30 minute figure session, critique please?

Nice job on showing off your underthinking of your "forces" of your figures, but they all seem too stilted to me, in terms of expression and exaggeration. Why don't you please free up your range of flow and fluidity of the lines with our interactive drawing tutorial?

The explanation behind this drawing is because of two reasons:

a) To get the basic fundamentals of visual communication in drawing.

b) To help you instinctively draw tight but loose at the same time regardless of time limits.

For most info, please look into the Sarah Simblet book, Anatomy for the Artist. These have plenty of images for you to practice your force drawing skills in your bones and muscles, if you want and can eliminate the superfluous details. Good luck to you and your process and progress.

Hello Polyvios Animations,

Thank you for the feedback, but like I've already said to you on the forum the other day, I've already practiced a bunch of times with the drawing tutorial of this site and also have watched a ton of videos about gesture already.

Seems like I'm back to square one, thank you anyways.

Meiji

Quick disclaimer! I am not familiar with the force method, so it is possible that my critique will be off target. I apologize in advance. Also, I appreciate you posting the reference image along with the drawing; that helps alot with critiques!

On the first ten minute drawing, the upper body has a wonderful balance between accuracy and exagerated gesture, but the lower half of the body looks severely underdeveloped, specifically the legs. I don't think adding more details is the fix, but maybe incorporating some information that will help the pose feel grounded. Maybe the knee can be incorporated to give a sense of form and additional direction to the leg? The biggest thing I noticed with that sketch is that the hips are twisted away from the figure in your drawing but I don't see that in the reference photo. The issue is that the twist would reveal more and less muscles that have to be defined through imagination rather than the photo.

On the second 10 minute study, I love the gesture but it is at the expense of the anatomy. I see this mainly in the legs, breasts, and the hips. The leading leg is too long at the ankle, the breast furthest from our view has an inacurate contour leading up to the neck (it also makes the chest feel squished and eliminates some awesome contours that can give the drawing some extra flow and rhythm), and the hips have more mass leading to a disproportionate feeling, especially with the extra pinch at the waist.

I'm not sure what your method and process is, but I find that I have similar issues with proportion when I am focusing on individual parts of the body and not viewing them as a whole. I fix this by jumping from different parts of the body. Since you are trying to keep the exagerated gesture, I think the challenge will be looking for proportion but being careful not to copy the drawing at the expense of the gesture. Also! I really like your 5 minute sketches in the first image. The extra contours with the lady pushing help to tell a solid story in your drawing. I also like the fact that you added some facial details in the other one. It makes me wonder what shes looking at.

I hope this helps you and I look forward to seeing more of your work on this site

:)