Forum posts by Aunt Herbert

One more word about shading, what I am currently experimenting with. It's about the shadow edge, the terminator. The shadow often appears darkest at the very edge with the light parts. This can just be an effect of our eyes emphasizing local contrast, it is definitely enforced by the typical lighting set with two lighting sources. I found that drawing the shape of this shadow edge often gives the drawing a lot more information than determining the darker value of the shadow itself. It works a bit like a third outline, only one, that runs perpendicular to the normal silhouette of a pose, and thereby adds the third dimension.

About the fear of plateauing and hitting a wall... I wish I had a good solution to that. I am afraid, there isn't really one. Even interviews with really accomplished artists point towards the constant struggle with frustration just being a constant companion on the arts journey. You may convince other people, that you are good at art at some point, but you can't really ever truely convince yourself. And even if you temporarily succeed at that, that is the exact moment where your progress halts. I mean, even Norman Rockwell suffered from imposter syndrom.

I am not the truthinator in regards to drawing, I can just give you the answers, that I found for myself over time.

The 30 seconds (and the 1 minute): My aim is to try to use the 30 seconds exactly the same way, as I would use them, if I tried to start a 25 minutes+ drawing. Same speed, same observations, same questions, same lines. At the moment, I do try to stick to gesture first, generally starting with a simple form for the head, and a line from neck to hips. Next I try to find shortcuts for the hips, ribcage, and shoulder. Which is strictly speaking no longer gesture, but already the start of structure.

I usually don't manage to finish even the first sketch in 30 seconds, finding even the first general idea of the pose takes me about 1 minute. But ending the 30 seconds in an "unfinished" state of mind helps me analyze my procedure during the first minute. The 5 minutes+ poses are then the proof of concept, whether the way I designed the underlying structure during the first minute holds true.

"At the moment" means, that I do experiment over time. I had times when I focused on gesture first, trying to find the vector of forces around which the figure stabilizes, when I focused on maniquinization first, where I applied a fixed set of simplified anatomical forms, on perspective first, when I focused on representing the masses of the body as 3-D boxes, even times, when I broke all the rules and started with beautiful details first. Each of those different approaches taught me to focus on another aspect of drawing.

The important idea for me isn't that I never change the order of lines, it is, that I try to stick to a plan while the class is ongoing, and only revise the order after the class ended, and before the class begins. This way I try to develop a methodical approach, that follows rules, from which I only have to deviate, when there is an obvious and unmistakable reason to deviate. Having such a method allows me to keep developing the same overarching idea from first lines to final rendering, and to still see it expressed confidently in the final result. But being able to stick to a method for one drawing isn't the same as never upgrading your method.

2) Looking at your drawings, you stay relatively close to the tutorial, which is a good starting point. But I think I do understand your need for directions. There is an inherent logic in starting the workflow with gesture first, then structure, then perspective, then anatomy, then shading, and the timed practices should help develop a distinction between those individual steps.

But, from a learning point of view this order has a huge problem: While gesture "only" uses a few "simple" lines, the concept behind those lines is actually quite abstract and hard to understand. Simple as they may be, they are supposed to carry a whole lot of information, and while you have no clue how all of this information is supposed to be processed later on, it's a lot of guess work. I remember my own first attempts, when I just drew a few lines that maybe looked like the ones someone else might have used, but then I just couldn't decode and use my own lines, and just drew something freehand on top of them.

For me, it only started to all come together once I started with manniquinization, i.e. using simplified forms that resembled actual body parts. In followed a Proko course, this one to be specific: https://www.proko.com/course/figure-drawing-fundamentals/overview and the time when it gets into manniquinization is around the lesson about the robo bean. Here is another very short clip, that introduces the whole set of useful forms: &list=WL&index=99

Note, this isn't strictly spoken gesture drawing, it is structure. You can learn all this nice forms, and still draw figures with them, that look awkward and stiff and unbalanced. But, at least for me, even understanding what those gestural lines are even supposed to represent was impossible, before I had enough experience with the structure, that is supposed to follow from those gestural lines, to even understand what I was doing.

3) "Measuring" in figure drawing is pretty much a part of learning structure. You just get used to how big a head is usually in relation to a chest, and how far a chest is usually away from the hip.

The problem with getting sucked into details and forgetting all about the proportions and then ending up with drawing a visitor from outer space instead of a human form... congrats, that problem will stick with you for quite a while, and a lot of people struggle with it. I have been drawing daily for about 7 years now, and I still occassionally find my hopeful attempts at a masterpiece crumbled on the floor, because that nice pretty face I drew turns out to be two sizes too big for those elegant hips that I drew a few inches further down on the page. The remedy against this is all those "methodical" drawing stuff I mentioned above. The only thing stopping you effectively from, for example, getting lost in all those interesting bumps on that specific knee is developing a habit to always indicate the leg with a set number of simple lines, and to generally ignore all juicy bumps and flourishes until you finished all the simple lines for the entire body. The goal isn't to draw one nice picture, but to develop a habit, that let's you produce consistently good results every time.

4) Here is a very simple source for shading, that introduces basic concepts: https://gvaat.com/blog/learn-to-draw-value-and-form/

I wouldn't point this out as the ultimate art source, it just lists and explains the basic concepts of shading without trying to spam your computer with annoying cookies. Once you are ready to dedicate yourself to shading you could use this site to look up basic terms, or just google "how to shade an egg", which is usually the object everybody uses to explain the first simple rules.

The true problem with shading is the "when you are ready" part. Because you will only ever get good at shading when you have a good grasp of the 3-D forms that you actually want to portray on your page. That would be at least in the third step after gesture and structure, namely perspective, and if you really want to impress, probably even after the fourth step, anatomy, when you start to get familiar with the shape of the individual muscles in a human physiology.

Clothes, I don't have a specific source, because I never felt them to be so much of a problem. There are probably people who said wise and instructive words about how exactly different types of fabric fold, but in my experience so far I always managed to somehow wing it, with the main problem not so much being the fine details of every piece of clothing, but, as mentioned above, making sure, that I don't get lost in detail, before I solved the underlying structure.

Take this with every piece of salt available. This is what worked for me, and I think it is quite different from what you attempt.

#1 I don't think you should really go into features within only 2 minutes. Instead, focus solely on getting a good grid, that represents the proportions of the skull properly.

The idea isn't from me, the OG can be checked here: https://archive.org/details/andrew-loomis-fun-with-a-pencil/page/n35/mode/2up

Do you see those robot looking skulls in the upper left corner of the page? The trick is to practice drawing these over and over, until you know all their lines and proportions by heart. From every possible angle. You don't even really need a reference to practice them, and if you use reference, then only use it to randomize the point of view of your drawing a bit. Try to draw that robot head in the same angle as the face on the reference is, to get a bit of a challenge, and a reason for the site to record your drawing time. Likeness, expression, whatever, ... forget about it until you no longer struggle with perfectly nailing the proportions of an (idealized) head and the placement of the features every single time.

I know, that sounds horribly boring and mechanistic and like wasted time and all. Trust me, it doesn't take as long as it feels now, and once you are good at it, you will see, that suddenly a thousand taxing problems with capturing the head and face just no longer come up with your drawings.

I could type a full description of every line now, but that would be a lot of typing. You can just follow Andrew Loomis descriptions on the prior pages of that pdf, but that head abstraction is so common, and used by so many people, that there must be at least a dozen tutorials on youtube for it. Stan Prokopenski is known to be able to explain drawing practices quite well, so here is a link to follow his explanations:




So, here my explanation, why I don't think practicing to draw a head in 2 minutes or less is a good idea: Because drawing a Loomis abstraction with clean and controlled lines will in itself easily take you 5 to 10 minutes for a long time, and I think it is best practice to start every portrait drawing that way for a long long time, until your pen finds its way home to the stable without you really having to direct it.

Whatever you have done, it worked.

Still stuck

My tip to first steps towards drawing heads and portraits. Start with an abstraction. Usually the Loomis abstraction is regarded as the simplest abstraction of the head.

Here is one video that details the method: or you could even work from the old OG source: https://archive.org/details/andrew-loomis-fun-with-a-pencil/page/n35/mode/2up

The idea is, that unlike in gesture drawing, the distribution of facial features is pretty much determined by the skull, which is a single bone. Once you internalized the average proportions, you will have much less of a struggle to draw an individual head.

So, your daily practice would be to draw the Loomis head several times every day. First attempts will likely take 10 minutes, when you get more practiced, it will go down to approx 5 minutes. So, if you want to draw 30 minutes daily, do 3 to 6 repetitions.

At first, don't bother much with capturing an individual reference. You can use reference as "randomizer", but only for different perspectives (and to keep the page counting your practice time). You don't really need reference at this stage, though, as your goal isn't to capture a specific face.

Just keep drawing Loomis heads, until you know by heart, which lines you are supposed to draw in which order. That way you develop an internal map for the human head in general, the major proportions, where the features of the face are supposed to be. Circle for the head, cut-offs at the side, brow line, center line, chin line,....

Once you repeated drawing a Loomis head often enough, that you feel really confident doing it, THEN you can start individualizing it and start switching from the idealized form to modifying the features to express emotions, or to start wondering where the proportions of the individual on the reference maybe deviate from the idealized proportions, that you now have practiced.

Bit of a warning with Loomis' OG material. It's really old, and some of his caricatures are quite outdated in regards to sensitivity to stereotyping people.

Someone wrote down a lot about proportions of the hand here: https://sweetmonia.com/Sweet-Drawing-Blog/the-various-proportions-of-human-hand-fingers-arm/

My question for you would be, do you study hands, because you actually want to draw full feature sized hands, or because you feel insecure about hands in your gesture drawings? Because in my experience, hand studies can be a bit of an overkill for that purpose. Sooooo many extra details to keep in mind.

Usually it's far more viable to simplify the heck out of hands. Often, you can just use a rhombus to indicate the whole hand, especially if the fingers are closed.

If the fingers are spread, it's usually enough to indicate the forefinger, the pinky and thumb. The great thing about indicating stuff: the human eye will give you a lot of credits. If you just indicate the overall shape and size correctly, the observer's mind will just assume, that you mastered all the details and just fill in the blanks correctly for you.

So, don't just jump ahead in adding details to hands, just because you want to prove, that you learned how to count to five. Keep working from general simplified abstract forms over the whole body, until you just have to add the details, because there is still time on the clock, and nothing else left to draw. And at that moment, you will find, that you have established so many landmarks, that finding the shapes and proportions for the last remaining details has become really easy.

I like, that you find long and decisive lines to depict the poses. Some of them look really cool, telling a lot of story with few lines.

A problem, that you probably may want to overcome overtime is, that a lot of them don't look extremely naturalistic. Expressive, yes, but the proportions are strange. And I think it stems from you not having developed an understanding of how chest, hip and spine work together, and where the major joints for the limbs exactly need to be. Which won't be an easy fix, but it starts with becoming aware of the underlying structures of the body.

I found helpful advice on youtube on lovelifedrawing and proko. Both channels/artists have over time developed and published their own versions of how to develop an underdrawing that provides you with proportions and perspective.

Michael Hampton is also quite popular, but he is very purist in his quest to start the gesture from understanding movement over understanding the body. I find him definitely extremely aestethic, but personally struggle to embody his visions on paper.

I mean, yes, redoing every pose with a mannequin is awkward and time consuming, and some poses you will never be able to accurately copy with it.

The mannequin is a nice toy, that can very effectively introduce a beginner to a certain type of simplification of the form. I feel it has an in-built expiry date. You buy it, you use it a few dozen times or so, you get the message, you gradually stop using it. In the end it mostly stands around on the desk or a shelf, until every now and then you really struggle with a specific problem of foreshortening, and take your chance of maybe triggering your brain better with the mannequin.

Given that a mannequin isn't crazy expensive, I think it's fair to have one, even if you won't be using it forever or very often.

What I don't see is how a 2-D set of shapes would do a better job than a mannequin. They will just be even more constrictive in their use cases, and they won't even look decorative on the shelf.

Still 302 hours 39 minutes

Thanks a Lot!

Under "My Studio">"Practice Log", there is this calendar with daily practice and underneath a box, that displays lifetime practice in hours. My lifetime practice currently shows 302,40 hours, and does so since I first spotted it several days ago. Now, I remember vividly, that I got my bagde for 300 hours total spent on this site on 20th of June, and I have been quite busy since, as my daily entries show. Still, the "lifetime practice" display does not seem to budge. Is it supposed to keep track in real time or to refresh periodically? Because it does not seem to do either.

I once again realized, that I really love their photos. Not necessarily beginner friendly, but utimately rewarding if you can crack them, because of the crazy way they play with lighting, perspective and human poses. I would definitely buy an extension pack for them, to have more of their photos in my feed. Ideally even some portrait references?

But, I was looking around on the webs, and it turns out, that Hong Ly is a quite common name, and I found at least half a dozen artists and/or photographers called that. Do you have a link or something, where I can check whether the OG from this here site has extension packs for sale?

Your drawings look cute. Your mass approach to the audience is a bit overbearing, though. Scrolling through 300 sketches takes a lot of time, and when I read your title, I immediately had the strong impulse of "I don't know if I want to do that". That is frankly the reason, why it took me a while to answer.

Maybe you should presort your works a bit, and then only present a dozen or so at once. Maybe the ones you like best, although I know, that it's hard to pick your favorite children. Maybe some, where you tried to focus on a specific thing you wanted to achieve, or even some, where you approach something, that you find challenging to draw.

Also, your quality is very high and consistent. Which is off course a good thing, but it is also a sign, that you are well within your zone of comfort, and probably not exactly discovering a lot of new things doing it. You love your shorties, but how would you develop them, if you spent more time on each drawing? These are all 30 seconds, what would you do with a whole minute, now, that you have established your first steps so firmly?

If you occassionally try out 5 minute or 10 minute sketches, that would also give you a feedback on your shorties: Can I start a long drawing with eactly the technique, that I train with the shorties, or do I have to modify the initial lines and use another setup, because I don't get enough proportions developed to spend a longer time detailing them?

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