Mensajes en el foro por Kim

On the other hand, now that I think about it, I've seen a number of artists jump straight into the stick figure stage while gesture drawing. To me this is a little crazy, but it definitely works for some!

On youtube there are even some boggling people who start at just drawing the fully formed human -- I am impressed by these videos, but also find them disheartening as they tend to rank highly when a student does a search for gesture drawing. I think it creates the wrong impression and sets a too-intimidating bar. I also wonder if those artists have not just trained themselves to see "outlines" very accurately, and wonder how solidly their foundations are rooted in underlying anatomy. What would happen if they had no model, for example? I really don't know.

To summarize my follow-up rant: Artists work very differently. You will probably need to experiment to see what works best for you!

My best advice is to work large, so you can fit a skeleton and eventual flesh inside/on top of the original gesture and still see the details.

For me and many artists I have observed, the method seems to be rapidly capturing the energy, direction and "gist" of the pose using the free-form gesture scribbles of our choosing, then at a slightly more sane pace, overlaying our chosen structural representation on top of it.

This helps to ensure the skeleton takes the pose and the energy, but still gives you the chance to put limbs back into sockets. It's like a second draft that takes into account real anatomy, without completely writing out the energy and expression that was captured in the first draft.

The third draft would then be changing that series of sticks and joints into a fully fleshed human, with the gesture and the skeleton slowly being erased but still informing the final, outer layer.

Holy cow, this is news to me. Amazing. I'm going to order one and see how it works.

Thanks so much for sharing these! I have used some of the above tools, and they're great.

Characterdesigns.com is actually one of the places that donated photos to our tools. I am especially fond of them.

Why ashamed of this one? It seems quite atmospheric to me.

And I like the tumblr idea, guys. Maybe I'll get in on that action too.

Hi Comissar,

I have moved your post to its own topic, so that you can get your own feedback without disrupting someone else's feedback topic. :)

Those are good tips! And perhaps this will help you with distinct? http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/distinct

Awesome, it looks like everyone is sticking fast to their original study commitments. I'm so proud of you guys! Keep them coming! :D

Thank you for saying so! :)

FYI, I moved your comment to the "shop talk" forum, since that's more for general talking then the critique board.

Hey Vyse (and everyone!) I'm sorry for my silence. I've had to work evenings and weekends for the last two weeks and I've been so exhausted, napping every minute I'm not working has been top of my mind. Makes drawing hard!

I know  I said this awhile back, but back then it fell through and this time it looks like it's going to work: I'm in the process of hiring office assistance, so hopefully I'll be back to a normal person schedule soon. I definitely haven't forgotten you guys or my drawing goals and I can't wait to get back!

And hi there, Robbjosf! It's a pleasure to have you joining us. We're definitely not going to laugh at you. I myself am pretty darn rusty, and no one has been anything but encouraging. Constructive criticism and practice is the name of the game for improving! Keep at it and welcome to the 100 project!

Any attempt moves you closer! Good job, Sylvester!

That sounds like a very reasonable goal, and definitely something that you could focus on in here. :)

I just discovered that you had posted this topic a second time with the exact same image and request for help, so I've merged the two posts.

This is very bad behavior. You have not bothered to thank or acknowledge any of the people who gave you excellent advice in the first topic before starting another asking for advice on the very same image. It's not kosher to repeat topics anyway, but it's especially bad form to do so without thanking the people who took the time to give you the advice that you asked for. Furthermore you have begged for responses after only two hours. This is a forum, not a chat room, and a small one at that. It would be bad form to whine if you hadn't received a response within 24 hours, much less 2. Participating in forums requires patience.

Finally, you have now burst into another thread dedicated to a specific exercise and begged for critique from me. No one person is obligated to give you critique, and it is explicitly against the rules to derail topics.

You have been warned. Please take care with your future conduct.

I may well try that too, Manns. Thanks for your feedback!

No toes stepping! I'm always happy to hear ideas, though I can't promise I'll use all of them. :)

It would be really nice to have the images centered and fit to screen. The lovecastle.org site does this and I really love it.

Definitely something in the works.

Move the Controls to the top, center of the image and add in the ability use the controls via keyboard. At least pause. If I’m interrupted I really don’t like wasting precious seconds by fumbling with the mouse to pause. This feature would be stellar. Forward, rewind, and stop are probably not as useful as keyboard commands, but you might want to code them while you’re in there.

I love the keyboard commands idea. I will have to take a look at doing that.

Give users the option to see the timer count down or leave it hidden. It could be dimmed so to not be too distracting. An option to this would be to play a ding just a couple seconds before a new pose. Maybe just a ding at the end of the timer then a 2-3 second pause to allow the user to flip a page or grab a new pencil (or reach up and pause).

Showing/hiding the timer is also in the works. :)

The ability to build your own class would be really nifty.

I have pondered this. It may happen. It would require a lot of new interfaces so it's not very high on my list of priorities for when I'm able to work on this tool.

Another feature that I think would be interesting are things like the ability to make a log of your usage of the site and comment on your drawings that day, like a journal. Some might want to do this in their sketchbooks, but I think it would encourage frequent use of the site.

Variations of this suggestion come up a lot... When I was making this tool, I was building a slideshow for my own use. It's since become a lot more and I'm more open to thinking of it as a complete bit of training software rather than a bare bones thing for my use, but when we get into this territory it becomes a whole different kind of ball game. We get into huge amounts of image upload and storing as part of the accounts, and I'm not really sure I want to get into that business.

Last feature I think many would be interested in is the ability to do a the same group of images that others do. That way it could be more like a class where everyone is drawing the same thing we can all talk about the curves of a particular figure and what was difficult or what we had fun with.

That is indeed very interesting, but I think not one of those foundational things that would immediately benefit tons of people. We'd have to have tons more in place before I'd want to start syncing... Plus, we'd probably need to finish switching to all commissioned photos, as the currently donated photos come with rights restrictions that a feature like this might be in violation of. (More about that in the FAQ and on the Support Us page)

I could probably sit and come up with these all night. If you haven’t seen the lovecastle.org site you should check it out. It has some good features which would be awesome to integrate into this website. Maybe the creator would be interested in joining forces?

I ran into lovecastle a few years back and was very pleased to see there were other resources out there!

I’d also be willing to assist, but only have a couple hours a week I could dedicate to this site. I’m also working on a site dedicated to becoming a better artist. I’m focusing on getting down a bunch of 5-10 minute exercises that can be combined together however the student believes it would best fit their needs. I’ve only just started editing it today and moving it to a more permanent site, so I don’t have much to show, but the ideas pretty much just have to be written. Once I have it more developed I’ll share it with you and maybe you’d even be interested in hosting it here. I’d be thrilled to help artists get as much free instruction as possible on the internet.

Shoot me an email with your ideas if you'd really like your tutorials and things to be hosted here, and we can talk about it. :)