Forum posts by Drunkenelf

These are flipping great! A lot of focus on nailing the expression and movement of each figure. I personally focus way too much on matching the form of the figure so I may copy a few techniques I see in your drawings lol.



I see a ton of improvement as well from your earlier drawings, like when you compare 9 to 40. I think your best pieces happen when you really know the line of action that the whole body follows. Even in your most succesful poses without the line of action, I can tell that you understand it intrinsically with that particular figure. The third figure on 63 is a good example of this, because the line in the middle of the chest goes straight down to one of the legs, making an unintentional line of action.



Its fine to start at the head, especially if you get it done quick. A circle with a + is a great shorthand. It really depends on the figure and you get a feel for which ones work better with different starting poses. Feel free to start at the pelvis or chest or even legs, experiment and find out which ones work better for certain poses. When you draw this much, experimentation is vital.



I feel like Im going to steal a certain member's thunder here by reccomending this, but try doing even shorter poses, with less lines. Your work really shines when you know the line of action of a figure. Heck, maybe even 10 second rounds, with just a line to indicate most of the pose. Do this for a couple of minutes as a warm up and I think your approach to figures will get even stronger.

Howsit goin! Welcome to the space. Critiques are tough, but they help soooo much.



Im impressed by the amount of practice you've done! No one ever says this, because gesture drawing is one of the first things art teachers tell you to practice, but they are very difficult and even more difficult to do well, especially with animals. Using them as warm up, then practicing longer poses is really vital, since longer poses are important to analyze and undertstand the human form.



You're making the same mistake I used to make (and sometimes still slip into the habit of doing) by using the short time frame to practice the first steps of constructing a figure. THis is technically not wrong and you haven't wasted your time as its important to practice that as well, BUT the point of a short gesture is to get the whole figure on the page. If you've spent to much time making the face correct and forget to add legs, then you haven't used your time correctly. You're faces are pretty great, but you are also kind of using them as a crutch to avoid practicing the form of the animals. I should be able to tell what kind of animal you are drawing without the face, by just looking at the body.

This is very hard to do. It takes a lot of practice.

Another thing that I pretty much tell every nooby on this site is to work on your line confidence. Scribbly lines mostly happen when you are draw the same line over and over, essentially doing your thinking on the page. TAKE YOUR TIME. One confident solid line is far more powerful than a bunch of scribbly ones. I find the best way to practice drawing one line instead of several is to hold your pen slightly over the paper, practicing the motion, then placing it down when you're sure of the mark to make.

For future practices, I reccomend

A) Doing longer poses. Animals are harder to draw. It isn't cheating to take your time for how you practice their figures. Even two minutes would be fine. Just remember to concentrate on the whole form of the animal first and not focusing on the face.

OR

B) Keeping the current length of these poses, but making them simpler, with fewer lines, maybe a thicker brush tip. Draw the WHOLE animal, no skipping limbs. Curved lines do wonders when you are short on time. Draw them the right way and they seem to have volume without having to add a shape.



This image i just googled is a great example of the quicker drawn gesture that Im talking about. Feel free to google other examples too. Mix the styles even. Whatever it takes to get the entire essence of that animal you are drawing.



Keep up the practice. Animals are HARD. My favorite piece of yours was the dog shaking his head.

I see improvement! Especially in your line confidence! In your earlier stuff, the lines are way more sketchy as you try to find the shape on the figure, but you can plainly see that in your later stuff, meaning you have a far better idea in your mind and in your hand what you are trying to portray.



You seem to not really emphasize the form of the neck very often and forget to toss in the colar bone. Two quick lines on the top of the torso for the collar bone is great for knowing where to position the neck and the arms. It also helps indicate when the person is bent over. You aren't focusing much on the head, perhaps for studying purposes, but practicing the neck a little more helps direct the rest of the pose far more than you'd think.



You're doing great! Im seeing some techniques used that I forgot about so I'll try to remember them for my own studies!

SOmething to remember is that gesture drawings are actually pretty difficult. They are fantastic beginner exercises because they force you to draw over and over again quickly, getting over that feeling of needing to be perfect everytime. They also help you get an idea of how to reduce of figure to its barest essentials, helpin you draw what you see instead of what you THINK you see.

I think your rectangle torso is messing with your ability to draw your poses. I think you should practice either one of two ways.



1. Draw the gestures without the torso and really focus on expressive posing without the torso. Make really fancy stick figures essentially. Instead of the box and circle, have a line to indicat where across the body where the shoulders are, a line representing the spine, and a line where the pelvis. They will be quicker to draw, making it easier to focus on capturing the essence of the pose. I personally don't like drawing the circles to indicate where the lines bend, since they interupt the flow of the lines when gesture drawing. Draw those when you are going to develope a piece further, where accuracy is a little more important.

Keep up the good work dude! Critique is rough sometimes, but it helps you get better so much faster!

2. The other way to practice is one of my favorites, called the BEAN.



https://youtu.be/7_TXrdo3SAs



Your flexibility with the torso really holding you back. The bean exercise is a fantastic way to understand the torso as a moving bending body part. One of my favorite beginner exercises was to draw figures torsos as just the bean for a little while. Keep the time short, just enough time to draw the bean torso.

Avatar is one of the most inspiring things for nerds like us lol. Drawing expressions from the show was great practice! I should do it again.

Thanks for responding man, its a personal topic so I know its a little much to let out into the world.

For a few years I stopped drawing anything whatsoever, because i just got sick of the practice. THen I reaquainted myself with my favorite comics and manga from when I was a child, and saw comics communities grow online and I remembered the reasons I wanted to draw in the first place. I had forgotten to do the thing that I actually wanted to do. So I think its important to remind myself periodicaly why I study how to draw in the first place.



Nice to hear from another comics artist! I only do this in my free time as well. I kind of have to keep a schedule going or else I don't remember to work on it all lol. I hope you get to work on your project eventually!

I mean, those are great reasons to be on this webiste. But why do you want to be better? To just draw figures? Do you want to be a portrait artist? Do you want to draw better fanart of things?

Do you want to draw something and have someone look at it and respond "Dang, I've never seen someone look angrier on paper before."?



Is there a project you've been wanting to work on but just don't have the skill for it yet? Maybe my topic wasn't clear enough, so you don't have to respond. I just know we have a fine artistist who works a lot in physical mediums and we have a very enthusiastic animator, so I can kind of guess what they intend to try to do with what they practice here. Im just wondering what other kinds of artists we have here.

SOmetimes its easy to get caught up in the studying part of ART, especially if you have ADHD like me. Gotta remember that outside of drawing random figures everyday I actually have to remember that I want to do other things besides figure drawing. Putting it out in the world is a good way to remember that.



My personal goal is comic art, inspired by manga. Like anyone else on the internet, I've always wanted to make a webcomic. Plus certain types of comic art can be translated to animation pretty easily, so eventually I'd love to make the graphics of a nice 2d indie game.



Why are you guys practicing on this website and what do you want to work towards?

yeah, Im not who asked for this exercise, but Im probably going to do it. Everyday for 8 months is a little extreme though lol.



Nice post JCML

I will try to keep my language simple, so the translation software can more easily work well.



If I undertstand you correctly, the orange sketches are the most recent. If that is true, then I definitely see improvement. They look more three dimensional and the proportions feel more accurate. The lines are sketchier, but you will have to just work on refining that. Sketchy good lines are better than clean lines that are wrong.



Improvement is hard! Especially by yourself! Input from other people helps you learn much faster. Critique on a website like this can do that. The other way to improve more quickly is to concentrate on what you are practicing. As artists who teach themselves, we tend to over read and over research before we create, and try to practice everything. We want accurate anatomy, we want clean lines, we want good shading, we want good faces, and we try to learn that all at once. When you practice art, just pick one of these goals. Or maybe choose something smaller and simpler.



If you are worried about your sketchier lines in your orange drawing, I reccomend taking your time and drawing your lines more accuratly the first time. If you feel like you can't draw the line right in one motion, practice how your hand moves over the paper while you keep you pencil just above the paper. When you feel confident in your movement, then press down and make the mark with your pencil.

I hope my advice has been clear. I think your work is very very good.

If you are having trouble with the skull, then I reccomend just practicing the skull. Or maybe a more detailed mannquein head. Take one and just pracice drawing its shape over and over at different angles. Then practice squashing and stretching it while you do you 30 second drawings. DOn't focus so much on the little details. Form is very important for realistic faces. When you add the details without a solid foundation, they can be placed slightly off model and you get that melted face kind of look.

Practice drawing that basic skull form or mannequin head and you'll be surprised how quickly you can access it when you decide to add the other details. You'll get to the point where you can do those small details without even putting them down. I have a feeling that since you practiced it before, they will come back to you faster than you think.

Welcome to the site! Its way more fun interacting! And believe me, although you can get better at art on your own, it goes much smoother and quicker when you ask for input and critique on sites like this. This one is a little less active than I'd like, but the people here are friendly and we try to help when we can.



Now I can tell you draw a lot by your gesture drawings. WHen you use less lines, the motion of the figure comes through. But a thing you need to work on is line confidence. You are drawing lines over and over, trying to get the angles right. If you took your time a little bit when drawing the first line, you'll practice getting it right the first time and you'll practice visualizing the line in your head.

If you are having trouble stopping your hand from doing frantic scribbling lines, hold it slightly above the monitor and "ghost" the line until you are a bit more confident with the angle, then apply pressure.

THats the tip I tend to give everyone at some point, but scribbly lines are something we all struggle with and writing this advice out helps remind me to stick with it myself. Keep it up, you are very talented!

... but don't under estimate the power of changing medium, because holy smokes it makes a difference. It just cost me 400 dollar to learn this.



Context: I am very stubborn. I want to learn digital art so not drawing on anything besides a tablet seems kind of pointless. Ill doodle on work breaks on a sketch book with a mechanical pencil, but whenever I study art and really really practice, I use a drawing tablet and the tablet I've been using for several years has been a $200 XP Pen, one of the cheapest drawing tablets with a display screen. Not awful for the price, but certainly quirky. The pen itself has a strong spring in the drawing nib and required more pressure than normal in order to work.



Recently, it died, and I had to buy a new device. Biting the bullet, I spent double the price on a new Huion Kamvas Pro 13 and holy smokes, what a difference. THe pen is far more sensitive, the screen is larger and my figures are coming out far more fluid and and smooth. In fact, lines are so easy, Im drawing a little too fast and have had to correct mistakes more often, but the most important thing is that drawing figures has become way way more fun and Im losing myself more in practice.

The thing is, all these things that I like about this new tablet? They could have totally been achieved by switching to paper and charcoal. Newspaper print and a pack of artsy burnt wood. Or maybe something else from the clearance section of Micheals. SOmething far cheaper than a 400 dollar device.

Now I won't be returning it, because I will use it every day until it dies like my previous one, but now Ill remember the next time Im feeling a little stuck, switching to a new medium is probably the best choice.

When you draw figures, what is your go too drawing materials and have you switched it up recently? I highly reccomend it!

Ignore the spam bots dude, they show up everyonce in a while before an admin whacks them away.

Nice Shinji! Did you construct this fure from imagination or did you look at a reference or trace? No shame in any choice, they all are valid ways to learn, it just affects the type of advice or critique I can give you.

Im going to take a guess that its a trace, feel free to correct me. In that case, the easiest thing I can suggest is to vary the line weight. Thicker lines appear closer to the viewer than thinner lines. If you decide to add details, make sure the lines on the head are more clear than parts closer to the floor.

Wow dude, you have such a great illustration style, Im so jealous with how well you draw clothing. I can tell these are mostly quick ish sketches and you managed a solid process for these pieces.



You have a really solid grasp of the Loomis method for drawing heads and faces, but I you need to practice putting a little more time in them. As poly said, warms ups are a god send for really loosening yourself up and getting most of a subject down on paper, but I think maybe its time you also started practicing some longer poses. Your concentrating on really nailing the eyes nose and mouth on your faces that I don't think you rememer to take the time with the hair and shading.

A great way to use this website is to upload one type of work at a time too. You posted a lot of different types of studies and its harder for us to give you actionable advice when there are so many things to analyze and work on. I focused on the portraits, but maybe you wanted more input on the figures or gesture drawings. Or maybe you might get overwhelmed by the amount of critique you receive and don't know where to work on first.



BTW your lighting was fine! Picture Orientation needed a little work though :)