started learning about a month ago, looking for critique

Hi, I started using this website a little under a month ago. I'm linking quite a lot of drawings, all are from the last 7-10 days, very grateful in advance to anyone who would take their time to look through them for whatever advice you could give.

note: I've only recently switched to drawing from my shoulder and using the overhand grip for the pencil, so that's an additional source of messiness for me right now

https://imgur.com/a/4JbQeVG

The questions I personally have:

1) what should my goals be for the 30 second poses?

2) i've been watching/reading a lot and feel like i need direction. Any one specific aspect I should be focusing on at this point? What i mean is, i see that a decent understanding of anatomy and perspective or just being able to make cleaner lines are going to be extremely long-term goals, so is there something I would see the most improvement from in the shortest amount of time or something in the meantime?

3) how do i include measuring into my drawing process? with 5-10 minute poses i already often overfocus on some one part, correcting it over and over, ending up with no time for the rest of the pose, and i feel like if i start trying to check proportions on top of that i will not be able to draw anything at all. sometimes i'll try to at least find the midpoint but most often i don't bother to do even that. how are my proportions in general?

4) any resources you would recommend for learning about: 1. tone/shading, 2. drawing clothes?

• Vermiform edited this post on July 27, 2024 1:19am.
• Vermiform edited this post on July 27, 2024 2:57am.

Hi Vermiform,

here are my thoughts on your questions:

1) Capture the essence of the pose with beautiful, flowing lines, going from big to small. You could try to incorporate more lines that go beyond just drawing the limbs, like doing one big swoop down the torso and through the leg etc. The bigger the better. Also, don't focus on finished drawings.

2) This question is kind of hard to answer as it depends on two things: Where do you wanna go? How much time are you willing/able to invest consistently?

A very good starting point is this curriculum for the self-taught artist based on free or very affordable online sources as learning material, that gives you an insight on the skills needed to become a well-rounded illustrator:

https://www.reddit.com/r/learnart/comments/dapk62/from_the_guy_who_made_the_most_comprehensive_list/

Mentioned in this list a couple of times is the website drawabox.com. Going through its basic courses is a must, that I would recommend to any beginning artist. It did wonders for me.

Because you mentioned it: imo pretty much everything in drawing will be an 'extremely long-term goal' if you focus too much on the results. Be kind to yourself. Consistency is key. Drawing five minutes every day is much better than doing 5 hours once a week.

3) From what should be expected from the timed drawings that you did your proportions actually look really good. Getting lost in the details too early is probably one of the biggest challenges of figure drawing. Try to establish a routine of doing the big masses (skull, ribcage, hips) and/or gesture lines first and check those for proportions before moving into more detail. Also do not try to aim for finished drawings with these quick poses. The goal is flow, as well as capturing the 'essence' of a pose. Exaggeration often works better than exact proportions.

4) A great overview on Light/values is this Marco Bucci video:

And Marco's take on drapery:

Hope this helps. Feel free to ask if anything is unclear. Always happy to talk shop :)

Happy Drawing!

I am not the truthinator in regards to drawing, I can just give you the answers, that I found for myself over time.

The 30 seconds (and the 1 minute): My aim is to try to use the 30 seconds exactly the same way, as I would use them, if I tried to start a 25 minutes+ drawing. Same speed, same observations, same questions, same lines. At the moment, I do try to stick to gesture first, generally starting with a simple form for the head, and a line from neck to hips. Next I try to find shortcuts for the hips, ribcage, and shoulder. Which is strictly speaking no longer gesture, but already the start of structure.

I usually don't manage to finish even the first sketch in 30 seconds, finding even the first general idea of the pose takes me about 1 minute. But ending the 30 seconds in an "unfinished" state of mind helps me analyze my procedure during the first minute. The 5 minutes+ poses are then the proof of concept, whether the way I designed the underlying structure during the first minute holds true.

"At the moment" means, that I do experiment over time. I had times when I focused on gesture first, trying to find the vector of forces around which the figure stabilizes, when I focused on maniquinization first, where I applied a fixed set of simplified anatomical forms, on perspective first, when I focused on representing the masses of the body as 3-D boxes, even times, when I broke all the rules and started with beautiful details first. Each of those different approaches taught me to focus on another aspect of drawing.

The important idea for me isn't that I never change the order of lines, it is, that I try to stick to a plan while the class is ongoing, and only revise the order after the class ended, and before the class begins. This way I try to develop a methodical approach, that follows rules, from which I only have to deviate, when there is an obvious and unmistakable reason to deviate. Having such a method allows me to keep developing the same overarching idea from first lines to final rendering, and to still see it expressed confidently in the final result. But being able to stick to a method for one drawing isn't the same as never upgrading your method.

2) Looking at your drawings, you stay relatively close to the tutorial, which is a good starting point. But I think I do understand your need for directions. There is an inherent logic in starting the workflow with gesture first, then structure, then perspective, then anatomy, then shading, and the timed practices should help develop a distinction between those individual steps.

But, from a learning point of view this order has a huge problem: While gesture "only" uses a few "simple" lines, the concept behind those lines is actually quite abstract and hard to understand. Simple as they may be, they are supposed to carry a whole lot of information, and while you have no clue how all of this information is supposed to be processed later on, it's a lot of guess work. I remember my own first attempts, when I just drew a few lines that maybe looked like the ones someone else might have used, but then I just couldn't decode and use my own lines, and just drew something freehand on top of them.

For me, it only started to all come together once I started with manniquinization, i.e. using simplified forms that resembled actual body parts. In followed a Proko course, this one to be specific: https://www.proko.com/course/figure-drawing-fundamentals/overview and the time when it gets into manniquinization is around the lesson about the robo bean. Here is another very short clip, that introduces the whole set of useful forms:

&list=WL&index=99

Note, this isn't strictly spoken gesture drawing, it is structure. You can learn all this nice forms, and still draw figures with them, that look awkward and stiff and unbalanced. But, at least for me, even understanding what those gestural lines are even supposed to represent was impossible, before I had enough experience with the structure, that is supposed to follow from those gestural lines, to even understand what I was doing.

3) "Measuring" in figure drawing is pretty much a part of learning structure. You just get used to how big a head is usually in relation to a chest, and how far a chest is usually away from the hip.

The problem with getting sucked into details and forgetting all about the proportions and then ending up with drawing a visitor from outer space instead of a human form... congrats, that problem will stick with you for quite a while, and a lot of people struggle with it. I have been drawing daily for about 7 years now, and I still occassionally find my hopeful attempts at a masterpiece crumbled on the floor, because that nice pretty face I drew turns out to be two sizes too big for those elegant hips that I drew a few inches further down on the page. The remedy against this is all those "methodical" drawing stuff I mentioned above. The only thing stopping you effectively from, for example, getting lost in all those interesting bumps on that specific knee is developing a habit to always indicate the leg with a set number of simple lines, and to generally ignore all juicy bumps and flourishes until you finished all the simple lines for the entire body. The goal isn't to draw one nice picture, but to develop a habit, that let's you produce consistently good results every time.

4) Here is a very simple source for shading, that introduces basic concepts: https://gvaat.com/blog/learn-to-draw-value-and-form/

I wouldn't point this out as the ultimate art source, it just lists and explains the basic concepts of shading without trying to spam your computer with annoying cookies. Once you are ready to dedicate yourself to shading you could use this site to look up basic terms, or just google "how to shade an egg", which is usually the object everybody uses to explain the first simple rules.

The true problem with shading is the "when you are ready" part. Because you will only ever get good at shading when you have a good grasp of the 3-D forms that you actually want to portray on your page. That would be at least in the third step after gesture and structure, namely perspective, and if you really want to impress, probably even after the fourth step, anatomy, when you start to get familiar with the shape of the individual muscles in a human physiology.

Clothes, I don't have a specific source, because I never felt them to be so much of a problem. There are probably people who said wise and instructive words about how exactly different types of fabric fold, but in my experience so far I always managed to somehow wing it, with the main problem not so much being the fine details of every piece of clothing, but, as mentioned above, making sure, that I don't get lost in detail, before I solved the underlying structure.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on July 27, 2024 12:33pm.

Hi. Thank you for taking the time to respond. Seems like there's no way to reply to a post directly on here, or I just can't find it.

Mahatmabolika,

Thank you for linking that curriculum, good to see some kind of concrete path I could follow. I'm already watching Proko's youtube channel regularly and doing the drawabox exercises (just drawing my ellipses for now). What I had in mind with 2 was more along the lines of: are there specific practices I should be adopting apart from drawing regularly? are there common beginner mistakes that are relatively easy to catch and weed out?

As an example, switching to drawing from the shoulder outside of drawabox and changing my pencil grip has been very frustrating and I've sacrificed a lot in terms of precision for now. But I also felt the benefits of being able to make those longer marks I keep hearing about pretty much right away. Things I was seeing in Proko's gesture drawing videos suddenly started making a whole lot more sense. Looking back at my earlier drawings now, the difference is maybe not as night and day as I've been imagining, but some things feel a lot more natural now, and some of the poses I've been drawing I would have considered too hard to even attempt a couple of weeks ago with the approaches I had.

Aunt Herbert,

Yeah, I know that in a way I am kind of getting ahead of myself with the things I am asking about. The thing is, I'm already watching whatever stuff Proko has on youtube and I expect that robobean/mannequinization is actually exactly where I am going to hit a wall, because that's where I'll have to stop just scribbling around in hopes of hitting something, and actually define the forms I am drawing. While I hope that sticking with drawabox will eventually get me there, that's going to take a while.

So, since I already see a plateau ahead, I'm looking for ways to get more out of what I'm already capable of. Which is not much. I know e.g. that shading follows form, but right now just copying the shading from the photograph I'm working with helps me define the form in the first place, when my lines alone can't do the job. And, well, if by the end of a class here I am more or less happy with the longer pose I did, I usually want to develop it a bit more, and shading is one way of doing that, I guess. With clothes, I was just hoping to expand the range of subjects I can attempt somewhat.

I don't know, to be completely honest, I am just on the lookout for things that could help me not give up on drawing all over again once I inevitably hit a wall somewhere, that's it.

One more word about shading, what I am currently experimenting with. It's about the shadow edge, the terminator. The shadow often appears darkest at the very edge with the light parts. This can just be an effect of our eyes emphasizing local contrast, it is definitely enforced by the typical lighting set with two lighting sources. I found that drawing the shape of this shadow edge often gives the drawing a lot more information than determining the darker value of the shadow itself. It works a bit like a third outline, only one, that runs perpendicular to the normal silhouette of a pose, and thereby adds the third dimension.

About the fear of plateauing and hitting a wall... I wish I had a good solution to that. I am afraid, there isn't really one. Even interviews with really accomplished artists point towards the constant struggle with frustration just being a constant companion on the arts journey. You may convince other people, that you are good at art at some point, but you can't really ever truely convince yourself. And even if you temporarily succeed at that, that is the exact moment where your progress halts. I mean, even Norman Rockwell suffered from imposter syndrom.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on July 28, 2024 5:26am.

Hey Vermiform,

glad I could help.

What you are doing sounds solid to me. You even reported progress with being able to handle poses you couldn't a couple weeks ago so just keep going and keep posting your stuff for reviews.

Concerning your question: One beginner 'mistake' I wish I would have caught sooner, is failing to realize that the 'how' is just as important (if not more) than the 'what' – the process being what matters and not the result. Establishing a calm and focussed state of mind, as opposed to a frustrated ego that keeps criticizing everything in a demeaning way and constantly wishes to be somewhere else.

My biggest challenge was keeping constant evaluation and judgement of what I did in check. The feeling of having to draw for Instagram (every drawing has to be perfect) as opposed to drawing on sand and wiping everything away once you're done to start over. This made drawing and practicing a struggle for me, which led to it being very exhausting and me not being able to work for extended periods of time (which in turn led to even more frustration and so on and so forth).

Taking my drawing practice beyond judgement, making it a thing I just do (like brushing my teeth) made a world of difference for me. It even turned the whole imposter-syndrom or i'll-never-be-as-good-as-this-person-cause-I-suck thing into a positive driving force that motivates me as opposed to something that pulls me down. I am happy with where I am (which is much further than I could have imagined in my wildest dreams), but still have so far to go and very much look forward to this journey now.

Yeah, well, "get ready to produce hundreds of bad drawings and understand that this is a process" is what just about every piece of introductory material I have seen opens with. I get that, I don't think that you get good at this by magic or "naturally" or by thinking about drawing reeeally hard. It's just that over a decade since the thought "I wish I could draw" first occured to me, and then for years not knowing how one would even go about that sort of thing, and a number of abortive attempts to actually begin learning over the past say 5 or 6 years later, it's becoming increasingly hard to tell what I even supposedly want this for anyway.

For now I might still be able to make some progress and have new things to try, and for now this is still fun for its own sake, but I know that pretty soon I'll need to Actually Know Things before I can get any further, and getting to Actually Know Things takes Time, and quite a lot of it too. So chances are I'll keep churning out misshapen humanoids for a couple more months and then go "ok, this is not going to happen, what was I thinking, why am I even doing this" once again. As I said I'm hoping that goals that are shorter term than "anatomy" or "250 boxes and then 250 cylinders and then 250 boxes combined with cylinders and so on, good luck" could keep me engaged but I'm not certain what they could/should be at my level.

Well, that short clip I showed above about mannequinization is an even shorter term goal then "anatomy". I shy away from using the word "anatomy', cause it brings people to buy books like "anatomy for artists" early on, and then to be overwhelmed.

For me, mannequinization was an important and markable step forward, and it gave me confidence and a feeling of progress for the time being. It also allowed me to better decipher what the purpose of practices more puristicly focused on "gesture" was, as it allowed me to decode those force vectors into actual bodily forms.

The clip above presents a full set of shortcuts, but it is exceedingly brief and short in its explanations. You can definietly find longer clips, with a more complete explanation of how to draw those individual shortcuts, and what they represent. You will also find minor variations between how different artists mannequinize the body. I like this one, because it makes a clear separation between shoulders and chest, which not all such systems do. I remember Love Life Drawing introducing and demonstrating a very similar set, but with way more explanation.

I don't think I got across the point I was trying to make. I wasn't trying to parrot 'drawing is hard and takes very long' for the millionth time. Or that you have to draw a lot to be good at drawing.

I'll try a metaphor. Say you wanna explore the world. You ask where to go first and people tell you 'I went here, and did that', 'I checked out this first and then went there'. So you pick a route and start out but you are driving a real shitty car, that breaks down three times a day. So you get frustrated, because you want to move along faster, see more things quicker. But instead of working on your car to make it more reliable, you blame the route you took 'I should have gone here first, I just did it the wrong way'. Or even worse you blame yourself for being lazy, untalented, stupid etc.

The car of course being your mental state, calmness, focus or whatever you want to call it. All I was trying to point is, that it occured to me way to late, that this is very much a trainable skill. Start small and build from there. Don't expect to run a marathon on your first day on the track, but understand that it is very much possible to pull off with time.

I am also not saying you should not plan a proper route, but I am trying to point out, that it is much less important than it seems to be, especially with such awesome study sources around every corner nowadays. What seems wasted at a time, will probably help you later and be a shortcut along the way.

Personal example: I got the full Proko anatomy course and worked at it for 6 months. I went through two thirds of it and then it just broke me. I couldn't see it anymore. It was way to detailed for my understanding of anatomy at the time. I knew all the muscles but not how they went together and moved on a more holistic level. It felt like a complete waste of time. Half a year later I went back and finished it. Still felt senseless somehow. I hadn't even noticed how clean my lines had gotten and how well I had learned to measure by eye from copying all his drawings and 3D models. On top of that, another year later, I realized I now finally understand and can properly study Bridgman (who was always my art parent when it comes to anatomy – just love his style) because I can make sense of his stuff that sometimes just looked like a scribbly mess before.

Again: don't overthink it. Pick a subject you enjoy and stick with it for a while.

I hope this didn't come across as condescending or anything. I have a strong opinion on this subject, because I have suffered from it much more than I would have liked to and it baffles me, that hardly anybody seems to mention it anywhere and instead everybody gets lost in details immediately. Just trying to help. :)

Hi, thank you, you don't sound condescending, no worries. Again I'm just looking for ways to not quit, and I think for that I need to at least occasionally be able to produce work that goes beyond stick figures (yeah, yeah, gesture is not stick figures etc), so that's why I want to at least get the basics of things that are supposed to go on top of the fundamentals.

By the way, I watched both of the videos you linked in your first reply and did a study in my spare time at work today. For a first attempt I think it could have gone a lot worse. And there's actually gesture and the bean and all that stuff under all the other stuff, so that's something at least. https://imgur.com/a/d8wcN7C

Again, thank you, both of you are being very patient and helpful.

• Vermiform edited this post on July 29, 2024 1:13pm.

Hi. Here are my thoughts about your questions.

1. One possible goal for your 30 second and 1 minute poses is to clearly show a stick figure doing something recognizable. I really like the person lying down in the upper right corner of page 2, and the boxing person on the lower left of page 4. Those communicate clearly to me, in just a few lines. (And the "10,000 bad drawings" advice doesn't mean that they'll all be bad. Just that your percentage of really good drawings will be lower when you're starting out, and that's ok. But you are already doing some good drawings here.)

2. In your longer poses, you might want to focus on a common beginner problem. Many people look at something that's almost vertical or almost horizontal, and then draw it as exactly vertical or horizontal. A slight angle or slight curvature looks more natural on drawings of people than straight vertical lines. I don't notice this tendency in your quicker poses, so it might be that the reference pictures truly were that vertical, so disregard this if it doesn't seem helpful.

3. As for measuring, I think that you won't have time to measure much in a 5 or 10 minute pose of the whole body. Perhaps if you want to work on measuring, you could make some drawings of just one part, like just a pair of legs for example. You could use your first minute to make a quick drawing of the legs, very lightly. Then stop and look at the angles and lengths of the legs, and how wide they are at thighs, knees, and ankles. Make adjustments to your quick drawing, if needed. After that you can draw with stronger lines and add more details like the shapes of the feet or the curves of the muscles. And if you need more time, that's ok. A 20 or 30 minute pose might be helpful if you're trying to get accurate measurements on the whole body. With enough practice, you'll notice the angles and widths of parts quickly without really thinking about it, and you'll draw faster. (Also some people don't like the technique of putting down a light quick drawing, changing it with measuring, and finishing with a final darker drawing. It works for me, but you can try various techniques to see what works best for you. And it's ok to try one technique while learning, and then outgrow it as you make progress.)

4. I learned to draw clothing by draping laundry over a chair, with a bright light on one side, and drawing the shadows of the folds and creases onto the page. So I don't have a good answer for finding the best tutorials about clothing and shading.

I hope some of my advice will be helpful to you, and please ignore anything that seems wrong for your own working methods. Good luck!

After posting I realized that I called them stick figures too. Oops.

Hi, Quiet Katt, thank you for the feedback

1. I have decided to try to stop trying to do the whole figure in the shorter drawings and just try and get the torso as a bean in 30s and bean + gesture for the rest of the body if i still have time in 1 min, hoping it'll make moving on to more detailed approaches to structure easier.

I have to ask, which drawings do you think are good and what in your opinion is good about them?

2. I'll try to keep that in mind, thank you, though I honestly can't see it. Which ones did you mean?

3. Yeah, I get now that in 5-10 minutes drawings measurement shouldn't be a priority. I'll try doing some longer studies where I have a clear goal in mind. I feel that I'm not getting that much out of simply doing 30 minute classes the same way over and over at this point.

4. Drapery is just way too confusing for me. I tried not thinking about it and just draw what I see a couple of times but got lost in the details very quickly, and since I wasn't able to tell what I was looking at exactly, I couldn't even begin to simplify it. The video above does a pretty good job at breaking it down into identifiable patterns and explaining what produces them, I think.

I looked through your drawings again, and discovered that I hadn't seen all of them. The problem with making lines too vertical was only in a few of the early ones. Counting down from the top of the pages on imgur linked in your first post - page 8 has a person reaching upward, and the line from armpit to leg on the left side seems too straight to me. On the next page, the legs of the sitting person seem too vertical, and on the next page the standing pose seems too straight. I could be wrong, however, and I don't notice this in any of your later drawings, so it's probably a problem that you've already overcome. Your recent drawing of a man with a gun is well-proportioned and all the angles look good to me, so you can disregard my advice about straightening things up. (And if my meaning still isn't clear, I have an example in my profile sketchbook of the seated pose, and how it would look with less vertical lines. Your drawing is better than my quick sketch, but it shows what I mean. I tried to link it to this post but I'm failing to link it correctly.)

As for the 30 second or 1 minute poses, my favorites are on the 2nd page, upper right - a person lying down, and in the lower right of that page, a person standing with crossed legs, touching their head. Also, the 4th page in the lower left, the person with circles that might be boxing gloves or might be hands.

Other people might have other favorites, and I'm not an expert artist myself. But I like those drawings because the poses are clear, the lines are simple and direct - not scribbly or wobbly or changed too much, the poses have an accurate sense of weight or balance (so the people don't look like they'll soon fall or float away), and they have just enough information without distracting extra details.

(And I apologize if it's frustrating to hear that I like something you spent 30 seconds on even better than I like something you spent 30 minutes on. That bothered me when I was starting out, but I think that eventually your best long poses will surpass your best short ones.)

I hope some of this is helpful, and good luck to you.