Forum posts by Aunt Herbert

Honestly, #1 quality: cheap! The cheaper your paper, the less you have motivation to worry about turning each sketch into a museum piece, and the more relaxed you can just scribble away and waste huge stacks of it. I mostly use printer paper made for business correspondence from a stationery store or even better a dollar shop. It's mass produced for all sort of administration tasks and therefor almost unbeatable in price.

If you go for more elaborate paper, I would think less in terms of good or bad, and more like an alchemist: if I mix this kind of paper with that kind of drawing medium, what will be the effect? Probably the reason to make a sketchbook from rough paper is to disuade the artist from focusing on minute details too much, and emphasize the flimsical nature of initial sketches. Now, you decided to focus on rendering, which is on the opposite end of the scale in terms of the work process. (sketching, then construction, then line work, then rendering) You can do detail on rough paper, it just takes more time and effort to get the lines and values look sharp, and the key is to pay attention to the grittyness and draw repeatedly over the same spot to catch all the white spots left between the bumps. (you will need quite a sharp point on your pencil to even get between the bumps; having a spare pencil prepared, so you don't have to break your workflow for resharpening might be a good idea) On the upside, this gives you an additional contrast that you can use for expression, with crisp and sharp values where you want to focus on, and a more gritty, spontaneous look on the periphery of your work.

I just finished a session with your post in mind, and observed how I do rendering. So, a) idiosyncrasy warning, I am not an accomplished master myself, this isn't immutable law, just the way I do it momentarily, and b) I usually use ink brush, which is almost digital in terms of darkness value, and does not even allow for arbitrarily thin lines, so I need to plan for hatching.

What I generally do, is that I draw the outlines for most shadow areas before I actually start entering the value. If done right, visual habits will already kick in and "fill in" the values to turn the figure 3-D, before I even start hatching, and occassionally, if I want to indicate a very light darkness value, it is even enough to just let a very light outline do the work, without any hatching at all.

Basically every detail on a figure, that isn't an actual surface color (like on a piece of clothing, a tattoo, body hair or strong variations in skin tone) IS a shadow. If you just bury them all in smooth gradients, they will be gone. If that is the result of you purposefully simplifying your construction and linework, that can look extremely stylish, if that happens as an accident of your final rendering, it will just look boring and flat.

Here is an example of me preparing a figure for shading. It isn't a textbook example for a number of unrelated reasons (line quality and proportions are questionable at best, for example), but I just happened to end the drawing process right before starting to shade.

just before shading by Aunt Herbert

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on May 17, 2024 11:58am.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on May 17, 2024 12:06pm.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on May 17, 2024 12:21pm.

It's a bit hard to explain, but especially when you have a darker shadow inside a brighter shadow, you tend to focus a lot on smoothing out the transition, which kills the illusion of volumn and makes the area look like one flat papercut. Try to use the edges of shadows, or even of different values of darkness within one shadow area, as construction lines, that emphasize either the volumn or interesting details.

Also, you use a quite rough paper, which leaves some of your shadows very grainy. You still achieve a deeper darkness by applying more pressure, but the grainyness remains. I am afraid you either have to switch to smoother paper, or get used to drawing repeatedly over the same area, until the grainyness is at least largely diminished, as especially in your darker shadow, it also seems to kill the volumn. Maybe drawing, rubbing, drawing over it could help?

Btw, I am starting with the problems solely to honor my national reputation of painful directness and social ineptitude (kraut here). The problems aren't consistent, they don't ruin your entire work, and you make good progress. These are just the things which I think would have the most impact if successfully changed.

Grats. I still remember working through the robobean, and starting to realize, that my scribbles finally start to resemble actual human beings.

Partially you are already there, partially you have to start a whole new chapter.

The part, where you are already there: you already extremely simplified your bodies, and you are already indicating parts of the body as voluminous objects in space. For example those circles around legs you already use. Draw an outline around that thing and call it a tube, voila, simple 3-D object.

The part with the reason, why you would consider calling your beautiful leg a silly tube, and the part with the new chapter: geometric objects are assumed to be easy to rotate around any axis. I am saying "assumed", because in reality it makes a lot of sense to actually practice that quite a bit. If you need ideas how to practice rotating geometric objects, I suggest a bit of a dive into drawabox.com, it's really good. The trick is for you to develop a set of useful building blocks, that a) you can substitute the body parts of your gesture drawings with, and b) you have practiced how to rotate.

The exact geometric forms actually vary from artist to artist. Some people only use cuboids, because they are easiest to rotate, with just right angles and straight lines to think about. Rotating a tube is already a bit more challenging, as you have to get a good grip on drawing ellipses in all sizes and with rotating axises, and getting an idea how to manipulate your ellipse to indicate that you are looking at a circular disk from a specific angle, but being able to use objects with round sides to indicate a human body let's you get so much closer to the original organic form, that the extra hazzle is worth it.

In the end, how simple or complicated you make those building blocks is up to you, the decisive quality is, whether you can rotate them around all axis. If you need inspiration, you can buy an artist's mascot of a human body, they are already made from quite simplified forms.

So, now you can substitute each part of the human body on your gesture drawings with an object, that you can easily rotate around any axis. Great. You can either rotate the whole body to switch your point of view, or you can just rotate a single limb around a joint to change the pose. Complete freedom at last. All that stands between you and that freedom is a **** load of torn hairs, sweat and tears when trying this nice theory out in practice.

My first experience with rotating a gesture: It took me about 5 minutes to draw a simplified gesture, with building blocks of my choice. 7 hours and half a drawing block filled with wild scribbles later, I managed to recreate approximately the same gesture, but viewed from a point of view, that had vertically shifted by 90 degrees. I congratulated myself on the success and swore to include rotating gestures as a fixture into my daily training, but so far resident trauma from that experience somehow always makes me skip to a more comfortable drawing practice, when gesture rotating is up. But it's totally a great idea, and I would immediately do it, if I wouldn't feel so tired right now. I'll do it tomorrow. Or at least the day after tomorrow, I promise....

I mean, your idea of images flowing from your head definitely has a lot going for it: You have fun drawing those images, and it translates well, and makes it fun to look at your results.

With the tools: You are already using digital tools, which are basically just other people's ideas, just interpreted by a machine. And you are obviously having fun using them, like they were NOT intended. It's the same with most of the art theory stuff you learn in courses. Doing the course isn't someone telling you how to draw, it is just introducing you to some additional ideas, downloading some code for a new and exciting toy. And then it is up to you to either stick with it, be all boring and prissy and try to channel the person, who introduced you to it, or to run amock with it and figure out a bunch of interesting ways to break it.

I think I have a hunch to what will be your priorities.

There is a bit of a gap between 30 second sketches and rendering... 30 seconds at most gives you a faint idea of a pose, a concept to develop. The next step would be to start building a foundation on that concept. I would propose to first start to develop a more complex, anatomical form for your torso, as it defines the body in space, and determines where the major joints need to be.

My most recommended course on the topic of how to develop a foundation of a figure would be https://www.proko.com/course/figure-drawing-fundamentals/overview, basic course has all you need. I can't guarantee that it is the best course evaaaaa, because I only took that one, and so I have no comparison, but I can guarantee that it taught me a lot of what I use today.

You got such a strange style. 90% of each drawing is really, really good, but then 10% is somehow off, and because the other parts are so good it sticks out like a sore thumb and pulls down the overall impression.

I think you would really do yourself a favor getting used to some underlying construction for the human figure, And I don't mean "anatomy", like in getting to know each bone and muscle in the human body by latin name, postcode and tax number, but more "landmarks", like in which proportions you absolutely have to measure correctly to make the end result look good, and which ones you can (and occassionally even should) play around with to your delight without anybody noticing.

Like your Freddy Mercury, so much of it looks really good, but that just aint how a human shoulder works.

Also on Freddy, I love the way you scaled down the digital blending enough to leave some structure to the shadows, and then accentuated it with a few drawn lines over it, that is a really cool style to render an image. It has a bit of an old school early digitalisation MTV vibe, but it looks very deliberate, and perfectly fits the timeline of Queen at their heydays, which makes it even better. But then the placement of the features of the face show your struggle with the underlying foundation, which makes it look like you slightly changed your point of view on different areas of the face.

Great job. To an equally productive May!

OK, here is a change, that I would appreciate, and it has to do with the review page after finishing a class.

So, while doing a class, I get presented a series of references, do some initial sketches, and switch to the next reference, once the timer is up, all working as intended. But it occassionally happens, that one of the references had a special spark with me, I really chimed with the lines and shapes, my sketch was ace, and I would love to try to finish that drawing.

Good thing, after the class is done, I can (unless there is a legal issue) look on the review page for that reference.

Bad thing, it's only sized as a bit bigger thumbnail now, and I can't click on it to get it back to full page size to continue the drawing.

If you could add an option here, that by clicking on one of those thumbnails, I can basically starts a new class session, beginning with that specific reference, timing option set to "all the same time", with timer either set to 3600 seconds or even somehow to infinity, that would be perfect.

A second thing, completely different topic: All the photographers on this page basically come with their own models, and their personal style in presenting and lighting them. If you could somehow squeeze in an option into the selection menu for the session, that let's me pick out all references from a specific photographer, that would also be very interesting.

In practical terms, I could imagine it as an extension of the review page. Make the name of the studio on the review page into a button, that allows me to mark them as "favorite" and save them to "My studio". Then, if I start a session while having one or more studios marked as "favorite" the option to start a session only from references from that studio is included?

I think this could very reasonably be advertised as a perk for paying users only. It's certainly not crippling if you don't have it (we don't have it now), and there is the thematic rhyme between paying for the services from a good photographer and being able to exclusively select them.

I like your graphite better. If you go ink, you should get markers at different diameters. Your drawing looks, like it is all drawn with smallest diameter, like an 0.1 or 0.2. I would at least get a variety up to 0.5 or even 0.8, so you can give different aspects of your drawing different emphasis. Ooooor, go brush? (which is admittedly a b**** to get used to)

A suggestion, also it is a bit hard to put in words: First, your rendering already looks very good.

You defined two values of darkness. On the legs you used the darker value as an actual shape, while on the upper torso you have been a bit shy, and only used it as a line. I think if you used a dark shape along the frontal terminus of the entire figure, to emphasize the edge of the figure, it would have looked even cooler. I would try to get about a third of the shaded area in that darker shade, and try to make it consistent over the whole figure.

About sketching longer then 10 minutes: The end goal of drawing is a complete rendering, so every now and then it makes sense to push it as far as you can go, to see when and what problems come up.

Edit: One trick that helps me to plan out where to put the dark values: I look at the reference and almost completely close my eyes, until the edges lose all sharpness, then I focus on where the darkest areas are. That way I can see the values on the whole figure, and get less distracted by local contrast. Putting about one third of the figure in darkness (or two thirds if it is in counterlight) is usually a good ratio. Then, once I decided where the dark areas are, and I open my eyes again, I try to design the outlines and shapes of those dark areas, as to define volume and some additional detail.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on May 7, 2024 11:38am.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on May 7, 2024 11:41am.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on May 7, 2024 11:43am.

1st link basically shows 404 - page not found, second link asks me to register a twitter account.

Your link is broken. Can you use imgur, please?

There have been a few gentlepersons lately showing interest into how to draw better portraits. I tried to help out by explaining typical face abstractions, like Loomis, Reilly, Steve Huston, Asaro,.... and well, the response wasn't too enthusiastic. I still stand with my proposition, that learning at least one abstraction by heart helps to improve the skill in measuring proportions of a face, and avoiding typical beginner errors. But, to be frank, I can understand, why grinding abstractions is considered to be rather boring, and frankly, I don't do them constantly either. And if I skim thru my stacks of sketches, the best portraits I drew never really started with actively drawing an abstraction.

Now I just stumbled upon this here video:

and I feel like it highlights another side of portait drawing, that my practical experience had been organically drifting towards, without me ever being able to verbalize it well.

So, I think putting this video link here is a good idea, first of all, as bit of an exposure to whom it may concern immediately right now, but also so I can link to it easily in response to beginner portraits and related questions, without having to scour youtube for hours each time to find it again.

And I repeat, I stand with my opinion that naturalizing yourself with at least one abstraction of the face, most likely the one from Mr. Loomis is a good idea, that will help everybody avoid a lot of mistakes and frustrations over their art career. Eat your vegetables, kids, because they are good for you!

But I think shadow shapes and shadow pattern is really where the tasty meat for the broth comes from! (with an apology to all vegX)

I wouldn't force it either. It's occassionally interesting to check where your borders currently are, as they can move quite a bit over time, but if something straight out feels like wasted time, then it probably is, at least for now. To produce satisfying art you need to find a satisfying production rhythm. From your dedication to art that I have seen so far, I can almost guarantee you, once it is time to move on, your own curiosity will come knocking at your door.

My inner mad scientist proposes a bit of an experiment though: Have you considered trying out a second drawing session at the same day (if you can make that fit your schedule off course)? Just to get some data about, once you knocked yourself out by focusing hard on drawing over a set period of time, how long it takes you to mentally recover, and what external conditions might influence your recovery time.