Forum posts by Aunt Herbert

I can't access the drawing without your express invitation, so I can't comment on it for now.

Here is a method, that I sometimes use to relief frustration. Pick up a piece of paper and a clipboard, don't sit on the desk, but make yourself comfortable in bed or on your sofa, or wherever you usually crounge when you are tired. Put your pen on the paper and move it around aimlessly. Don't plan anything, just keep watching the pen, until you filled the entire huge page with scribbles.

My experience is, that even without planning, even while trying to avoid planning, and even while trying to vent frustration by drawing purposefully bad, all the training that you imprinted in your nerves will start to show. Your hand will start to reproduce your trained patterns, even without being directed to, and although the result will be extremely surreal and abstract, the beauty, that you trained so hard to achieve will show through after a while, and you can zone out just watching your pen do its own thing. Initially your very frustration will keep you from conscious decisionmaking, and if ideas come creeping up, just turn the page on its head or by 90 degrees, or randomly continue scribbling somewhere else on the page, and just keep watching your pen go.

There is a youtuber, Peter Draws, who does this kind of intuitive scribbling a lot, and watching him do it and listening to his asmr voice can also help zoning out.

I must admit, I heard a lot about looseness of lines, I am rarely certain what that means.

Looking at your 30 sec drafts, I can recognize the pose, and even the fotos you drawn from, from very few lines. This shows a good choice of what to draw. Looking at the quality of linework, it certainly varies a lot. Some lines are very broad and even seem smudged out, other lines are very thin on top of them. Sometimes you are satisfied with a single line, sometimes you start to scribble quite a bit to find a line.

The one minute poses add more lines, but they look even more hasty, and some of the figures get harder to recognize instead of clearer. In the 5 and 10 minute poses I can better make out, what you aim to show, although the broad lines that indicate the shadow value sometimes plainly overshoot their intended shape.

Maybe try to use fewer lines, but draw them slower and with more intent. A 30 sec or 1 minute sketch does not need to be "complete". If it's only a few lines, that's OK. Try to plan each individual line out on the paper, before you draw it, then draw it in one move, as beautiful as you can. And then let it be, don't correct it, just start planning the next line.

Maybe also just spend some time practicing to draw geometric forms with even lines: parallels, curves, straight lines, that exactly connect 2 points without overshooting, etcetera. We have all seen straights and curves drawn so often, that we become quite convinced, that it's easy, but our brains need quite some training to connect what our eyes watch our pens do, with how to finetune the movement of our hands and arms.

Will that make your lines "looser"? I don't know, definitely not immediately. Confidence is a slow growing weed.

I think it's still a bit too early to go for details. Try focussing on the proper proportions and placement of hips, ribcage and head, first. The ribcage is somewhat egg-formed, and the typical upper-body silhouette of a person includes finding the placement of the chest, but also the shoulder joints, which are outside of the chest. Drawing a shoulder line might be useful to understand how the parts come together.

Likewise the hip contains the joints of the legs. Try to spot the joints. Your limbs partially don't attach where they should go.

Don't search so much for outlines and surface lines, really try to spot the underlying structure. (And I am totally talking to myself, too, when typing that)

Check out Arko's thread right next to your's, they pretty much nailed it.

Your line work looks very precise and intentional. I find it very inspiring how you simplified the forms, and will try to aim for it in my drawings today.

You said you started practicing recently. With that knowledge your sketches look mostly how they are supposed to look. Especially the 30 sec practice is not intended to lead to completed images, the size and placement of your ovals that indicate head, chest and hips looks natural.

It takes some time for your brain to learn to fully anticipate what the result of the fine motions of your hand and pen will be when drawing, and until that time has come, drawing will feel clumsy and the results will be somewhat unpredictable. The only way to overcome that is to give your eyes regular opportunity to watch your hands draw, ideally daily. Those neurons need stimulus to grow. Even if you are too tired to concentrate on formal courses, just watching your hand scribble away will provide some of that stimulus.

You can also include some warm-ups to practice just drawing straight lines with an exact start and finish, or perfect circles and ovals. We all feel like we should already be able to do this, but it also takes some practice, which is a bit frustrating to admit to yourself when starting out.

That said, I would like to make two recommendations. One is just the site proko.com . It's by Stan Prokopenski and offers Free Courses and Premium Courses. The Free Courses contain really all the content and examples you need, and teach a very step-by-step progression from line-of-action and indicating masses (where you are at) towards an extremely in-depth understanding of anatomy.

The prices for Premium Courses may seem a bit daunting, but they really do not offer so much more. If you followed along the free courses and feel grateful for what you learned, you can buy one to support Proko, and will get a bit of extra content as a thank-you from Stan.

My second thought is about the size of drawings. You, like many beginners, start with a lot of drawings on one page. That has the advantages, that you save paper, that you don't have to spend time to switch the pages between the short sketches, and that it is easier to scan and publish the result of an entire lesson in one go.

I would recommed to get a clipboard and a stack of regular sized writing paper to practice instead. Paper isn't that expensive, and flipping pages doesn't take that much time once you are used to it, so the only real drawback is, that scanning and publishing takes somewhat more effort.

The advantages are:

-You get used to bigger drawings right away. That way you will automatically start to involve elbow and shoulder movements more from the get-go and won't have to retrain that much later on, when you want to go to bigger formats. Our fingers and wrists are usually pre-trained from learning to write, so getting the bigger joints involved is more of a learning curve. You may as well start early.

-Bigger drawings use longer lines, which is one part of improving line quality

-You immediately train with the goal of using the whole page, so your brain gets a bit of a starter course in composition without much extra effort.

Another training resource that helped me personally a lot is drawabox.com . It's also free. It's focus is on perspective drawing rather than on figure drawing, but especially the first lessons give a very good introduction towards improving line quality and control.

In discussions in this forums and in other creative communities I often hear talk about "stiffness", "fluidity" and "dynamic", and it sometimes makes me cringe a bit. My very sincere impression is, that these terms seem to refer to a wide variety of concepts, and it's rarely clear what they are really meant to express.

"Stiffness" is often an attribute mentioned in relation to line quality and seems to imply a very timid, overly controlled habit of moving the pen over the paper. But then "stiffness" can also refer to a rather awkward posing of the figure, when the anatomy of limbs seems slightly unnatural, because body parts are all depicted from a simplified perspective, do not match perfectly, and appear more oriented towards the axis of the page, then towards anatomical necessity of a natural body. But that is a different problem, already! Then, stiffness can refer to a lack of expressivity, when the posing of a model is anatomically convincing, but the model just doesn't seem to do a lot.

It doesn't help that the opposite of stiffness, dynamic (dynamism?), in photography and rendering often refers to a special way of lighting, with stark contrasts between light and dark values, and can although refer to a compositional problem of distributing light and dark values over the entire piece, independent of the contrast between adjacent shapes. Alternatively I heard the word "stiff" used for very clean and stylized depictions, that frankly just lack detail and fail to distinguish between voluminous convex or concave forms on the one side and flat planes on the other side.

With all the ambiguity in the concept I sometimes feel like the words "stiffness" and "dynamic" are often just stand-ins to refer to the overall quality of a piece, or to the perceived experience, confidence and willingness to experiment of the artist. It also doesn't help a lot to explain the concept by just refering to a beloved artist or artistic piece, that mastered "the problem". There is no guarantee, that two people looking at the same artistic piece will always focus on even the same part of the piece, let alone the same aspects.

So, how can I approach the idea of "stiffness" in a way that let's me understand faster and less unambiguous what, for example a beginner, that asks me for advice with his "stiff drawing" is actually unhappy with?

There is a crossover point between figure drawing and structural drawing. In the end, the human body is a special case of a 3-d body, too. I like Stan Prokopenko's image of drawing as learning to juggle a lot of different balls, which you can't do before throwing and catching each individual ball is part of your muscle memory.

Figure drawing courses usually start with a focus on proportions, the relation between the three "masses" (head, chest, hip) and the limbs. At first you note them down in a very abstract, shorthand form, as simple ovals, but over time the shorthand should evolve into more complex geometrical forms in space, that get closer to anatomical representation (Reilly-head, flattened egg, bucket).

Dont thank me before you finished your boxes ;D

I did lessons 0 to 5. To overcome the "repetitive" part, make sure you keep your sketches around. At first the view of a growing stack of sketches will encourage you, but after a while, the difference between your starting sketches and your current sketches will become more and more visible. In the end, the repetitiveness will feel calming and relaxing.

It's a bit like pumping iron in a gym. It's boring and tideous at first, until you start to actually see how fast your muscles actually grow. Drawabox.com is just unforgivingly efficient in teaching structural drawing, and, actually, line quality, as in teaching to plan your lines before you mark them down.

About the time split, 50% sounds right. If I remember correctly, I had a long period, where I almost exclusively did Drawabox practices, then another time, where I followed mostly Stan Prokopenko's lessons on proko.com for getting my skills on figure drawing up. Line of action provides good tools to get your motifs and learn a bit of timing, but the actual lessons part seems a bit sparse.

OK, full exposure: I actually did this once or twice, because I thought it was fun, ... it was, but it probably isn't the bee's knee either. I think practicing a lot is important. Following a strict pattern in training has the advantage, that you always know what to draw, and don't waste extra time and energy on contemplating. It has the clear disadvantage, that it can become boring and repetitive, so introducing new rules just to play around with can liven it up.

Finding a fun new rule to follow makes me feel good for a while, and I tend to get overly excited at first. I have an overarching theory brewing, that making up rules (and talking overexcited BS about them) might actually be an integral part of art as a whole, more likely at least part of my development as an artist. It certainly beats zoning out on youtube vids or netflix instead of drawing.

I still think actually counting strokes out loud might be a good practice for more people than just me. I strongly doubt by now that it is the fully mapped out highway to nirvana, but it can be an interesting piece of road along the way.

Enough blathering, I'll turn on the engine and start sketching. Maybe I'll post some of the sketches in a few hours, just to say hello.

The ovals represent head, chest and hip. They pretty much determine the proportions. If they don't, then you should practice making them fit.

The idea of practicing to start with this "ovals" is to ingrain into you, that you always nail the proportions of the figure, before you waste any time adding details. When your knowledge of anatomy grows, you will add an eyeline, a chinline, a centerline and ears to the head, make the chest "oval" into a flattened egg-like shape and the hip "oval" into something akin to a bucket-shape. You will also learn to determine "landmarks" on the body, that will help you determine the exact size and position of chest and hips.

If you want a good introductory course, I would recommend Proko.com . The free courses on the page offer plenty enough material and explanations to understand the underlying basics, paying for the premium course is more of a gesture, that you appreciated Stan's work. It adds a bit extra, but that's more a "thank you for your support" from Stan, than introducing any new concepts, that aren't covered by the free course.

I am not 100% certain what exactly makes you feel, that these images look stiff. The poses look quite natural to me, and for example that dog's hairs on the first page looks super fluid. Maybe the perspective could vary a bit more, or you could raise the bar by going from multiple individual figures per page towards a complete composition?

And then, there is off course the big ole problem of digital drawing, that lines all start out very uniform in their line weight and dynamic. I know, that there are ways to become more playful there, but don't ask me for details, as I haven't much practical experience with that medium. I heard about varying brushes?

Your decision of "staying in what I'm good at for the moment" is a bit questionable for practice. I also enjoy it if all the sketches in a series come out 100% as intended, but (I am fairly certain of this) the dirty secret is, unless you are seriously unhappy with at least 50% of them, you are probably putting the bar too low. Steady results are good for cashing in or publishing, but bad for artistic growth. And at your level of experience you will pretty much have to decide yourself how to raise the stakes. More details, less details, natural rendering or stylized shapes, selecting another artists style and working towards emulating it, becoming wilder and more experimental,...?

You are right, using an eraser wouldn't be a good idea for the purpose of quick sketching. Instead you should shake the habit of overcorrecting every line. One stroke, and its done, and if the stroke is off, there will be a new chance in your next drawing a minute later.

If you feel like you have generally shaky hands or problems placing a line as intended, I can recommend drawabox.com . The site focuses more on drawing in perspective, so a bit of a different approach, but a) they do that very well and are generally a good source and b) their first lesson or two emphasize line quality a lot and introduce a variety of good warm-ups to practice your lines. Even if you don't finish the entire course, these first lessons might help you advance very rapidly.

Interestingly, the practice log seems to work perfectly fine, it's just the "Current goal" box that always lags a day behind.