Minor tip for figure #5: If a lot of the figure is blocked by a prop, like in this case the wheelchair, it is totally valid to ignore the prop and just draw the parts of the figure that are visible.
You are currently focusing on constructing the figure from simple 3-D forms, which is good, as it will build up your intuition about perspectivity. I would recommend switching the form that you use for the torso away from a large rectangular form to something called "the bean".
The concept in my own few words: Try to draw the ribcage as an upright egg, with the lower half of the egg cut off in an inverted V-shape along the lower ribs. On top of the ribcage draw the colar bones, connecting the neck and the shoulder joints. Draw the hip separately from the upper torso, either as a block or as a pair of undies. The rectangular block you are currently using corresponds to those forms in that the collar bones are what you now draw as the upper edge of that block, and the hip corresponds to the lower edge.
The bean isn't immediately visible in all poses, but focusing on figuring out where it has to be teaches you a good idea of how the torso can move. It is more important for now, than finishing all the limbs in each drawing. There are some drawing tipps, who tell you to focus more on the forms underneath the surface than the outlines, understanding and drawing the bean is what is mostly meant by them.
Edit: the form that is proposed in IDK's video for the torso works also. Instead of "the bean" it uses two separate boxes for the ribcage and the hip. The important takeaway: Don't draw the torso as one single shape, separate ribcage and hips.
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Aunt Herbert
edited this post on April 21, 2024 10:10am.
Looking at your stuff and thinking what general useful advice could help you best, but I can't come up with much. Maybe a detail I found helpful in drawing stretched out feet: I often draw the forefoot as just an extension of the leg, with the heel as an appendix attached at a 90° angle, instead of the entire foot as a separate entity, that is attached to the leg.
And I don't think simplifying has a definite obligatory list. To me it is not "This has to be simplified in this way, and that there has to be simplified in that way". It is more like looking for things, that possibly could be simplified, and then trying out, whether it looks good. Like, here are 2 lines, that almost line up, if I fuse them into one line, does that look strange or cool? Here is a bump, that indicates a muscle, how does it look, if I just ignore that muscle and flatten that bump into a straight line in fusion with the rest of the limb? Hmm, I see a relatively simple 2-d shape formed by different outlines and shadow shapes,... if I just draw that 2-d shape, can the eye still translate it into a part of the figure, or does it look weird?
Simplifying generally is a good thing, because what is simpler to draw is also simpler to read, but off course you also always lose some information when doing it. So it is trial and error, whether the remaining information still translates into an object, or turns the whole image into an abstraction. And people who are really good at simplification sometimes hit that sweet spot, where the image is just at the vexing border between object and abstraction, which can add quite a bit of extra funk.
The maximum simplification of pretty much every pose is off course a mere stick figure, but it looks boring as heck, because it is pure abstraction. The other boring extreme would be a 100% detailed photographic representation, like you would get when you just put a tight grid over the figure and copy all the squares of the grid separately. Finding the goldilock zone between those extremes is more a matter of taste, and willingness to play around, than a matter of rules.
The one guy I had in mind, and I could kick my back for not noting down his name, was a a guy who actually drew figures from live with charcoal, in a single non-ending big swaying motion of perpetual circles. When he started doing it, I was certain it would all end up in a giant mess, but after a few motions it started to turn into a very good looking actual drawing. I tried to follow the advice he verbalized while drawing, but just couldn't translate his descriptions into practical behavior on my part. I tried just imitating him, and produced something, that didn't look that bad at all, but nowhere near anything, that I would want to present to anyone. His method was strange, but I felt a bit of envy for his results. That is what I meant with actual legitimate artists, who might approach a topic from a really weird angle.
Another guy comes to mind, still no name, but one of the lead figure designers for Riot Studio of Arcane fame, so absolutely a demigod in my books. He showed off his work method, and... well, he definitely cured me from my prejudices against searching lines. That guy started to draw one vague line, and another, and another, until his screen had almost turned into one solid black plane from all the attempts, then he switched to another mask, drew the one line he finally settled on over that mess, deleted the rest, and it was an absolutely ace looking crispy clean fighting pose. I told myself to never ever again judge someone for using searching lines (if done right)
But yes, 10 second drafts, maybe as a very specialized tool to train something very particular, but I don't see much use for me personally either. 30 second warmups, as warmups, I find useful as a reminder to go for the big forms and don't start with details, b/c if you start with details you wont have squat on the paper after 30 seconds. For me 2 minutes is my "laziest" time, I can confidently finish the figure without bothering to go for shading.
I see, that you prefer to start with a quite detailed perspective foundation from neat boxes, and it makes sense to me that you prefer that methodic approach. I don't draw out a very neat foundation for figures very often. I kinda have internalized enough of one to wing it most of the time, and when I feel that my drawings become weirder than I prefer, I occasionally discipline myself by drawing a dozen actual foundations.
But I did experiment a bit with Reilly abstraction for portrait drawing, and, absolutely, trying to really combine an elaborate foundation with timed drawing is like trying to learn juggling with 20 kg dumbbells. It might be theoretically possible to do, and would certainly look impressive as heck, but the outcome seems uncertain, and the mere attempt may be dangerous to your (mental) health.
In the end, learning to draw for me is like learning home repair. It isn't a single skill, it is about learning what tools exist, what tools can do which jobs. and which tools fit your personal goals best.
I think the fascination with "fluid and dynamic lines" versus "stiff lines" is a strange and badly defined topic. I get it on the very basic beginner level, what drawabox teaches, translated as "don't accidentally chicken scratch" (unless you know what you are up to and consciously decided to chicken scratch for aesthetical reasons).
On advanced level, the only big name I found, that is actually trying to give a coherent definition of what the different between "fluid" and "stiff" ought to be seems to be Mike Matessi, and I have two big beefs with him: The one, more obvious and immediate one, his english descriptions of what he does sound like a foreign language to me, and the one more fundamental one, which probably also causes the first one, is a throwaway line from one of his interviews: "Yes, off course I learnt all the boring perspective stuff in art school, like everyone else did, but now..." Well, Mr Matessi, I think the reason your method works for you might be those boring times at art school, that actually not e v e r y o n e had the privilege to attend.
Just grinding 10 second drafts definitely aren't the silver bullet to get there (and isn't something even Mike Matessi would recommend). And I definitely had requests for critique here from people who just drew very neatly and cleanly, and then felt bad about their lines being "too stiff", .... and I don't get where the problem is.
Similar thought on this video:
To me it translated mostly into how hard it is for Peter Han, after a distinguished career of 20 years working 9 to 5 (plus definitely crunch times and overhours) as a professional artist, to break out of his mold. And yes, he is definitely a fantastic artist, and his dedication to still be willing to search out an area, where even he risks making mistakes is inspiring. Doesn't change the fact though, that I personally lack at least 2 decades of drawing experience to come even close to the mold, that he attempts to break out of.
Sounds about right, and most importantly it seems to work for you, as the result is convincing. It conveys a lot of information efficiently, which gives the viewer that pleasant feeling of quick recognition.
Only little caveat, the "all" in "all figure studies" is a bit of an overgeneralization, just because there are quite a number of different techniques, styles or priorities someone else could have when figure drawing. I have seen some people on youtube start their drawings in ways that looked at first glance extremely weird to me, and nevertheless end up with astonishing results.
Idon't know, sorry if I find that a little bit funny, but how do you expect timid people to express their timidity in a more appropriate way?
I think the #1 natural expression for shyness is to not react at all. After all, all kind of reactions have to be interpreted and validated by someone else, and then those reactions can potentially be regarded as dumb or patronizing or unhelpful or silly or...... and that is what timid people are afraid of.
I have been reading your posts on this forum a bit, and I think a part of your artistic problem is a self fulfilling prophecy loop based on your anxiety about your own self worth and your expectation.
To explain what I mean, I'll contrast with my own drawing style. I think one aspect that characterizes my drawings is, that I always very quickly jump to the conclusion "Aaah, that's good enough, let's start doing something else". So I get a lot done, and I have a 95% experience with a lot of subskills, and if all of that comes together the end result can occassionally be impressive, BUT... there is also always that rough and dirty and unfinished feel to whatever I do, because there is never a real 100% in the mix. And it doesn't bother most people a lot, and people who give me critique often tell me that it looks bold and confident and carries emotional weight. Which is true, but it still bothers me personally a bit, that I don't have a real choice in the matter. For me, getting my lines to really look smooth and pretty, or cute, or really clean, or "girlish", or diligent, seems just outside of my grasp, because at every step on the way, I get to "Aaargh, that's good enough, let's do something else" just way too early.
For you on the other hand "That's good enough" never seems to be even possible. You start with sky high expectations about how every result has to look, and if you don't exactly reach it, you despair and beat yourself up publicly for it. And when you start your next drawing instead of focusing 100% on actual drawing, you are at least 50% already in the process of self-critiquing every dot you left on the paper, and start overcorrecting and then overcorrecting the overcorrection. Which actually lowers the resulting quality instead of improving it.
That said, your actual results aren't nowhere near being as horrible as you seem to perceive them. You are actualy a good draftsperson, and your results show that you improved a lot over what a complete noob would produce.
Now, from some experience with anxious people in my life, I know that trying to help them can run into a lot of risks. If you just tell them "Don't be anxious", no matter how soothing you intended that to be, the reply may just be "Now that is just rude. I can't change who I am."
If you instead come up with exercises for them to lower their anxiety, then they will just become anxious over whether they did the exercises correctly.
If you feel defeated and tell them to search help from someone else or to adress their issue on their own, they will feel rejected.
I mean, in this case you asked someone a question, that they had no answer to, and so they chose not to answer, and you are reading into that that you broke some unspoken rule, and now everybody might hate you for it? And if they wouldn't secretly hate you, they would have found a somewhat more appropriate way to respond?
I remember a conversation either with you, or with someone with almost the identical user name, which quite abruptly ended with me being told "I heard everything you said already a thousand times, and I already told you, that I am not interested in that, how dare you keep saying that!" and a threat to be blocked. This wasn't a response that was especially inviting to carry on a conversation, and furthermore, it did not change my conviction, that my answers were still correct and actually the best possible answers to the questions that were asked. If you ask questions, you have to live with people either giving no answers, or other answers than you wished for.
Kim, there was this spambot with the french repairshop yesterday, and I posted a joke about it. You deleted the bot post and my joke about it, which is fine, but now I got the "forum post deleted" alert icon stuck on top of my page, and I can't make it go away, because it doesn't link to a post anymore.
People are definitely timid. I mean, just compare the number of people using this site to the number of people even asking for advice, and then to the handful of people who usually dare to give advice.
Also, there is the difference between having a skill, and being able to verbalize what it takes to acquire a skill. You can probably ride a bike, but could you explain HOW to ride a bike to someone who has problems with it?
So, not asking any random person for advice isn't so much an unspoken rule, it is just that asking is such a low probability attempt that most people won't even try. Maybe if you already established an ongoing conversation with someone, you could say "Hey, I noticed, that you are especially good at x, do you have any tips how you do that?", but then still the most likely answer will be: "Aaahm, never thought about that, I just do it!"
Moriya, it's just a common and natural beginner's mistake to start every drawing by focusing on one detail first, then the next adjacent detail, and so forth. Which inevitably leads to the problem of minor variance in scale between each of the details multiplying with each other, until the last detail is much bigger in scale than the first one, and off by inches in either the vertical or horizontal axis.
What you describe about your figure no longer fitting into your frame is just a variation of that problem.
And the fix to it is to learn to establish the big overall shapes as soon as possible, so you can measure all details relative to those big shapes, and not from detail to detail.
Besides measuring proportions better it also allows getting a grip on composition.
You will find this principle in several different drawing techniques, named differently depending on subject and the method to establish the big shapes.
You will even find similar effects when you start to investigate how shading works and learn how to establish the big values first.
I have been drawing daily for several years now, and when I am particularly annoyed about proportions or compositions in the result in one of my drawings, and I ask myself: "Did you maybe jump into fiddling with details before you established the big shapes?" the answer is in 90% of cases: "Yepp, guilty as charged"
I don't see any systematic mistakes, that you could specifically avoid. You are focusing on powerful lines and simple forms. This should be the best way to train your pen and all the squishy matter that holds it to produce aesthetical depictions of the human figure. GJ, keep on practising.
The very simple sounding, but very hard to pull off trick: Learn to establish the biggest shapes first, so you can measure the details from them.
This is going to be important for a hundred different reasons, and unless you are completely different from most other people, it will take you quite some time from understanding the general idea, to experimenting how to put it into practise, to becoming so accustomed to working that way, that you no longer have to constantly focus on it and can start paying attention to other problems more.
But it will fix 90% of all your problems with proportions, be they about composition or about anatomy.
Edit: Maybe a more practical tip for the stage that you are at right now: Not every figure drawing has to capture the entire figure. If you realize, that you started the figure too big to fit on the paper, don't waste time fiddling around with the frame size. Just focus on drawing the parts that do fit as good as possible. So you end up with only a half-pose? So what. You start your next drawing immediately afterwards, and can avoid that specific mistake now. Learning is about making mistakes, realizing it was a mistake, and then not worrying, but just carrying on and trying to avoid repeating that mistake.
One small extra I would like to have is an edit option for critiques. I am a bit OCD in regards to grammar and spelling, and when I discover typos in my critiques, it itches a bit.
Aunt Herbert
edited this post on April 11, 2024 1:02pm.
Reason: OCD
#1: Ugh, the way he pulls his shirt around turns it almost into a giant quadrangle, that covers half of his body. Cool, half of the drawing done already.
#2: Making the legs curvy would be a nice contrast to the straight lines of the shirt. Hmm, I saw this abstraction of legs from the front with the double-wave somewhere on youtube, I guess it could fit here well. Idk is emphasizing simplifying, so let's do a bit line economy bingo... 31 lines for both legs, that's ok-ish.
#3. Add the hands and the bit of the head.
#4: Add a bit of hatching to make it look less flat in spite of all the big empty shapes.
This is one way of simplifying the pose.
Edit: Looking at it after publishing I realized, that I didn't really check the relations between the masses. The way he pulls the shirt up in my version would have actually covered the entire head, so I could have saved those lines, too, and it would have looked anatomically more correct. Alternatively, if I wanted to keep the head, I should have been a bit more subdued with the shirt rectangular and made sure, that it didn't rise too high above the shoulders./Edit
just portray the most eyecatching-feature, the rectangular-ish shirt, and stickfigure the rest. It certainly is simplified as heck, and no one mentioned pretty.
Aunt Herbert
edited this post on April 21, 2024 10:10am.
Aunt Herbert
edited this post on April 17, 2024 1:42pm.
