Forum posts by Aunt Herbert

My advice would be to try to improve your line quality, so you can find one long line instead of scratching a ton of attempts. Now, that is easier said than done, and will take some practice. To understand the concept of line quality I recommend drawabox.com, at least the first few lessons before it goes into actual perspectivic drawing.

And then, do a lot of short drawings, a minute or so, but still try to take your time for every line. That will lead to a lot of badly measured figures with really wonky proportions. Don't try to correct them, just do the next one, but try to focus on controlling every line. You won't get your figures "finished", that is OK, that is not what your goal is. You will feel a lot of frustration while doing that, and that is a good thing. Frustration is the emotion that occurs, when your cortex tells their neurons, that they don't do their job the way they are supposed to, in other words, that is how learning a new skill feels on a physical level.

You can look into some short measuring techniques, like finding three dots on the reference in a straight line, just to compare distances, or looking for vertical or horizontal relations, but a lot of measuring will eventually have to run in the background of your mind, while you focus on a thousand other things while drawing. Repeatedly drawing the human body is also kind of a measuring technique, as you get used to the proportions. But for now, your measuring just isn't there yet, and it is more useful to accept that and improve the line quality instead. Your figures will look wonky for quite a time to come, but if they are at least drawn with clean, long, and decisive lines they will already look a lot better.

Oh, btw, found the title of the old-timey book. "Drawing with Pen and Ink" by Arthur L. Guptill. Can be found as free pdf on the webs if you are curious. Doing the exercises from that book is also straight at the border between stupid and genius to me. I would say the skills that book teaches are nothing anyone expects from an artist nowadays in the digital age, but trying to practise them, and observing your own experience and progress has kind of a low-burn psychedelic component. Plus ofc, there are tons of incredible prints from accomplished masters of ink in that book, capable of lifting your vision of what is possible while crushing your self-esteem if you dare to think of your own skills in comparison.

With the time and discipline matter.... my dirty secret: having no life helps. I successfully survived on the dole without becoming homeless a while back, and I learned 2 lessons: Never pay money to be happy, and never pay money to find friends. And don't waste your life trying to earn more than you need, fight like heck if someone tries to make you. I ended up with a half-time job and an incredible amount of excess free time to get rid off, and free computer games get either boring or annoying after a short while. Learning to draw is perfect to fill the god-sized hole in my soul without having to self medicate with hard drugs or alcohol.

I am looking forward to see some more of your works, and I'll certainly add my 2 cents to them. May the ole spaghetti monster sprinkle your path with parmesan until we meet again!

I think the word "appeal" is a bit touchy. My guess is: there are schools of art, long and complicated theories about which skills to train and what is real art, and what isn't. And then there are those madpersons, who don't give a dime about all that art theory and do something completely different, and everyone agrees, that is just interesting to look at. Off course, there are way more madperson, who don't give a dime about art theory, and their stuff is just boring as heck. The difference is called "appeal".

I think trying to systematically practice "appeal" is a fool's errand. That's like trying to find a course, that teaches you "success"! You will probably find a lot of such courses, but you can be guaranteed each and every one of them has been set up by a con, who tries to transform the content of your wallet into the content of their wallet.

OK, I thought a lot about the phenomenon, and I got kind of a theory about what happens with us, and how to deal with it.

First thing to realize: drawing isn't exactly one skill. Emphasis on the number. Not one, but a multitude of different skills. It starts with knowing how to sharpen a pencil, holding the pencil the correct way, drawing controlled lines with a decent quality, conceptualizing a drawing, learning how to measure proportions while drawing, identifying interesting 2D-shapes, understanding bodies in three dimensions, simplifying forms, getting used to common forms like the human figure or the face, understanding light and shadow, learning to differentiate shades and how to use them, ..... and so forth and so forth and so forth.

There is pretty much a separate tutorial for each of those individual subskills and probably a thousand more. Probably each of us has at least done one such tutorial, and probably quite a few more. Now, while doing a tutorial, at first it feels a bit awkward, but in a good tutorial the scope of artistic expression you have to focus on is quite tight, and you will see quick progress after a while. Then you try out more and more tutorials, and add more subskills to your general drawing skill. But now, you are no longer throwing one ball in a perfect curve, you are juggling a dozen or so.

Also, frankly, some of those subskills are just contradictory. There are about a thousand exercises to perfectly measure every dot on the reference and to perfectly copy it onto your page, be it proportions, shapes or darkness values, and then there are almost as many exercises to find a "looser", "more dynamic" way to draw, and that is only possible if you stop obsessing over every dot on the page.

So, we are juggling a dozen balls, and some of them drop by the side, and we don't even realize at first. And then, one day we look at our latest drawing and realize, that that one, and the last dozen we drew before that are just incredibly fugly. Which is a valuable, honest, aesthetically sound observation, but not really a craftperson's observation.

I think the real solution is to get better at self observation and self diagnosis. "Cool" and "Lame" just aren't useful categories for that. If you would try to give a child or a total beginner a honest and valuable feedback, you wouldn't just tell them "Your drawing sucks, git gud, nub!", even if that is your actual first impression. Instead you would first show your respect by appreciating what actually good qualities the drawing has, and there just isn't a single drawing in the entire world, that has no redeeming qualities at all. And then you would check your mental library for that catalogue of subskills, you encountered over time and think about which one would be most valuable to focus on for that specific artist.

So, part of our journey as craftsperson is to be able to identify the balls we dropped, so we can remember to pick them up again. "This drawing sucks" doesn't help, but "well, at long last I got the proportions correct, but my line quality is back to total chicken scratches" or, "OK, those lines are long and confident, but this was supposed to be a human figure, and those proportions look like something from an alien monster movie" are way more valuable.

Because we know what exercises we did to achieve that subskill, and once we realize, that we have been slagging, we can focus on retraining that. And the word "self" in self observation and self diagnosis is also somewhat important. Because if you just show me an image of your last drawing and ask me for advice, I will most likely tell you about the subskill, that is most present on my mind, and that will most likely be the one, that I am currently practicing. Which could by chance be the one fitting to the source of your disappointment, but it could as well be a totally different one, because we are different people on different journeys.

A practical example of my recent slump in quality: I realized, that my drawings were really falling below standards, that I easily passed long time ago. First attempt at self diagnosis didn't take very long: We had a really bad winter at my workplace, and I had to do tons of extra shifts to jump in for sick colleagues, so I felt constantly tired and exhausted and stressed out, and I did my daily practice with gritted teeth, not with real interest into quality, just to keep in the habit of drawing, and to remind me, that a universe beyond my stupid job exists. Under this circumstances it wasn't surprising, that the results looked ***, and once I realized that, I didn't worry for a while.

Now, the job situation has cleared up a bit, but somehow my drawings still were off, and it took me a while to realize the stupid detail I missed. When I started drawing I drew with graphite or charcoal. I did some tutorials about holding the pen more like a brush, that is at the end, and controlling it from my elbows and shoulders, and less like a first grader, who is leaning to write and barely controls its pen with its fingertips. Later on I switched to ink, and during this winter I returned to charcoal. What I really forgot about: charcoal pens are wooden pens, and you sharpen them by shortening them a bit. So over time the pen got shorter and shorter, and I retrained holding the remaining stub almost at the tip and drawing with my fingertips alone. Which feels natural, because that is the way I write, and like probably everyone else here, I learned to write before I really got into learning actual drawing techniques. It's the lazy way to draw for me, and it felt awkward and like a lack of control, when I first switched away from it, and it feels awkward and like a lack of control now, that I have to go through the motions and again get used to holding the g****m pen correctly.

This is one stupid ball I dropped, and now I have to pick it up again.

Self diagnosing your results is kind of a very important subskill in itself. It is trained by adding more insight into all the other different subskills you accumulate on your journey, and by occassionally remembering those that you trained a long time ago, and checking whether you still make use of them.

The notion of "Take a break from drawing"... I am wary of that. On the one side, it can absolutely work, especially if the problem that currently impacts your drawing quality the most is the sheer frustration about the low quality of results. This can become a vicious circle, and taking a break has decent chance of stopping that.

On the other hand, drawing daily is a valuable habit, that we want to keep. And if our #1 choice to solving problems, that we encounter within the habit, that we want to have, is taking a break from that habit, then "taking a break" can become a habit in itself, and "taking a break" is a habit to stay away from, because it can end the artists journey for good if it gets permanent.

So, the ideal way to fix an ongoing quality problem is to self analyse and understand which subskills you have to retrain.

If you just can't figure out which one that is, and your frustration grows so much that the frustration becomes a problem in itself, I think the second best way is to keep "practicing" every day, but completely change the content of that practice. Do something completely different than you used to do, change the medium, change the motive, change your style, and if you feel like you can't draw anything well, then start doing stupid stuff, like trying to draw as bad as possible for a while.

Also, don't just look at the skills, also look at yourself and your surroundings. From stupid things like "how long is my pencil" "how is the lighting" to more existential things like "where are my thoughts and what else is going on in my life".

Art is a journey, and we all will pass through bogs and landfills on our way to the peak at the horizon. But as long as we keep walking, that **** can't stop us.

I think I somewhat "conventionalized" my practises after getting deeper into drawing and doing some tutorials from dudes that actually knew how it works. Main influences were drawabox.com and https://www.proko.com/course/figure-drawing-fundamentals/overview, but also a lot of stuff that I either heard someone talk about on youtube or saw someone pull off on this here site.

But the experience you are getting from PPP is definitely valuable. Learning how to simplify complex forms, and learning how to start a drawing from the big forms instead of getting lost in details immediately is 99% of what most beginner tutorials are jumping through hoops to get into other people's heads. Well, maybe not 99%, but at least a solid 30% or so. And the experience to enjoy doing "stupid" things, and to just see what happens is probably at the core of most general creativity courses, for which people pay tons of monies.

Things I personally did and had fun with for some time:

-OK, I was quiet impressed by some old-timey book about drawing with ink and improving line quality, that Proko and Marshall had mentioned in one of their podcasts, but from which I sadly forgot author and title by now, but a good while I just spent time practising beautiful parallell straight and curved lines. It always felt hard to do and like I was making little progress, until I cleaned my room some day and found one of my first attempts at doing that, and realized how much I had actually improved in rather short time.

-I think I had a perfect streak of drawing daily on quickposes.com of over a year, but then the site had some organizational issues and was even down for some time, so I landed here, and am still struggling to get my streak of uninterrupted drawing beyond the 70 day mark.

-One "game" I came up with is line economy bingo. Ideally it should be played in an urban setting with several people, but I never found someone to play with, so I did it solo: Find any one object, detail or sight in the vicinity, don't tell anyone what you are looking at, and try to draw it, while counting every line via the CSI method. I stands for a straight line, C stands for a simple curve, and S stands for basically two opposing curves that meet - line an S, d'uh. Each one of those count as one single line, anything more complicated has to be broken down into individual lines and counted. The goal is to be the one that uses the least amount of lines to draw, what they see. If everyone else recognizes what that thing is, it counts as a "bingo".

The idea is, if you use very few lines to produce a recognizable shape, then a) you can focus very much on drawing each line especially beautiful, and b) you develop an eye for impressive and recognizable shapes.

-I got used to draw with a clipboard in my left and a pen or pencil in the right and spent quite some time "urban drawing". One especially daring attempt,... I was walking down the street, and whenever someone came towards me, I tried to memorize how they looked, then once they passed by, I tried to sketch them from memory. The results looked incredibly fugly, and I postponed the project until a future, when I would feel more confident with the human form.... well, spring is around the corner, if the weather isn't too bad, I might give it another shot soon.

-I spent quite some time "portraying" trees. So, not drawing nice symbols, that would easily be recognized as some tree, but actually drawing a specific tree, with the exact ways the branches and twigs and leaves are, like you would portray another person. Drove me nuts, but also taught me a lot about randomness and the problem with fractals. The original plan came from some childhood memory. A lot of people see faces in all kind of stuff, and children especially so, but for me it was so bad, that I was actually afraid of quite a lot of trees and walked quite long ways to avoid coming too close to them because the m****f**** faces in their twigs and branches looked reeeeeally sour and angry, and the way they waved madly in the wind didn't make it any better. I always wanted to be able to draw "that", so people would understand, what I was so scared about from those "harmless" trees.

-One project I tried about half a year ago, was to just learn the abstractions from Loomis, Reilly and some other guy, which name currently evades me, to get a perfect foundation for drawing the human head. Might take that up again, if and when the constant demand at work finally goes down a bit more.

I hope I didn't shock you with my wall of text. I love drawing, but I also love talking about drawing, and I am a big fan of any kind of stupid ideas in general, so if we can try to establish some conversation here, where we just brag or laugh about our latest fits of genius, I would be happy to post my 2 cents ever so often.

Well, that looks certainly interesting. For me personally, it's been a long time since I did digital drawings, I just do analogue and scan it in.

That said, PowerPoint is a peculiar choice. Yes, it has off course graphic options, but it is first of all a presentation software. Your works in a weird way have the charm of someone using a rolled-up newspaper instead of a brush to get color on their canvas. It produces results, and the fact that these results stem from a sub-optimal tool is obviously part of the design choices.

The boring and conventional advice on how to improve on your works would be to suggest using an actual graphic program. But that would off course ignore all the fun you are having with abusing PowerPoint.

I do remember a long time ago I toyed around with some CAD-program. I forgot the name by now, and I can't say I ever understood enough of it to do something actually useful with it, but it had a tool, that made toying around with Bezier curves quite intuitive, at least for me. I was member in a graphic novel/manga forum, where people regularly posted all kind of challenges and I answered to some of them with my Bezier curves comic strips.

The reaction was uniformly irritation: "Dude, that doesn't look like manga or marvels or anything, that looks like cheap 1980s videogames, why are you doing that to yourself?" I loved it, BECAUSE it looked like those videogames, but I didn't have the stamina to just keep it up versus zero positive reactions from anybody else.

I wish you better luck with your project, and well, you are doing a quite unique thing there, so maybe in hope of getting more of a conversation going, how about you try to say, improvise a mini-tutorial for what it takes to turn Powerpoint into a graphic program? How do you have to approach that, how do you conceptualize a piece and get it from start to finish?

Well, kind of. The timed classes are a practice tool, which allow to refine some stuff, but you also need to know what you want to work on, to get the best result with them.

Several people have different interpretations for what to do with that tool. Some people try to train to really get a completed drawing done within 30 seconds, and if someone just loves the challenge, and keeps at it... I have some people achieve incredible results with it, but I am not certain whether that really leads towards any particular advanced techniques..

My understanding of what the tool is best to train with, is the first lines of a drawing. Why would you want to train them separately? Because according to one drawing philosophy, most of the quality of the later drawing is decided by the quality of your first lines. And the short timer helps you to avoid waisting time on "polishing a turd", i.e. spending a lot of time to add more bells and whistles (or usually rather shades and corrections) to a flawed start, instead you better spend more time training to find a good start. For example, if you spend 15 minutes drawing and erasing and redrawing the same stuff, and then kind of draw some shadows over it, to make it somewhat look better and cover up obvious flaws, and it still looks crappy, you would have probably learned more by practicing your first lines 30 times in the same amount of time.

That method of drilling "quickies" comes with a theory of how to approach drawing a figure, and there is also a bit of a tutorial mentioning some concepts like line of action, and drawing the masses first to capture the pose, but it is extremely brief. I found this side: https://www.proko.com/course/figure-drawing-fundamentals/overview promotes a similar technical approach, but spends a loooot more time explaining the individual steps toward capturing a pose and constructing a human figure from it.

Besides the "classes", there is also the option to chose a certain timing and to stick with it, which may be more appropriate, depending on what you want to do. For example, I am convinced, that the shorties work well for figures, but don't work well for portraits, especially if you want to apply some common portrait techniques like Loomis or Reilly, as they just take at least 5-10 minutes to properly finish the initial construction.

However you use it, the site provides you with a selection of poses and references, and getting used to really "drill" your stuff, i.e. doing lots of repetition in a certain approach towards different references also made at least me more comfortable with daily training, and with not always planning ahead to creating the next masterpiece to hang into a museum and then be frustrated with the result, but to focus on watching myself try out and acquire a bit more of a technical approach to drawing.

Think of it like a benchpress in a gym. The benchpress itself doesn't make your muscles grow, and doing a single repetition on it won't either. But if you get used to regularly strain your muscles with it, you will see differences in your results.

BTW, the site quickpose.com has a similar selection of timed poses, if you start looking for more variety after a while, but it comes without a forum to ask questions.

OK, my firewall classifies the link in Dylan Wlker's post as dangerous website, warning to everybody not to use that link, and I'll write Kim a note to remove that BS post and block our lovely Dylan here.

Heirloomtomato, my first intention to post was to thank you for your post. Yes, yes, yes, on so many levels!

Your bean is looking good so far. The secret with the connection is getting an understanding of the joints next. The hip joints are in a way easier, because the hip bone is pretty much one big fixed bone, and the thigh bones always start from the same position towards the hip. The problem with the hip is, that there is just a lot more mass around that joint, so you often can't directly observe it, you rather deduce it from your understanding of the bean and the position of the thighs. There are some landmarks for the hip, but which one is visible in which position, and actually accordingly helpful in measurement seems so arbitraty, that I consider catalogueing them a bit of wasted time. I tend to mostly retro-engineer the hip joints from looking at the thighs, and then decide whether the positions I found make sense in regards to the bean. As a result, I vary the shortcuts to indicate the hip quite a bit, dependend on the reference, the exact position of the extremities and the point of view. Sometimes the classical bikini buttom works best, when I try to focus on perspective, I sometimes use one big box, that contains all of the hips and the buttox.

The shoulder joints are a bit more complex. They are at the end of the clavicula/shoulderblade bone, which starts on the center top of the ribcage, and has a bit of mobility itself. What you indicate in your longer sketches as the upper side of the bean is basically formed by this bone and the lair of muscles directly on top of it. Because this bone has a bit of independent movement itself, it slightly deforms the upper half of the torso, and it determines where the shoulder joints can anatomically and plausibly be located. On the up side, the muscle lair here is usually comparably thin, and there isn't much subcutan fat in the area, so you can almost always spot the upper edge of the clavicula, as it protrudes from the neck area, and deduct the possible shoulder positions from it.

The shoulder joint itself is generally contained in rather prominent muscles, but these mostly can be depicted in a rather simple form. Whether that form looks more like a sphere or more box-like or even formed like a tear or a double tear varies a bit dependend on the model's physiology and your own graphical goals, but it is generally too compact to become really hard to visually understand.

So, hip joints, simple construction, but harder to spot, shoulder joints, a bit more complex, but usually easy to observe, once you know, what you are looking for.

In my head, as I progressed to see the shoulder joints as individual objects, I automatically also started to modify the upper half of the bean to reduce it to that typical egg form of the boney ribcage, with the shoulder "apparatus" basically sitting on top of it.

Some drawing challenges occassionally would be nice, where the site proposes a theme, a motive, or a technique or so, and everybody gives it a try?

I would try to focus on the main masses first. Head, chest, hip. Head is generally easy enough to spot, chest, i.e. ribcage and clavicula (or ribcage and shoulder blades from behind) is in itself a rather simple form, but it takes some practice to everytime spot it. Hip is a bit complicated, and you might find some variation to indicate it. Some people indicate it as a box, that includes the buttox, some just draw a bikini bottom, I generally vary as it fits the motive.

As a rule of thumb, I wouldn't bother finishing the outline of limbs, before you are done with indicating the position of head and torso. Your shorties are supposed to follow the same routine as when starting a longer drawing, and instead of feeling hurried when drawing them, you should become more comfortable with not finishing them. They aren't supposed to be finished. Ideally keep the same drawing rhythm up for shorter and longer drawings, the shorties are meant to practice the crucial initial steps more often, they aren't meant as a separate art form.

You are practicing methodically, and will see improvement over time.

A tip: On the shorter timed drawings, try to separate yourself a bit from the attempt to draw "the whole picture", including a complete outline, and just focus on finding some good lines for head, chest and hips. For the limbs a simple line indicating length and general orientation is more than enough, unless they hide the torso. Head and torso define 90% of the pose, as they determine where the joints are, to which those limbs are attached, and how they are oriented.

The purpose of shorties is to practice the first lines of a longer drawing repeatedly and efficiently, and once you get there, you will realize, that a mismeasured limb is usually easily fixed, while an unclear, unnatural or unconvincing torso is usually grounds to scrap the project and start all over again.

To draw good torsos, really getting an idea of how chest and hips are separate forms, and in which ways they can combine is somewhat key. I see you got our feisty male model quite a few times in the image selection, on him, and on other overweight models I often even add "the paunch" and "the thighs" (and ofc "the breasts" on female models) as additional masses. They aren't as decisive for the placement of joints, but they hide the form of the hips and the chest, so separating them mentally allows a bit of mental standardization of chests and hips to more resemble their relatively uniform bony foundations.

A shorty with clear indications of "the masses", but without any outline or limbs, is ultimately more useful than a shorty with outline and limbs, but only vague indication of masses. Because in the long run you train to start your drawings by finding the masses first and foremost for best results.

I am glad everything turned out well. I am old enough to understand the necessities of real existing capitalism, and that services like from this site are only possible as long as they are economically viable for the crew that runs them.

Thank you for your service and good luck!

Your drawings show the complex poses quite convincingly.

They would look more naturally if you had more of a clue how head, ribcage and hip function as voluminous bodies in space to define the torso.

I would recommend the free lessons here: https://www.proko.com/course/figure-drawing-fundamentals/overview

And while I am at it, here is the second recommendation for all beginner artists, this one is mostly about explaining line quality and how to understand perspectivic drawing: https://drawabox.com/

Working through those two courses will generally give you the foundation to figure out 90% of all typical beginner challenges.

On the "your studio" page, instead of telling me how many days in a row I practiced and how many minutes I practiced today, I am told to subscribe? I assume that has to do with the design changes on the map, but my heart missed a beat when I first spotted it. 65 days was the last running total, and it would be super-disheartening to lose that.

My name and logo is still visible on the upper right of the screen, so I am very much subscribed, and "your studio" even remembers the 65 days, but the boxes "spenzt practicing this week" and "critiques received this week" are empty.

I am also told to upgrade my account to upload to my sketchbook... did anything go wrong with the billing mayhaps?



Edit...

I went through the subscription process again to check after the drawing session. I was irritated, that the option was even offered, but it still remembered my billing details and congratulated me on my subscription. Your studio still seems to believe, I am not. I checked with my bank, everything seems fine on that side, and I have no messages about declined payments.

Btw, right under this message I see the add to support LoA, which tells me it would be removed, if I already did....

Edit again. I found th e Billing info in my profile. It tells me, the next payment will be deducted in -2 days, and I am a Free member.... I guess, that has something to do with the problem. The card details I provided haven't changed, and there are about 1500 € debit on the card, so I don't know what the problem is.