OK, first observation: the skill level you show with this sketches is rather inconsistent. It kinda ranges from, "OK, I'll start explaining from first baby steps" to, "Ah, no, that is actually decent" to "Wow, that one looks pro" (the skier made me think that).
Sometimes you nail it, sometimes you are a mile off with the proportions. So, you need to develop a functioning method to measure proportions. And I am not talking about holding a brush in front of you with a straightened arm and a goofy face, but something that consistently works, fast, and in any kind of environment you happen to be drawing in.
How about cheating? You don't actually measure, you learn some proportions by heart, by repeatedly drawing them a lot. That obviously only can work on stuff, that repeatedly actually HAS the same proportions, but luckily human faces and human bodies are generally similar enough to each other to just grind their proportions by heart.
First guy who came up with that cheat was famously Leonardo da Vinci, and he was really thorough with measuring a looot of proportions. Luckily for us, some time has passed since then, and generations after L. d. V. spent a lot of time and thought into how to economically memorize the important stuff.
For memorizing the proportions of the face and head, nowadays everybody cites a guy named Andrew Loomis, a professional illustrator who lived from 1892 to 1959. His main work was probably "Creative Illustration", but I think his most famous one is called "Fun with a Pencil". Like the name implies, it was basically a small side project to sell his knowledge about illustrations as entertainment project to hobbyists and families. It contains the famous Loomis head, a fun little way to learn how to draw human faces within 15 minutes. And it actually works. Draw a circle-ish thingy here, cut it off like that, draw another circle like so, et voila, this looks unmistakenly like a human face.
Good thing, that was long enough ago, so all copyrights have expired, and you can check the pdf of those books for yourself on the interwebs.
Now, a Loomis head isn't really a measuring device, and Loomis himself didn't use that method for his own professional work, a Loomis head is "an abstraction". It teaches idealized proportions of an idealized human head. It is purely a method to draw from imagination, and all that Loomis guaranteed was, that you would be able to draw "some" human head, not necessarily that specific one of the exact person that you want to draw a portrait of. But, if you keep drawing a dozen or so daily for a good time, you will develop a spidey sense for when the proportions in your own drawing start to leave the range of what is plausible on a human being.
Loomis-heads are probably the simplest abstraction for the human face, and if you image search for them, you will find a slew of very abstracted once, that literally look like robot heads. Those are the most useful to actually grind, and if you ever see a clip of a professional artist starting to draw a human head, there is at least a 66% (or so) chance, that the first few lines they put on paper will be exactly that.
There are other abstractions of the human face. Reilly (more about him later) adds additional lines and circles (rhythms, as he loves to call them) to indicate the muscles around the mouth and at the cheeks. Avaro came up with an abstraction of every possible plane on the human face, and you can buy full-sized Avaro heads, which are especially useful to reproduce the shadows a human head will have under variable lighting. George Bridgman, Steve Huston, and Michael Hampton have come up with abstractions, too, constructing the head from squares or from triangles...
You can invest time into each one of these people, and it will be time well spent. On the other side, you can find very honest statements from serious artists on youtube, that tell you, they feel like they spent too much time on that, and wish they had spent time otherwise. Learning at least one abstraction of the head will help you out, if you find yourself having a hard time to figure out, where exactly this or that feature of the face should go in your drawings.
Now that is the head, what about the human body? There is off course the method that this site is named after, "Line of Action", and if you do the tutorial here there will be a few short sentences about how to find the "line of action" first, then "the main masses" (which generally correspond with head, ribcage and hips". None of those snippets is wrong, I just feel like they are awfully short, which is probably a necessary consequence of webpage design. I personally learned a method, that is at least very similar from this course:
https://www.proko.com/course/figure-drawing-fundamentals/overview which takes a lot more time to explain the concepts. There is a premium version of the course, but I recommend doing the free version first, and deciding whether what you learned from it was worth it to pay the sum Stan Prokopenko wants for the premium. All the essential infos are in the free version, the premium version seems to be more of an elaborate buy-me-a-coffee button, that gives you a few extra videos of Stan applying his lessons to a specific model. I don't know the exact history of that method.
The essence I found in this method: If you understand how the ribcage, the shoulders, the hips and the head relate to each other, you can draw convincing bodies. If you mess up, everybody who never held a pencil in their life will be able to tell you: this looks wrong.
A second famous and I guess related method is by a guy named Reilly who has a whole system of rhythms, that teach you how to divide the body, and the face, and basically everything up. I think if you here the name "Watts atelier", they are basically the living descendants that carry on Reilly's tradition.
I'll end my rambling wall of text here, I hope there were some interesting tidbits within it.
Aunt Herbert
hace 8 meses.
Pastabrother
edited this post on March 26, 2024 2:55pm.
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Polyvios Animations
edited this post on March 28, 2024 8:42pm.
Reason: Fix link