Forum posts by Gibberibberish

Those 30 second sketches are impressively detailed, but you may want to focus less on detail and more on capturing the whole pose, however simplified you have to make it. Somebody told me early on that it's important to include the feet and hands and that proved surprisingly helpful to my figure drawings overall.

• Gibberibberish edited this post on November 5, 2019 6:41pm.

Looks good to me. Proportions are pretty close it seems, poses are still fairly fluid despite being a little more rendered, and it looks like you already have some understanding of wedging (I think that's what the technique is called?) so overall I'd say you're starting out pretty strong. Honestly can't think of much to criticize.

• Gibberibberish edited this post on October 1, 2019 7:44am.

I've been wanting to add more to this but there's been a lot of inconveniences keeping me from uploading my work. I have still been working on this regularly though and I've got a lot I'd like to post, too much really, so I've picked what I feel are some of the best pages. Unfortunately, these were photographed with a less-than-great camera and lighting situation, so some of them are a bit blurrier and more warped than they appear in person. Incidentally, if anyone has some tips on photgraphing one's work more accurately, I'm all ears.

Proportion set-up as warm-up

Exercises in maintaining proportion/perspective of rotated limbs

Weight distribution with a simplified skeleton

10 minute figure drawings from reference

I've been working from Andrew Loomis's Figure Drawing For All It's Worth pretty religiously for past few months and it's been doing pretty well for me, but obviously you need to spend a lot of time applying the lessons to proper reference before you can start to effectively create from imagination. You'll often hear artists talk about "building your visual library" because after all, if you don't know how something looks in real life, it's gonna be hard to render it convincingly. I shared some of my notes here:

https://line-of-action.com/forums/topic/applying-loomiss-lessons

• Gibberibberish edited this post on September 25, 2019 5:44pm.
• Gibberibberish edited this post on September 25, 2019 5:48pm. Reason: typos and general clarity

Unless I'm missing something, this seems to only be one drawing? If so then my first suggestion is to draw more. It's easier to help if there's more work to look at.

Drawing the same pose at different speeds seems like a really good idea (one I should probably implement) though one thing I noticed is that you seem to be starting with the longest time and doing it progressively quicker (I'm just guessing based on it going left-to-right). I'm wondering if it might also be useful to tackle it from the other direction, so that you're building up to the longer drawing rather than breaking it down?

These look pretty good to me, only thing I might suggest is that you push the exaggeration a bit more in some of the poses. In a quick gesture drawing animation is more important than accuracy.

well thanks very much. I have been doing plenty of my own created poses as well, mostly for the perspective problems. I'd take a picture but my tablet camera is really inconvenient to use.

I've also been studying from some Greek/Roman statues (or replicas of such.) I find that they're easier to work with as the forms are a little exaggerated and simplified. (sorry for resolution)

I've had a stack of books by Andrew Loomis for quite a while that I've really been neglecting. I guess I just found that they were a little too demanding to follow. Starting this week though, I've committed to getting through "Figure Drawing For All It's Worth" by going from page to page, front to back, copying every diagram and coming up with exercises to apply the information. Just trying to be as thorough as possible so I don't wind up lost.

So far I've only made it to page 32 but I feel I've improved a lot already. Any feedback that could help me to improve further - maybe see problems I'd missed - would be appreciated. A couple of the images may look skewed simply due to the angle they were photographed at.

I begin each session with a quick set up of the proportions, which I then try to recreate in 3D.

Here's the same idea but executed more meticulously.

Trying to turn the forms in perspective.

Applying the proportions to reference, then trying to imagine the subject from a different angle.

In regards to proportions, have you checked out "Figure Drawing For All It's Worth" by Andrew Loomis? It's available as a free PDF and it's been doing alright by me. It's covers a lot of different topics but proportion is the first.

• Gibberibberish edited this post on June 13, 2019 9:55pm.

Maybe you could describe in more detail what you've been doing to practice? How long is a gesture drawing session for you? How frequent? Are you doing an hour of two minute gestures a day for example?

Some 2 minute gestures

oh well I think the reason is pretty simple then, beards are just easier to draw quickly - I can just kind of scribble them out - whereas I have to slow down and actually consider the fingers more carefully

I've still got a lot to learn myself so take this with a grain of salt, but I feel like you're doing a bit too much construction in these. Too many balls and cylinders. You're also going back over your lines a lot. Gesture is more about finding the rhythm or "flow" of the pose. Try lowering the time-per-pose down to 1 minute to help you loosen up and more quickly identify the important lines.

I've always tended to rely pretty heavily on some form of understructure in my art, but lately I've been trying to break away from that for a few reasons. I often feel like my work is very stiff, and that I'm not drawing as efficiently as I could, sometimes requirking well over an hour of tweaks and revisions just to construct a simple pose.

I feel like pushing myself to draw in a less constructionist way will help alleviate some of these issues, as well as forcing me to improve my eye for spacial relationships and shape design. A lot of my favorite art lately is drawn like this, and to me it just feels a lot more elegant and expressive. Ultimately I'd like to get into animation and comics and so being able to work quickly express complex forms with simple, effective lines is important to me.

My questions are A) does anyone know some good ways to practice this, beyond just what's offered here, and B) am I jumping the gun? Should I spend more time mastering the constructionist method before I start trying to simplify?