Forum posts by Aunt Herbert

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.

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.

I repeat, as I said before, don't worry about the limbs until you figured out what ribcage and hips do. Focus on drawing head, ribcage and hips.

OK, several things:

a) Yes, starting with simplified gestures to get a working muscle memory for drawing the pose is definitely a way better idea than jumping right into complicated anatomical details. If you get accustomed to the pose, you will find big landmarks to measure your proportions from. If you try to add up itsy bitsy details instead, you will become crazy, as every bit of mismeasured relation bitween two details will multiply, and at the end, your drawing will just consist of a bunch of little shapes at vastly different scale.

b) ...and when you start getting into some more details, the limbs aren't the best place to start from. Keep the arms and legs as simple lines for quite a while, until you are confident how to draw "the torso". And I put "the torso" in quotation marks, because ideally you should stop thinking of it as one thing. It's the ribcage plus collar bones on the upper side, and the hip on the lower side you are interested in, and they aren't solidly fixed to each other, but connected by the spine, which has its own typical range of mobility.

Ribcage is a standing egg, with the bottom cut off in an inverted v-shape, on top of the egg sit the collar bones. For the hip either draw a pair of undies, or draw a big box, that contains the buttox, and think of the legs as cut out of that box. Collar bones and hips indicate where the major joints have to end up, and until you are confident enough to pinpoint them, any attempts to go into detail with limbs will end up as a lottery: If you get the position of the joints randomly correct, you might end up with a decent drawing, if the joints are positioned off, you can spend hours working hard, and then realize that you won't get away from that uncanny feeling, that something is off with the drawing.

c) That said, your curiosity about legs being drawn strangely s-shaped has an answer. It has even two answers, as there isn't just one, but two possible s-shapes, depending whether you look at the legs from the front or the side.



The s-shape from the front is mostly visible in athletic persons with really shredded legs. On the front of the thigh, you got the quadriceps, and its most prominent line goes from the outside of the hip to the inside of the knee, which lines up with the calf muscle which arcs from the inside of the knee to the outside of the foot.

Seen from the side, the bone structure is almost linear, but it starts near the front of the hip and goes to the back of the foot. Above the knee, the anterior quadriceps extends into a curve ahead of the bone, below the knee, the calf muscle extends into a curve almost completely behind the shin.

Big caveat to my explanations and sketches: My own anatomical knowledge is at most half-baked. If someone wants to show up to beat me with some real facts, I'll instantly and happily yield.

Edit, That side pose is drawn badly, it only works if the person is holding themselves with the hands to prevent falling on their back, as I drew the bone structure too vertical. Should have positioned the foot a good bit further to the rear to show the leg in a stable position. The hip joint in a relaxed and stable position should be pretty much exactly above the start of the toes.

Very focused on construction and on big and clear lines to show the pose. I especially like the big figure second from the right, the pose shows a lot of swagger.

The term this page uses for those "lessons" you mention is practice goals. There is even a button on this site. that asks you to select a practice goal from a multiple choice selection, and if you didn't change it for four weeks, you get a reminder. But that is only a minimal crutch, and after you get more experience with different approaches to drawing, these selections start to feel incredibly vague. There is the option to type in your own words, though.

Ideally you should select a specific practice goal for each of your drawing sessions, and try to put it into your own words and/or visualize the effect you are going for. Those different tutorials offered you different tools for your toolbox, now it's up to you to learn to distinguish between them, and to select and chose consciously which specific tool fits your artistic vision best. In a faraway future, when we approach the horizon of mastery, we probably want all of this tools at our disposal.

And I know, that sounds all great and almighty, like I figured that all out, and I absolutely haven't. Compared to a lot of other draftspersons I lack discipline and tend to just wing it a lot more often than is good for my artistic development, but having given a lot of feedback to other artists here, I at least have seen it done right by some people, and occassionally I succeed in getting it right myself.

I think (I hope) becoming aware of the general problem, and at least trying to address it by attempting to become clearer about my goal for every session, before I just start scribbling away, is a step into the right direction. On the upside, trying to define my next practice goal for drawing is an uplifting mental exercise when I am stuck at work, or forced to do boring chores. How successfully I then manage to stick to it when the pen meets the paper is another question.

I think you are still stuck in the same loop, and not in your drawings, but in the way you look at them. What is that constant obsession with better or worse all about?

There is just an array of things, were the question better or worse stops making sense. Which is the best color? Is a racecar better or worse than a rose petal?

You are experimenting, some of the stuff you try out ends up more on the side of conventional and pretty, some ends up more on the side of wild and energetic, how are other people to know, how far they are off your original intention?

How about you try out this practice: at the end of a drawing session, sort your own drawings by which ones you like best and which ones you like least, and after you done that, try to verbalize, to put into descriptive words, what you like about the ones you like best. Then in your next session, you can see if you can push those qualities further.

That way, I hope, you get used to understanding the qualities you yourself are looking for, and neither be constantly depending on other people's feedback, nor regressing towards beating yourself up for imagined flaws.

Well, so far most tutorials I found about drawing heads in one way or another come down to learning to draw an abstraction of an idealized head, to get used to common proportions and placement of the features of the head.

The most commonly used abstraction is from Andrew Loomis, the one from Frank Reilly I suggested adds a few extra features to determine mostly the cheeks and some features around the mouth. George W. Bridgman has an abstraction that is built up from squares and blocks instead of circles, which he generally prefers because they are easier to manipulate in perspective. Steve Huston's abstraction is based on triangles instead, and he emphasises dynamic more. Michael Hampton also has one, but I don't know a lot about it. John Asaro has made a map of the planes of the head, which is useful to construct how shadows fall in different lighting, and you can buy Asaro heads printed out to check for shadows while drawing.

About how "atrocious" abstractions are... well, you draw them a few dozen times, until you no longer have to check the order of lines while doing it. While training that, you also get a good idea which proportions the artist of your choice feels important to measure while drawing. Then later, whether you go through the full hazzle of drawing the entire abstraction every time or not, you will profit from the muscle memory about those proportions.

I have read a lot of your comments about being insecure about your drawings, and blaming yourself for not being able "to determine the correct simplification" for example. Well, these abstractions, at least in the first drawing from imagination stage actually deliver a whole lot of exercise, that you can do "objectively" right. It's a lot of work, sure, but you also get quite solid guard rails how to do it.

Otherwise I would have recommended the more popular Loomis abstraction, as it is the simplest one to pick up. But being simple also means that you get earlier into artistic improvisation and having to make aesthetic judgments, which, from your comments so far, seem to be an area in which you generally don't feel so comfortable.

OK, if you want no abstractions at all, there is this guy, Tony Swaby, on youtube who draws excellent portraits with charcoal. He describes his own method as observing shadow values, and he is quite outspoken about how he thinks exercising line art is an oppressive waste of time. He definitely has a pleasant voice to listen to, and a great choice of reference materials, and I spent quite some time just listening to him and drawing from his reference photos. You could do that as well, maybe his explanations fit your intuitions about drawing better than they did fit mine.

I have seen some other portait artists which, like Swaby, have what I would consider a painterly approach to drawing, namely instead of developing the face from lines they start with the darkness values first and block out simplified forms. They typically work with paint brushes on a rather large canvas, and start with quite big brushes. I didn't look so much into them, just because I would have to rearrange my setup quite a bit to use those tools. Also I am a bit suspicious that those people might have forgotten a bit about their own beginnings, as they rarely mention proportions, but clearly have a quite keen sense about them, which in my experience does not come naturally to most beginners.

I have no search term in mind to help you out finding them, but if you look for portait drawing videos a bunch on youtube, the algorithm will certainly bring up examples.

There might be still other approaches to portrait drawing out there, these are just the one that I encountered so far.

Have you considered trying your hand at Reilly abstraction of the face? It's a very controlled step by step method, and I could imagine you enjoying that approach.

That sounds suspiciously like you might not be a mark 5 drawing robot, but a human being! I would let that check out!

Jokes aside, 2 hours focused concentration on a task IS exhausting. Most people wouldn't even get the idea to aim for training to draw more than that at once. I personally rarely rarely have a day, where I manage to draw 3 or 4 hours, but those are especially inspired days, and then its generally not in a single setting.

I know that professional artists and some enthusiasts manage to draw 10+ hours at once. But I think getting there is less a problem of strictly developing drawing skills, it's more a question of getting used to regenerate efficiently when taking breaks. Or even using mentally less taxing parts of drawing, like filling in large shapes, for regeneration.

Quite a few of them look really good. I especially like the way you separated and sorted out the darkness values on the last figure, it clearly shows the volume and has a nice punchy visual effect to it, bit of a "That's how I meant it!" vibe.