I have no idea on how to learn how to break subjects down into simpler shapes and how to make my shapes more interesting and dynamic.

I know, quite a long title but i clearely need your help!

I cannot find a place where I can learn any of this stuff, it's not straight up perspective lines i have to study since i know how they work, I also did the 250 boxes challenge and it revealed me it doesn't help me at all understand the 3rd dimension in drawing. I got more out of doing cross contour of pokemon than from this one course that I must reveal someone here that finished it was not really satisfied.

I found one from proko but besides being a proko course it is also incredibly pricy, so please no to any of that.

Thanks and good work :).

Anatomy - Karina Drawfee / Anatomy - The Sequel - Karina Drawfee

:) Hello my friend,

These two particular YouTube videos from Karina from Drawfee helped me IMMENSELY. I had such trouble breaking down general shapes. BUT I found her lesson on anatomy helped me break down organic shapes a lot better. Understanding the shapes in bodies.

I like to watch some of the Patreon Streams. They are Paid Streams from Patreon- but they are released to YouTube later for free!!

My Anatomy Drawings - Following Along :)

I watched both of the live sessions, and I have to ask: what better insight those videos gave you? The instructor started with gesture drawing, and then BAM! Advanced anatomy. I admit it gave me a hard time, maybe there was something wrong with the way I experienced it. I think there should be an intermediate step between the stickman phase and the anatomical fidelity phase.

One particular issue was that when deconstructing a reference I did not find out where a body part starts and where it ends.

Despite all, thanks again for your rensponse.

Idon'tknow, I think your problem at this point isn't, that you know too little about drawing theory or that you have to watch yet another instruction video. The problem is, that you misunderstand what theory can do for you, and that you are stuck to it like to holy scripture.

I have seen you post quite a lot over time, including the results of entire sessions. I remember one session you posted. Most of your results where extremely simplified, and frankly a bit boring as a result, but there were a few, where you seemed to have slipped up, and veered away from sticking extremely close to any instructions, and those were a league above the rest in quality, but with handwritten comments almost excusing yourself for their existence.

You try to read drawing theory like an algorithm, just a long and complicated series of simple commands, that you have to learn by heart and then faithfully execute to reproduce the intended outcome. That is not how it works.

Drawing theory is just there to point you towards relationships between lines and forms and what-have you, that you might otherwise miss. The repeated practices you do are not a mystical ritual, that will some times in the future allow you to press a button, raise a numerical stat inside you, and thereby grant you access to the follow-up set of instruction for advanced characters. The reason you repeat that stuff so often is, to make it come automatically while drawing, without having to think about it.

Here is one instruction from me to you, but I am afraid, given what I have seen so far about your relationship to yourself, you might find it hard, almost impossible to follow. Chose one subject that you really find beautiful, and just try to draw it as good as you can. DON'T try to apply anything you learned or read or seen, don't put yourself under pressure of timing or how to "correctly" simplify stuff or anything, just be confident and focus on the drawing itself. If you become unsure, whether you have done something right or wrong, don't fret about redoing it or anything, just accept it for the time being as what it is and continue developing the drawing from there on. If you feel like your drawing doesn't look close enough to your initial idea, don't fret about it, accept your preliminary results and continue working from them as best as you can, until you feel the piece is finished.

The amount of time you have spent consuming theory, analyzing theory, doing repetitive practice to hone your skills according to theory, it has already taken root and shows results. Stop panicking about whether you draw correctly or wrong, just draw, and your experience will show anyways, you don't have to constantly monitor yourself, to make sure you keep injecting enough of it into your process, or to repeatedly judge every mark you have put on paper to prevent yourself from heretically deviating from orthodoxy.-

A follow up suggestion, to make it ultimately easier for you to execute that first instruction. From your forum posts so far, I am almost certain, that you picked up a really bad habit: once you have finished a piece or a lesson, you most likely look at it, judge your result, search all the possible flaws and spiral into desperation about how you failed yet again to improve even the slightest bit.

You should conciously practice to break that habit. When you have finished a piece or a lesson, make an effort to find everything that went right, every idea you started with, that now shows in the result, every aspect of the drawing, that you do like, everything you managed to do better than in previous attempts.

Be fair to yourself and your circumstances, if you otherwise had a horrible day, you can't be surprised, that you didn't produce peek results, instead congratulate yourself to have found the strength to repeat practicing anyways.

Say that stuff out loud, or even better, write it down, to make sure it gets rooted in your memory. Do that every time you finish either a lengthy piece or a daily practice session, until it becomes routine.

If you find it hard to be kind to yourself and your own results, you can practice that by giving feedback to others. Look at their results, find anything you can possibly like or recommend about it, and tell them first, even if their skills are way less developed than yours. Don't focus on spotting flaws, or pointing out what went wrong, unless you see a simple and practical way, they could easily improve some aspect of their drawing. If you do, explain it kindly, after you are done mentioning everything that is already good in their attempt.

OK, let's make that a triple post then. @Idon'tknow. I told you before, that I find your questions always quite deep and worthy to consider. And the reason for that is, that your problems heavily resonate with me. I sometimes base parts of my answers on assumptions, which can in itself be considered quite transgressive and impolite, but I want to assure you, I am not attempting to pathologize you, and I am not trying to psychoanalyse you through the screen. Things is, I feel a lot of resonance within myself to the worries and problems you express, and I think that they are indeed tied to the general process of producing art, and likely shared to some extent by all artists. Just, you seem to to experience these specific problems more pronounced than other people, which gives you the courage to repeatedly raise them to debate in public.

I have yet another suggestion for what you could try to overcome the problem, this time tied a lot closer to the specific topic, of "how to break subjects down into simpler shapes and how to make my shapes more interesting and dynamic".

One more assumption, I am sorry, but, since you spend a lot of time and effort into becoming a better artist, it seems quite safe to assume that you know the experience of just looking at something, and becoming aware, that it is beautiful. This basic experience is the key to understanding how to assess and apply all that theory. And, becoming aware that something looks beautiful is, like a lot of other stuff you practised, basically a trainable skill. So, the suggestion, start a drawing session with references equaly timed at 5 minutes or so. Don't touch a pen, just look at a reference and try to decide IF you find it beautiful and WHAT makes it beautiful. When you have come to a conclusion, use the forward button to skip to the next reference.

If you spend more time looking at things, and contemplating, THAT they are beautiful, in a practicing artist like yourself, this will eventually trigger the curiosity to understand, WHY they appear beautiful to you, and how you could best express that beauty to other people. Now, beauty can be expressed in words, but unless you are a poet, your words will likely be to bland and boring to truely show that beauty to other people. As an artist, the natural instinct is to take a pen and piece of paper, and draw that beauty.
To discover, that idea to be harder than it appears at first thought. And go look for instructions. But frankly telling someone how to draw is like telling someone how to drive a bike: hard to put into words, even for the best teachers.
The techniques that can be taught all start from the premise, that the artist already sees something beautiful and wants to share it. Gesture, composition, the study of perspective and of shapes, these are all just attempts to describe beauty in a way that is practically useful. If you worry so much about understanding this concepts, that you lose sight of your own intuition of beauty, they become impossible to understand and apply correctly.

Finding the simplest interesting shape isn't a problem of geometry, it's first of all a problem of self observation, phenomenology, if you want. If you look at something, while experiencing beauty, which shapes is your attention drawn to? Teachers, tutorials and instructions can give general guidelines what attributes such shapes can generally have, either universally, or within our shared cultural tradition, like symmetry, clear asymmetry, simplicity, etc.... but if you try to interprete such an instruction without keeping in mind, that it is just a suggestion for you how to express the beauty you experience, than you won't understand it. If your result looks less beautiful to you than before, than either you got something wrong, or the instruction is just wrong for you, and you should try another.

A final word about proko courses: you don't have to pay anything for any of his basic courses, and they are generally complete in conveying the idea. Indeed, if you pay for the premium course, you might be dissapointed, how little extra you get for that. It's basically like a "buy me a coffee" button or a patronage fee, which just gives a few extra perks to show gratitude, only that stan apparently isn't interested in administering 5 bucks at a time.
If you find something interesting, but are short on money, just do the basic course for free.

Not my question, but I'd like to thank you for this incredibly detailed response (trio) anyway.

Especially the instruction/advice to just stop and find the beauty. Really encouraging - thank you.

I second that. What a literally beautiful way to put it. Preach it, @Aunt! You made my day!

OK, to respond to popular demand, let's describe a practical example. Today nothing came up, so I don't have a scan to illustrate. For example: in principle I am doing a series of gesture study. A model comes up, I find her smile really intriguing, it captures my attention. In principle a facial expression isn't part of a gesture study, but it is what caught my eyes. I see, that the way she holds her head frames her expression in an interesting way, so I definitely want to show her head, neck and shoulders. Her hands seem also important. Her legs on the other side, yes, they are there, and she is a model, so they aren't ugly per se, but they don't do a lot for me that supports her smile, and I just don't extend the drawing beyond her waist and focus on just her head and upper toso instead.

Deciding not to include her hips and legs off course is already a massive simplification of the drawing, but it isn't deducted from general principle, but from following my own sense of beauty. Someone else, or even me on an other day, may have decided to only draw her feet, and it also would be a valid decision. The various technical drills we are practicing also introduce us to more things to spot, and to better understand what we are seeing.

Maybe the long curving line from her neck along her torso along the hip towards her knee might be something that catches my eyes on another day. The interesting way she twists her shoulders against her hips, etcetera, and the longer I spend on the drawing, the more I will try to include those details, too. In a 30 second sketch, I have to decide for one of the possibilities, and focus on that, and when I continue the drawing, that first impression generally should stay my guide, .... unless I realize during drawing, that a switch in focus would really enhance the result. But that is in practice the rare occassion, and I trained my habit to stick with the first impression long enough to generally trust my brush to find the right path over the paper on its own.

Just in case this helps anyone understand better what I want to say, this is my 30 minutes session from today: I think I found OK lines, but as I am currently between two shifts, have been distracted a lot, and barely managed to get in minimum practice, I did not expect top quality from me.

Maybe another illustration: this should be a link to my sketchbook for winter 2019/2020. By that time I barely knew anything about technique, I think I finished the major drawabox lessons with the homework. I watched a few youtube-videos and saw someone mention intersting shapes, and demonstrate how he copied an interesting detail from a photo of a roof. I found the words "interesting shape" intriguing, and wandered the streets trying to find some simple and interesting shapes to draw: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/eaPaBD

I think Aunt Herbert's advice is great, especially about focusing on what you consider beautiful, and not being so hard on yourself.

I'll just add that I think modeling forms in 3d can help you simplify 2d shapes that confuse you. It takes awhile, but if you can squish a kneaded rubber eraser or some playdough into a head or torso or whatever (or create a really low poly model in 3d software), and then draw your 3d model from the same angle as the photo, then you'll have a much better understanding of the form that you're trying to simplify.

Really, tanks to everyone that dedicated their time and energy helping me. I will hold onto these insights like they are part of me. Thank you and I hope you a thriving art journey