Forum posts by Finn

Happy new year, guys! Anybody made any art resolutions for 2013? Welp, this turned into a wall of text, feel free to just skip to your name...!

@El Bow: Thanks! Keep up the impressive work!

@illographer: Your portraits have already shown massive improvement, so if you're this good at 15, can't wait to see what you're producing further along in the project! And thanks for the critique, I'll definitely keep your suggestions in mind for future drawings.

@Mikoko: It's never too late to try again :) Good luck this time around!

@Casidy478: First up, "What do you want to draw?" Interest goes a long way towards motivating yourself through the practise required to improve. El Bow’s list will start you off very well. If you have time, read over Vyse’s post in this thread; it’s long, but their advice is solid, especially if you start to feel a bit overwhelmed by it all :)

@AdrienneRose: You can always mix ‘n’ match if you can’t decide on one single goal i.e. mine started as ‘learn to draw gestures’, evolved to ‘learn to draw humans’ and comes with a side order of ‘draw hands and feet’. Go on, join the madness!

@fbtmoj: Welcome to the project, Joe! You’ve got some nice dark values in the first sketch you posted, but it might be worth adding some midtones to balance out the stark shadows and highlights; by mastering shading, you can move away from relying on lines to describe form and let the shading do it instead.

The two portraits you posted are good, you show a pretty solid awareness of the facial features and proportions, but the alignments (portrait #2) are something off. Try holding your sketches up to a mirror for a quick way to spot any mistakes before adding details and shading. Portrait #3 is more even and you’ve made some nice bold choices with your colours. It’s great to see some pastel work here, keep it up!

To gain spontaneity in your drawings, try combining gesture studies with Michael Hampton’s “Figure Drawing: Design and Invention” – I found his chapters on gestures really helped me to loosen up my own drawings.

As for accepting your less than stellar works, the 100 project seems to help with that, because you move pretty quickly onto the next drawings and let the previous ones be. Good luck!

Welcome to the project, illographer and Lucian!

Carved out some time for myself and sat down to do some drawing. I tried not to get rust on the paper ;) Someone told me that I usually start the hips too low on my drawings, any thoughts?

Sketch 21-23   HB pencil on paper, untimed

Sketch 24-25   HB pencil on paper, untimed again.

Hey aelankaelyn,

First and foremost, what do you want to draw? Without knowing what your aims are, it’s hard to know what advice to point you towards. ‘Anything’ is a little broad ;)

As the previous replies have probably shown you, there are as many methods for drawing as there are artists. The one constant is ‘practise, practise, practise. Then practise some more.’ Vyse’s post is fantastic, and take the warning to heart: at first, you will suck. Everyone does. You just have to be determined and work through it :)

illographer’s suggestion to read “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” by Betty Edwards is an excellent idea. There’s a lot of psychology discussion, but it’s a great primer for learning how to draw, rather than drawing something specific.

If you want some suggestions on what to start off with, keep reading. Otherwise, feel free to skip the rest of this post, and good luck with your drawing!
 

 
2D Shapes

To start out, help to train your eye and hand by drawing straight lines, curved lines, circles and squares freehand—without using rulers or compasses. Keep drawing them until you can draw these shapes accurately without any guides or tools. These shapes serve as the building blocks for most ‘how to draw’ guides, even the ones on this website, like this gesture tutorial on breaking the human form down into lines and basic shapes.

3D shapes

Once you get the hang of drawing 2D shapes, start turning your circles and squares into cylinders and cubes; this is the basic beginnings of perspective. Mix in some shading and you’re starting to render.

Shading

Shading is pretty simple and just requires a sharp pencil to start off; draw with it, and notice how the lines change as the lead grows blunt. Sharp pencils are excellent for thin, precise lines but terrible for laying down large areas of shading. I find a flattened edge works best for large areas of shading, working in diagonal lines or close loops to put down smooth areas (to avoid the scratchy criss-cross lines and marks that show where one stroke ended and the next started). Less pressure gives a thinner, lighter line; more pressure gives a thicker, darker line. Start off with the lightest greys, and build them up with gradually darker and darker greys (also refererred to as ‘working from lightest tones to darkest’) and put in your darkest grey or black shadows last.

Direct Observation/Still Life

The easiest way to understand shading is to study from direct observation, which I haven’t seen mentioned yet. Choose an object and try to draw it just as you see it. Most people start out with fruit or flowers since they’re simple shapes and don’t usually involve too many reflections!

Draw your object from a variety of different angles and notice how the shapes change depending on the viewing angle. Use a lamp in different positions to light your object and observe how the shadows and highlights change, depending on whether the object is lit from above, or from the sides, or from behind. This helps practise different light sources.

Blahblahblah

If you have the chance to draw people directly, through a model, joining a  life-drawing class, or just having friends that don’t mind, DO IT. Photographs are useful references, but nothing beats being able to draw something from life.

Some people can find direct observation quite tedious, so listen to your favourite music and stick with it :) The more you practise your drawing, the faster you’ll progress. Play around and explore and see what you like.

If I can help clarify anything, just post here and I’ll try to explain in more detail, or find more information for you. And anyone who read that whole thing can help themselves to a cookie!

Of course it's hard to do. Everybody I know has run into this hurdle at some point, and most of them gave up and always lament to me that they can't draw at all. Those that didn't give up are still drawing today.

"I imagine all kinds of interesting things or people that I want to draw but it never makes it to the paper intact." I think this is pretty common for most people. Some people like to write the idea down and come back to it later, once they feel skilled enough to tackle it; others prefer to give it their best shot and rework it later once their skills have improved. One pretty popular practise on DeviantArt (long before the Draw This Again contest) has been to take an old picture and render it again, to compare changes in style and technique.

Personally I'm in the 'write it down for later' camp, because there are some characters I want to draw, but I know that I'm nowhere near ready. Like you said, I don't know enough about drawing people and faces to render them properly and what I see in my mind won't make it to the page. So I keep practising people, because each sketch (for better or worse) brings me one step closer to being able to draw these characters. I haven't shared all of my sketches, because some of them aren't even recognisable as human. I keep them in my sketchbook for myself to review later.

I'm not trying to be patronising, because I get frustrated too. When that happens, I step away from my studies to something familiar, something that I feel I can draw easily and enjoy; for me, that's drawing horses. Or if I'm having a terrible day, I just doodle stick figures or mess around with a different medium; sometimes I end up with a picture, and sometimes I just end up with a colourful mess. Those times, 'good', 'correct' and 'accurate' don't even exist in my mind. The only aim is to do something, regardless of whether it's good, bad, ugly or something else.

So good luck trucking through the frustration, because it's a pain and it can kill the fun of drawing, but when you look back on your drawings, you may be surprised at what you see.

Welcome to the project, Dominique, robbjosf and reverandjames! It's great to see new people joining in with the fun. Can't wait to see any drawings that you guys choose to share with the rest of us :)

Haven't really had a chance to draw since the last picture I posted a month ago; a family member's been very ill in hospital, so drawing's ended up on the backburner. Stayed up late tonight and scribbled out a few gestures, because I can honestly say I've missed holding a pencil in my hand. I'm pleased with how they came out, since it feels like I might have actually learned something after all...

Gestures

Will go through the thread and comment on everybody's latest works, after I get sleep. Looks like there's plenty for me to look at, well done guys!

Hey chase! I think I know where you're coming from, I've ended up taking a hiatus from drawing and I was having trouble getting back into the habit of drawing every day. It was easier to spend an hour looking for an eraser rather than sitting down and drawing for 10/20/set amount of minutes.

In the end, I sat myself down and just drew. One line on a blank page. That was as much as I felt like drawing. The next day, I managed two lines. The next day, a quick gesture sketch. By that point, I'd remembered that I enjoyed drawing, and I *wanted* to draw, and so it wasn't a chore to say "I'm going to draw *what I like* for as long as I like now."

One thing struck me about your last comment. "They are not really that good" seems out of place. Please don't judge yourself against anyone else. Judge your work against yourself. Do *you* think you're improving? If yes, great! If not, what can you do to fix that feeling?

Keep up the good work!

1/5th of the way through my 100 sketches now.

#20

Drawings from last night. The proportions are far from perfect (particularly #17 and #18) but now that I've learned to recognise the mistakes, I can start working to fix them.

#17

#18-19

Wow, you guys have made so much progress! Even going back 1 or 2 pages in the thread shows a real improvement in everyone’s pictures, keep up the good work :) No new drawings from me, I’ve been wiped out with a cold for the past week, but everyone’s posts have inspired me to break out the sketchbook again

@ El Bow: ah well, feel free to ignore my suggestion then ;)

@ A_A: congratulations on finishing 100 gesture sketches! You really are an inspiration to the rest of us, and I hope you’re proud of all you’ve accomplished, because it’s fantastic!

@ sylvester: I love all the pictures you post; you manage to cover such a wide range of different subjects and styles. And your dedication is frankly impressive

@ Kim: I like the way you draw their eyes. Good luck with the noses..!

Thanks, El Bow! Really like your coloured environments, sylvester_hansen, especially the frozen tundra picture.

El Bow, would putting your aims on a post-it near your workspace help too? Mine are written on a post-it stuck beside my monitor, so I can always see what I'm aiming to do.

Sketches:

13-14

15-16

Thanks for the help, Kim and Vyse! Photobucket kept claiming that it couldn't find the image files, despite letting me browse them in my album. So, tumblr links it is.

If anyone has any thoughts, suggestions or critiques, please share them :)

1-3,   ~2-5 mins each

4-6,   ~2 mins each

7-8,   ~8 mins each

9-10,  ~10 mins (#9) and ~5 mins (#10)

11,      ~8 mins

12,      no idea, I got a bit lost in the drawing.

Please forgive the double post. I was trying to link to photobucket images, but I can't post any.

Having taken a look through the other sketches in this thread, I'm really impressed with the amount of talent on display here. Can't wait to see how all of us improve over the course of this project :)

Hello everybody!

I've been using the reference tools for the past few days, but I thought posting on here might encourage me to actually crack on with the 100 sketches. My aim is learn to draw humans more accurately and to familiarise myself with general proportions and anatomy.

Aim 1: Become comfortable drawing men and women in a variety of poses

Aim 2: Actually learn how to draw gesture drawings

Aim 3: Learn to draw hands and feet

Aim 4: Learn how to draw faces with a variety of expressions

Aims 3 and 4 may be grounds for further '100 sketches' projects rather than acting as the focus for this one. Currently I'm trying to get in the habit of drawing every single day. Will post up some pictures as soon as I figure out how to do that!