Mensajes en el foro por Mallou

Congrats on the release!!

One thing that occurred to me recently is that I tend to get too comfortable with what I'm doing, which then suggested what might be a fun feature:  per-session challenges.

The user story would be something like, you check a box that says "enable random challenges", choose between per-image or per-session, hit start, and see "draw the next pose with your non-dominant hand", or "draw the next pose without looking at the paper", or "draw the next pose in a single unbroken line", etc.

Straight lines only, curved lines only, no lines at all / mass-blocking, silhouette only, no silhouette, extend all lines past their endpoints, concentrate on contours, pick a hatching style you're not used to, only look at the screen three times, only use ten lines, use ink, etc.

Seems like it could piggyback on the existing tips mechanism, and could be a nice way to shake up practice a bit in a way you can't control (I think that last bit could make a big difference for a lot of folks, myself included).


Thank you again for an incredible resource!!

First, just wanted to say, massive thank you to Kim and Sanne, you're doing amazing work, and I hope you know just how much it is appreciated, and how much of a difference you've made.  Sorry if these questions have been asked before, I checked briefly but couldn't find anything.

First question is, there's been a couple of times when I wanted to use a sketch from a previous practice session, a few days later, as a preliminary drawing for a painting, or just because I think the pose was interesting and I didn't do it justice.  

As far as I can tell though, there is no way to revisit the images from a given session (except for the immediate after-session review).  Totally get if that's intentional, just wanted to check if I was missing something obvious if not.

The other question was, I just spent a bit of time writing feedback for a piece that popped up in my critique queue, but now it doesn't seem to... exist?  The log says I have one critique posted today, but it's not showing up under "replies posted".  Thought maybe there is a moderation queue, but the original request for critique doesn't seem to have been a forum post, plus it was some time ago.

Halp?

Thought of one more thing:  please correct me if I'm wrong, but I can see Michael Hampton's approach to gesture in your drawings.  

Which is great, he's an amazing educator, but one thing I had to add to his method when I was working with it was to find the joint before putting down the gesture curve going towards it.

So I put a dot at the pit of the neck and the curve of the spine before pulling the thoracic spine curve between them (not necessarily connected to the dots!), I indicate the shoulder joints before doing those curves, I always, always mark the elbows, knees, wrists and ankles, etc.

Michael Hampton doesn't need it because he's been teaching anatomy for 20 years, and he knows where his lines will end, but for me, getting correctly foreshortened limbs and torso just takes way more time otherwise.

I've never done gestural landscapes (or a whole lot of landscapes of any kind really), so take this with a huge grain of salt, I'm mostly drawing on my experience with still life and life drawing.

That said, my advice is:  squint.  When you do that, the subject separates into areas of value, you immediately see the main big forms, the structural light and shadow.

It can be really helpful to just get those areas first, before filling in value.  For me, 9 times out of 10, just doing that and then filling in the shadow with a single solid value, paying no attention to the form at all, immediately makes the whole thing recognizable.  It's a bit magical, goes from "uh what did I just draw" to "whoa it's Bob" in 30 seconds.

On that note, I would also really try to avoid color in the beginning:  one thing I'm noticing is that there's a lot of areas separated by chroma alone.  If you convert it to grayscale, you'll notice that some things are suddenly blending together, which makes it harder to navigate when capturing the form.

Hope that helps!

I would try to complete those contour ellipses whenever you do them:  otherwise the danger is that they stop sharp, more like a parenthesis or half-moon than half an ellipse, at which point they can lose their purpose as a roadmap for the spatial form.

One thing that I found really useful when doing these gesture drawings is to deliberately not care about the silhouette, and just indicate bits of it here and there, e.g. with where the cross-contours start and end. 

It really helps me to think of it as taking notes in shorthand, as if I'm putting down the least amount of information required to be able to reconstruct the pose later once the model is gone.  I can piece together the anatomy later if I leave it out, but not the scaffolding of where the knees and elbows are, what the motion is, what the perspective is, etc.