seems to indicate a very upright posture, and his hips would either indicate leaning backwards a bit or being hunched together lazily. Sometimes models assume quite strange poses, but your figure still doesn't seem to come together 100%.

As for the two ladies, they look quite immaculate.

I think this may be the link you are looking for: https://line-of-action.com/photo-bundle-policies

I would be happy to see the portrait library getting some new additions.

OK, let's address the feeling of being stuck first: Say hello to your new friend and be prepared, that they will never leave again. I think I drew at some level my whole live, but I started to develop some real ambition about 3 years ago, and "You are stuck" and "You don't really improve at all" have been more or less constant guests in my head at least since then. Sometimes they leave me for a few moments, when I finished a new piece, but they certainly will be back, when I look at it 10 minutes later. I heard Norman Rockwell suffered from imposter syndrom throughout his life, and he earned big money with his work and defined a whole generation of illustrators' works. "you are stuck" is just the dark shadow of the ambition that drives you to get better as an artist, and it regularly misbehaves.

The link shows quite a large number of drafts, which is good in itself, and they vary in quality, which is just the way it goes. If I had to find a common theme on where to focus your attention next, I think getting an even clearer idea of the anatomy of ribcage and hip next could lend your sketches some more substance in their construction. Especially the tendency to overestimate the distance between ribcage and hips shows up in some of your weaker sketches.

As you generally include hands and feet in your drafts, you might look out for finding a simplified construction for them too. Especially feet aren't very complicated, once you overcome the urge to assemble them from details and look at their simplified geometric shapes instead. They usually aren't the star of the show, but they can bring down the final result until you found a set of clean lines to handle them.

OK, your fondness for Charles Bargue explains the expert finish on your foot sketches.

A bit of a warning, so, the teaching method of the French Academy is,... a bit special. You wouldn't even be allowed next to live models before you painstakingly copied about a hundred expert drawings of greek plaster statues, all with an instructor peering over your shoulder and telling you what exactly to take away from those plates. After that you are meant to spend half a lifetime drawing those same statues yourself.

Croquis Cafe, with its focus on quick sketches, would have been seen as complete heresy!

Given your experience with Atelier drawing, you probably know how much of what I said is true, and how much was exaggerated for dramatic purpose, but the actual point I want to make is, that you probably gain more from Croquis Cafe if you take a look at some quick sketching theory and a constructional approach to drawing. My alltime recommendation would be proko.com, the free courses. It's quite systematic in explaining the approach, follows it through all the way to detailed studies of anatomy, and Stan Prokopenko has by far enough experience with this technique to show off its promises.

Another popular approach to quick sketching would be Mike Matessi's force method. The method is about the polar opposite of the Atelier technique, with its total focus on movement, focus and dynamique. It's frankly a bit alien to me, but the results of those who study it are undeniable. This one might be interesting to you, exactly because it's so different from what you done so far.

Generally with Atelier drawing as your introduction to art, you have already decided for a spicy mix of techniques. Finding the perfect blend will be up to you, but what I seen so far from you looks promising.

The hands look good, their 3-D structure works in perspective, and the anatomy is convincing.

I have no silver bullet to the problem you are describing, mostly because I suffer very much from the same problem.

I believe it stems from "meassuring", i.e. comparing the relations and proportions of everything that is already drawn to itself and the reference. The more details are added, the more relations become visible, and suddenly proportions that looked right a few strokes ago start to look off, because the relations to the latest detail no longer match.

I hope it gets better with experience. If I am frustrated about, say, the distance between eye and ear often enough, I'll start to pay more attention to that specific relation while planning my lines. Deciding after the fact, whether the eye or the ear is placed wrong, or too big, or too small, or if its really the fault of the cheekbone, that I indicated in between and that made the conundrum obvious, is quite frustrating, and takes me out of the flow a lot.

If everyone else has a better answer to your problem, I'll be the first one to try it out.

BTW, links work well, no problem.

About those searching lines: Given, that you did them in 30 secs, those are really a lot of them. Which means, you mostly scribbled them down incredibly fast. Take a breath, even in a 30 secs sketch, and learn to plan your lines. In analogue drawing, there is the trick of shadowing your lines, i.e. moving with your pen over the paper a few times before you put it down and draw. I don't know how well that works with a digital pad, as it is a different object from the screen, which displays the result, though.

Also, I don't know how long you have your pad. I had one once a long time ago, and threw it out frustrated one day. Later someone told me, that getting used to it, by spending a good amount of time drawing simple geometric forms, might have been the better idea for me instead.

On the upside, the figures that you found with your searching lines show a good eye for gesture and proportions. Probably the life drawing classes from college pay off. If you find a way to get over the problem with your line quality, you might be further along the path than is visible now.