Forum posts by Aunt Herbert

I think you are actually on the path of "rewiring your brain" already. You observe yourself while drawing, you analyse your problems and break them down into specifics, you feel frustrated about them. You could translate all of this, including the frustration, into physiological functions of neurological plasticity, and you would end up pretty much at a description of how the human brain learns and acquires a new skill.

Untrained humans are not used to look for big shapes.

If you look at any childs drawing, they all start from a symbolic, language-based drawing style. Mama is a human. A human has a head, and legs, and hands, and legs and hands attach to a body, and to improve the drawing I need to find more words that describe more details, that I can add to the drawing.

Then beginning draftspersons discover shapes, and the easiest shapes to immediately observe are usually the smallest shapes, and you can see any number of beginner drawings where people try to accurately draw one detail, then add the next closest detail as accurately as possible next to it, and so on, and so on, but at some point realize, that they slightly mismeasured proportions and relations, and all those slight mismeasurements add up, and at the end, some of those details from the start of the chain just no longer fit together with the details at the end of the chain. That is usually when they either make those details fit by heavily compromising proportions and relations, or break off the drawing in frustration. I know I certainly went through that phase, and I see a lot of beginners in exactly that struggle.

The idea to start drawing from big and simple shapes is the best way to escape that conundrum, as that way you establish a uniform scale and composition for the entire picture. You will still have slight mismeasurements, but they can no longer combine into huge gaps, as instead of a chain of details, you have a hierarchy of scales, which reduces the range of errors to that of a single mistake, not a combination of mistakes amplifying each other.

But between understanding the problem on an intellectual level to becoming able to act on it "naturally", without specifically having to focus on it all the time is still a long way to go, and by the time you understood the problem for the first time, you still have no practice with it.

The way you practice it, is you decide to focus on solving exactly that problem before you start drawing. Then after you are done drawing you look at the result and only think about, whether you solved that specific problem well. If you decide you did it decently, you will get your dopamine shot from that discovery, if you failed, you will feel a bit disappointed. That is basically the rewiring process in action on a neurological level, and how it feels on an emotional level. To make it work efficiently, you have to organise your work such, that you can repeat this experience as often as possible.

Note that solving that specific problem isn't the same as drawing a more beautiful picture. Beauty is about more than a single problem, and while you focus on one skill, other skills may even deteriorate a bit, and the overall result might look uglier. This may lead to frustration and the feeling, that you did something wrong, but you did not. You focused on a single problem, and once you feel that solving that specific problem becomes more natural you can go back to analysing your overall process and identify other skills that you also need to practice, find other problems to solve.



A practice that I did at that stage, which I feel helped me personally was "line economy bingo". But I have to add, I wasn't especially focused on figure drawing, as I was mostly into urban sketching. The rules I set for myself: I walk through the streets, until I find an interesting shape. Then I try to draw that shape with as few lines as possible (CSI-rule, one line is either an I for a straight line, a C for a curve or an S for a double-curve) A bingo is achieved, if any observer could recognize that shape without me pointing at it.

One advantage of the game: as I defined the depiction from that shape, I naturally used the whole size of the paper for the shape, and once I had established it and decided it needed more details for clarification I did not fall into the temptation of expanding to neighboring shapes, thus I automatically kept the hierarchy intact, and all additional details were always in direct relation to that initial shape.

If I found the shape of a windowsill interesting, the result would always be a draft of a windowsill, with as many details as I thought were necessary, not suddenly a draft of that windowsill, plus the window, plus the next window over, plus the house wall, and the car parked before it, and the roof, the chimney and the clouds above.

I think the recommended practice in drawing human figures is to stick to an established abstraction of a human body, and strictly and always start each drawing following the "line of action first, then head, ribcage, hip, then joints, then limbs" pattern. Or alternatively you could learn Reilly rhythms and strictly learn following that pattern.

This will not necessarily make your drawings nicer immediately, but it will make you focus on the big shapes in a human figure. Some people will keep sticking to this abstraction throughout a whole successful career, other artists will do it for a while, and find other, more personal ways to draw, once they no longer struggle with identifying big shapes on a human figure. But for focusing on big shapes in humans, it is pretty much established best practice.

You are developing a good sense for pose and volume in space. I would even think maybe for 30s/60s you are producing too many lines. The idea is to find a good drawing rhythm that you can keep steady whether you start a short or a long draft, so that in theory every shorty you draw could be the foundation for a lenghty work.

I wouldn't worry about hand and feet in such short sketches of a whole body. If you sketch in their outlines as variations of quadrangles around the 2 minute mark, that is still plenty of detail.

I think you are doing great, and I don't feel like I have special details that I can point out. I am just not ahead enough in any technical regards or in experience.

I want to tell you about the one surprise moment I had, and that was looking at your 25 minute drawing. Really nothing bad about it, I marvel at the details of the face. What surprised me was, that it doesn't contain any big amounts of shading. My personal experience is, that after 7 to 8 minutes of drawing I usually feel like I am being "done" with my basic linework, and switching to picking out shadow forms and introducing values into the drawing is all, that is left to do. You chose sticking with improving actual linework right till the end, and it doesn't look like wasted time either, because your linework is actually at least a class above my own in that drawing.

So, now I feel guilty about my own sloppy lines, and I totally blame you for that! Live with it!

My impression of those sketches: You draw very methodically, starting from a good foundation of the body, developing very clean and beautiful lines.

Your question about finding your mistakes: I think your "mistake" might be, that you long reached a plateau that allows you to be very comfortable in what you do. Which isn't bad, it keeps building confidence in your drawings, which shows in your lines. But if you want to push beyond that, it is up to you to raise the bar, to find challenges, that you aren't comfortable with yet, to actually dare making mistakes again.

I could brainstorm a bit about typical challenges you could try:

-Explore longer drawings, including shading and possibly hatching could be an idea.

-Test your foundations by drawing the same pose you see on your reference, but from different angles, that you have to construct in your imagination.

-Try to stylize your figures by expressing the same with even fewer lines..

-....

These are just challenges that came to my mind, because I personally want to explore them in future, there must be many more, and which ones you chose will be very much informed by your identity and expression as an artist. You will have to trust your own curiosity to lead you away from safe havens.

I love your solution to a very specific problem: How to present the art journey with all its many steps, without just spamming everything with the sheer mass of output.

As a fellow user of Line of Action, there is off course the added thrill of recognition: "Ah, I know this reference, interesting how Valentine solved it differently", and also "Ah, I know the problem Valentine is working at, interesting how she(?) approaches it"

Hals- und Beinbruch from a fellow traveller!

One immediate thought: Yes, I agree, that a number of poses here are .... hard to grasp. Thing is, I started my habit of daily timed drawing not here, but on quickposes.com . Then that site ran into issues, as the masters of the interwebs made the creators of <a href="http://quickposes.com">quickposes.com</a> aware of a dirty little thing called copyrights, and how that does relate to earning money with a site that lives of depicting photos. <a href="http://quickpose.com">quickpose.com</a> was down for a time, and I ended up here as an alternative. I do love about line of action, that it has a forum, where at least the chance exists to talk with people about drawing and exchanging experience. But occassionally I check back in with quickposes.com, and you might try it to.

The images there are just from a different set of photographers, and they feel much more intuitive to grasp silhouette and movement. In comparison line of action images feel like at a higher level of difficulty. Which, by now, I somehow enjoy. Daily quicksketching to me has partially an appeal that is comparable with solving crossword puzzles, or sudoku.

I frankly would be curious for your opinion, if you go try out a bunch of images on quickpose.com, post your results here, and tell me whether I am crazy, or if you get the same feeling.

Yepp, click on the Line of Action logo to get to the starting site.

You'll see a big green bar, informing you that LoS students have put in yadda yadda time.

Underneath there are thumbnails which lead to the different areas of studies

Underneath those thumbnails is another green bar. That one will take you to the tutorial.

One thing that struck me is, that most of the photographers have their individual style of posing and lighting, and sometimes I wish there would be a button to just depict photos from a specific photographer (which obviously would only be possible for photo studios who have submitted a sufficient number of images).

Some of the image styles allow for, or even beg for, testing out a specific drawing style, which just might make little to no sense with references from another photographer.

You are often 90% there, but you would benefit bigly from finding especially a foundation for how the hips work, and for how ribcage, neck and shoulders go together.

Topmost drawing is top notch. One could debate whether a different drawing style could bring out the figure more dramatically, but any criticisms would be purely in the range of choice and taste. Then the lowest drawing, your shoulders and hips just lose symmetry in a way a human body can't and wouldn't work.

To get an idea for the torso, I would start drawing a bunch of figures from a regular upright front, side or 3/4, standing approx up right.

As foundation for the head, you can use basically a circle with a jawline.

The ribcage is an upright standing egg, with the top at the neck, and the lower curve of the egg cut off at the lowest rib bone (in an inverted v-line towards the sternum from the front, joining the spine almost horizontally in the back).

The shoulder apparatus sits on top of the ribcage. Most important is the bone that is the clavicula in the front and forms the shoulder blades in the back. It starts from the center top of the ribcage, has a bit of mobility of its own, and is usually well visible on nude or scantily clad torsos, as this bone has generally little muscle or fat tissues covering it. At it's other end is the joint where the arm bones start, with a few very compact muscles around it.

For the hips your main concern is to make sure, that the joints where the thigh bones start are in a rather fixed position symmetrically to each side of the spine. As a shortcut for the foundation you could either just draw a piece of underwear, a slip, which has a relatively simple form, that is easily reproducable and shows most important infos about the hip, or you could use a box around the entire buttox, and think about the thighs as cut-outs from this box. Looking for the crotch is the usual method to determine the center of the hips.

The throughline through head, shoulder, hips is the spine, and its range of mobility dictates prettty much which poses a body can take. A common beginner's mistake with the spine is to overestimate the distance between hip and ribcage and thus lengthening the torso, or to "straighten" the spine by underestimating the angle the masses have to each other.

If you get used to arranging these bony masses consistently to form the foundation for your poses, your random inconsistent mistakes will pretty much disappear. The mental trick is to stop observing the body purely from the shape of its surface features, but getting used to imagining where and in which position the underlying bone structures would be, and how they produce those shapes you see on the surface. This foundation provides you with a hierarchy of proportions, and thus reduces the amount of observations and measurings you can do wrong.

If you take artistic liberty with other features of the body most casual viewers won't even notice, but if you get the proportions of these basic torso structures wrong, you are headed straight into uncanny valley.

Yes, he definitely has published books. Just as a decision making aid for whether it is worth buying one, you could start by taking a look at this mini series:

where he explains his ideas. There are more videos of him and people who follow his method online, that show the frankly incredible results he gets from this.

Also, you succeeded in re-sparking my own interest in him, so I'll watch the videos, too, and see if I can maybe be less brainnumb this time.

My own immediate instinct would be to still push you towards form and proportion, but I am not the truthinator incarnate, especially not in regards to the artist you want to be. I think I can help you out by namedropping Mike Matessi and his force drawing method. He is definitely the current superstar in regards to line fluidity. The results he and his pupils achieve with the method are definitely top notch, I just personally won't be able to share much experience with what he does or how it works, because for me a lot of the english words he produces turn into a foreign language.

If you would be willing to dig a bit deeper into that side of the art, and then share some practical insights when critiqueing my stuff, I would be eternally grateful to you.

OK, first observation: the skill level you show with this sketches is rather inconsistent. It kinda ranges from, "OK, I'll start explaining from first baby steps" to, "Ah, no, that is actually decent" to "Wow, that one looks pro" (the skier made me think that).

Sometimes you nail it, sometimes you are a mile off with the proportions. So, you need to develop a functioning method to measure proportions. And I am not talking about holding a brush in front of you with a straightened arm and a goofy face, but something that consistently works, fast, and in any kind of environment you happen to be drawing in.

How about cheating? You don't actually measure, you learn some proportions by heart, by repeatedly drawing them a lot. That obviously only can work on stuff, that repeatedly actually HAS the same proportions, but luckily human faces and human bodies are generally similar enough to each other to just grind their proportions by heart.

First guy who came up with that cheat was famously Leonardo da Vinci, and he was really thorough with measuring a looot of proportions. Luckily for us, some time has passed since then, and generations after L. d. V. spent a lot of time and thought into how to economically memorize the important stuff.

For memorizing the proportions of the face and head, nowadays everybody cites a guy named Andrew Loomis, a professional illustrator who lived from 1892 to 1959. His main work was probably "Creative Illustration", but I think his most famous one is called "Fun with a Pencil". Like the name implies, it was basically a small side project to sell his knowledge about illustrations as entertainment project to hobbyists and families. It contains the famous Loomis head, a fun little way to learn how to draw human faces within 15 minutes. And it actually works. Draw a circle-ish thingy here, cut it off like that, draw another circle like so, et voila, this looks unmistakenly like a human face.

Good thing, that was long enough ago, so all copyrights have expired, and you can check the pdf of those books for yourself on the interwebs.

Now, a Loomis head isn't really a measuring device, and Loomis himself didn't use that method for his own professional work, a Loomis head is "an abstraction". It teaches idealized proportions of an idealized human head. It is purely a method to draw from imagination, and all that Loomis guaranteed was, that you would be able to draw "some" human head, not necessarily that specific one of the exact person that you want to draw a portrait of. But, if you keep drawing a dozen or so daily for a good time, you will develop a spidey sense for when the proportions in your own drawing start to leave the range of what is plausible on a human being.

Loomis-heads are probably the simplest abstraction for the human face, and if you image search for them, you will find a slew of very abstracted once, that literally look like robot heads. Those are the most useful to actually grind, and if you ever see a clip of a professional artist starting to draw a human head, there is at least a 66% (or so) chance, that the first few lines they put on paper will be exactly that.

There are other abstractions of the human face. Reilly (more about him later) adds additional lines and circles (rhythms, as he loves to call them) to indicate the muscles around the mouth and at the cheeks. Avaro came up with an abstraction of every possible plane on the human face, and you can buy full-sized Avaro heads, which are especially useful to reproduce the shadows a human head will have under variable lighting. George Bridgman, Steve Huston, and Michael Hampton have come up with abstractions, too, constructing the head from squares or from triangles...

You can invest time into each one of these people, and it will be time well spent. On the other side, you can find very honest statements from serious artists on youtube, that tell you, they feel like they spent too much time on that, and wish they had spent time otherwise. Learning at least one abstraction of the head will help you out, if you find yourself having a hard time to figure out, where exactly this or that feature of the face should go in your drawings.

Now that is the head, what about the human body? There is off course the method that this site is named after, "Line of Action", and if you do the tutorial here there will be a few short sentences about how to find the "line of action" first, then "the main masses" (which generally correspond with head, ribcage and hips". None of those snippets is wrong, I just feel like they are awfully short, which is probably a necessary consequence of webpage design. I personally learned a method, that is at least very similar from this course: https://www.proko.com/course/figure-drawing-fundamentals/overview which takes a lot more time to explain the concepts. There is a premium version of the course, but I recommend doing the free version first, and deciding whether what you learned from it was worth it to pay the sum Stan Prokopenko wants for the premium. All the essential infos are in the free version, the premium version seems to be more of an elaborate buy-me-a-coffee button, that gives you a few extra videos of Stan applying his lessons to a specific model. I don't know the exact history of that method.

The essence I found in this method: If you understand how the ribcage, the shoulders, the hips and the head relate to each other, you can draw convincing bodies. If you mess up, everybody who never held a pencil in their life will be able to tell you: this looks wrong.

A second famous and I guess related method is by a guy named Reilly who has a whole system of rhythms, that teach you how to divide the body, and the face, and basically everything up. I think if you here the name "Watts atelier", they are basically the living descendants that carry on Reilly's tradition.

I'll end my rambling wall of text here, I hope there were some interesting tidbits within it.

I am afraid there is a problem with your link. I get a 404 page not found from imgur.

OK, I think you have developed a decent understanding of the poses the human body is capable of. Especially the sketches were you focus on the underlying foundation seem very natural and convincing in proportions and range of motions.

But when you switch from foundation to final figure, you suddenly become insecure about proportions... maybe try starting with foundation anyways, but draw them very lightly or with a hard pencil that leaves little traces, then draw your outline over it with a softer = darker pencil?

And one other aspect, that holds you back is line quality. That you draw the same line several times until you are confident with the results doesn't matter so much for your foundations, but it looks insecure if it happens on your final outlines. I would recommend checking out drawabox.com, at least the first three or so chapters, and generally to adapt a technique called "shadowing". You plan your line beforehand, whether it is curved or straight, and where exactly the ends are supposed to go, and then you move your pencil several times along the preplanned line, until you see "a shadow" of that line before your inner eyes, and only then do you draw the actual line. The result should be, that you can do the outlines with perfect, confident lines, and don't have to "search" those lines leaving traces on the paper.

It takes quite a bit of discipline to get used to that, as it will probably break your drawing routine quite a bit. If you watch any video where Stan Prokopenko actually draws something, you can see his hand twitch a bit before every line he puts on paper, as he definitely preshadows each and every line. I personally tried to pick it up, too, but I am generally a bit too sloppy and undisciplined to really get used to it, but even practising it ocassionally helped me get my lines way cleaner. If you get to the point, where each outline and each feature is presented by one single clean line, the overall impression of your drawing will immediately jump up quite a bit.

Then on the longest pieces you added a bit of shadows by improvising a few scribbles about where you thought the figure needed to look darker. I don't think that improved the figure, instead it reinforced the problem with your somewhat shakey line quality.

Now getting shadows on a figure looking good is a bit of a science in itself, or maybe two or so sciences overlapping. There are a bunch of websites and videos that explain how to shade an egg. You should watch some of those, to understand what values are, what a terminus is, why reflected light is a shadow value and why medium light is a bright value and why all shadow values always have to be darker than all bright values to produce clean brights.

I know that sounds like a confusing warble of words, but if you use those terms as search words, and looks for eggs, you will find good explanations.

And science part 2 of shadows: You must find a way to distinguish shadows from lines. Shadows do have outlines, shapes, usually along the terminus, and it is often okay to draw those outlines and shadow shapes as lines. But if you just want to fill in an area with a given value, and randomly scribble into it, the eye will pick up those scribbles as additional information and will be confused, so you have to find a way to "camouflage" those scribbles, so the eye knows that is just the value of an area, not a bunch of additional details. Easiest method is with soft graphite or coal, where you can just softly rub over the area to smooth it out. If you are using ink or harder graphite, or just want to demonstrate your skill by NOT smoothing stuff out, you need to learn hatching and crosshatching. You present the area with a pattern of parallel lines, that is so regular, that the eye knows, it isn't a bunch of extra details, but just the darkness value of the area. Learning hatching or crosshatching is probably science 3 or 4 or 5 or something, as deciding the direction of the hatching lines is somewhat close to black magic.

For now, reading up on how shadow values work, and paying attention to keep your shadows smooth, not scribbled, and with clear seapartion between values should be enough for your next task,.... after you improved your line quality.

About your proportion mistakes... I still have them occur on some of my drawings, they become less over time with experience with the human figure, but if you want to push faster, there are also quite a number of different measuring techniques, that you could research and practise separately. I use a half-remembered mix of several, that I picked up over time, and do a lot of it subconciously anyways, until I annoy myself with wrong proportions a lot and task myself with retraining one or the other thing.

OK, feedback #1: Do an old man a favor: check your scanning software, I am certain there is somewhere a button that let's you adjust contrast and brightness. Rip up the contrast to 100%, the page will probably turn white when you do that, then lower the brightness until the drawing reappears.

Ideally you should chose a bright enough paper and a dark enough pencil, so that isn't always necessary and you can control the amount of contrast you want while drawing and don't have to always mess around with it while scanning, but the combo of dark paper and timid lines makes it really hard to see, what you are even doing for a pair of old eyes.

The lines, that I do see look like you are on a good trajectory. You are focused on finding essential lines that show the gesture, and design and execute them cleanly and confidently, and you even know how to exaggerate the poses for quite a bit of extra swagger.

I think you are at a point with your short sketches, where basic beginner advice reaches its limits, and you have to make some artistic decisions about where you want to go next as an artist yourself.

If you want to start really celebrating your lines, and keep to a caricature style, you could try switching to an ink brush. Pentel GFKP Japan worked best for me, not too expensive and reliable ink flow. Ink brush gives your line weight a lot of variation, (which might take a few attempts to get used to, but you'll figure it out) which will make your good line quality really apparent to the viewer.

If you want to go photorealistic instead, it's probably time to read up a bit on theory about how light and shadow works, and get used to doing longer drawings.

Another step into the wild would be to come up with short stories or jokes and try to do short series of three panels with a continuous narrative, to get used to drawing from imagination. Your foundation in drawing from observation should serve you well, but it is still a separate skillset.