Messages du forum par Aunt Herbert

My feedback, don't take it as gospel. I think you are currently focused on identifying individual lines on the reference, but don't do literal construction a lot. That isn't wrong, it makes a lot of fun and all, but it isn't a particularly fast way to progress. The quicker way to progress is instead of trying to draw what you see on the reference, you learn how to draw a mannequin from a fixed set of primitives, simple 3-D forms. Here is a video of one set of such primitives, it's not the only possible one, just an example: &list=WL&index=99
Once you taught yourself to draw such a mannequin in a neutral pose, you stop drawing from the reference, but instead only use the reference to indicate the posture and perspective, that your mannequin should assume. (also, you possibly have to add fatty pouches for less-than-lean body types), and stik with drawing that mannequin.

Doing this, at least for me, is way less fun than actually drawing from reference. It forces me to ignore all those beautiful relationships that I can discover by admiring the reference. But what it does is building some reliable framework, so the next time I skip mannequinization and just return to drawing from reference, my lines will be a lot more convincing, relations will be more on point, I will be more aware of extreme aspects of poses.

I would advise you to do that construction/mannequinization grind at least to some extent, even if you (like me) feel like it is less fun than really drawing from the reference. It's a bit like the "eat your vegetables" part.

About the difference between gesture drawing and figure drawing.... Let me put it this way: most art teachers are renowned for being good at drawing (or painting). They are not renowned as poets or philosophers. Don't start to meditate too much about anybody's specific choice of words, because there is a good chance, they are not even aware of the specific difference you are looking for. And certainly don't expect one art teacher to consistently use the terms some other art teacher has established. If you ask an art teacher for an exact definition of what they are talking about, they will vaguely wave into a general direction, tell you, that "that" is what they clearly meant, and expect you to live with that.
If you want to learn from them, look at what they are drawing, and try to understand their words from that, not the other way round. Drawing is a manual skill, and even pushing someone into the right directions with words alone is extremely hard.

Your technique is up to the task of delivering your message, and your drawing is effective, in the sense, that it looks like you are quite confident about what effect you want to produce.

I would say the next step is to use primitives to represent the masses of the body. Here is a short video, that introduces a good set: &list=WL&index=99

You are working quite meticulously along a detailed morphology of primitive building blocks of the body - which is fantastique, as it builds intuitive understanding of how the body functions in space.
Now in your self-critique you mention, that you feel like you almost plateau-ed or are even regressing, especially in your 2 minute works. You also mention feeling stiff and awkward.

Now, in a way both can be true at the same time. Being very focused on precise measurement and 3-D forms allowed you quick progression in the past, that is now slowing down in visual progress, as you are pushing limits. But off course, that same focus also shows in the results. They don't look playful, excessive, flamboyant, expressive, because that isn't part of your specific project right now.

Your results do look impressive to those, that are on a similar path, and can savour the effort and discipline, that went into them, but that is a rather narrow audience. On your overall art journey, you have to remember, that those designs are mere etudes. You don't focus on combining exact measurement and pose, so you can put a frame around it, but so, that it becomes natural to your craft and you don't have to focus so much on that in later works, and still reproduce it.

To overcome the feeling of plateau-ing and stiffness, the best advise could be to relinquish focus for a bit, and draw something else, where precision and morphology aren't in the foreground, so you can get an impression how much your skills already improved, when you don't stress about them.
If you want to keep up with daily practice, you could just switch focus for a while. Just some suggestions: line economy, line quality, shadow forms, shape design, value separation, drawing poses from imagination or manipulating poses, that are drawn from observation, drawing from memory, attempting to impress a small child with your drawing, drawing the same thing in 10 different ways, ... these all would be alternative areas to focus on. They wouldn't advance your current focus much, but would add a reprieve, something else to do, to not get stuck in a rut, and meanwhile widen your artistic toolset.

Ahm, pose and posture is not really a different term.
The drawing each line in one decisive movement is one of the basics of line quality. It makes basically the difference between producing an image, that looks "clean" and one that looks scribbled and funky. You can have nice looking images that are drawn with funky lines, if they have other qualities that save the image, but if you want to have the aesthetic decision between drawing clean or drawing funky, you have to practice that drawing clean part, as it doesn't come naturally. And if you know how to draw clean, even when you decide to draw funky, your funky will look more purposeful.
Usually, funky lines just look indecisive and amateurish,.... which can be an interesting effect, if you do it on purpose, but quite a drag, if it just happens to you, and you don't know how to avoid it.

Advice#1: Keep on trucking. You spend your time repeately analysing poses, and the way you analyse them makes narrative sense. 95% of getting better will come from you observing your own drawings and making small and minute adjustments over time. Asking for tips is nice, but there isn't so much improvement to be had from reading tips. Drawing is about practice, putting practice precisely into words is hard, decoding such words into precisely the practice it means is hard, too. Conveying any fine details that way is almost impossible. You are mostly doing well, what you are doing, keep at it.

Advice#2: Here is a thing, that you could maybe do. At the moment you are mostly focused on pose and posture, and that is fine. You could maybe hit 2 birds with 1 stone, if you draw your actual lines a bit slower, but also include line quality techniques. Measure start and end for each line first, then shadow the line, then put down the mark in one decisive movement. Make sure all straights are beautifully straight and all curves beautifully curved.
The reason to integrate that into your posture grind is, this is one of the things, that will do little if you do it once or twice, it should be repeated hundreds of times until it becomes your natural sequence of movement.

This does not imply, that you are currently doing your posture grind wrong, or that grinding posture isn't important and you should do something else. This just means, if you keep doing what you are doing, and then integrate this as well, you will end up getting more out of your practice time.

Yepp, it's still there, but I initially overspecified the problem. It happens simply if you have a class section with practice tips enabled, and close the practice tip with the x on the upper right corner instead of the continue button in the lower right corner. The image does not reload and instead the timer function disappears.
Nothing to do with the quick start function at all, just class function with practice tips enabled, and it happens the first time the practice tip shows up as well as on subsequent times.

Google Chrome... I'll check if it still works the way it did yesterday....

Ah, nailed it down. If you do a class session, commentaries on, then restart a session via quickstart choosing class session again, and then close the first window by using the x in the upper right corner instead of the continue button, the first image will show up without a timer and just be a still frame. Which can be confusing, as you are focused on starting with a 30 sec drawing, and instead have all the time in the world.

imgur says: "requested page could not be found", sorry

The girl on the roof looks ace, and I like your overall style. For the girl standing in the foreground, her entire posture is derived from a single straight line, which you then tried to partition into right sized chunks (and you nailed the sizes only 70-ish %). It would look better, if you were more aware of indidiviual pieces: where is the chest, where is the hip, how are chest, hip and head connected by the spine, how do the shoulders sit on top of the chest. chest can be abstracted into a flattened half-egg, and seen from the side, it is almost never straight vertical, but slightly diagonal, so the spine ends up in a double-s curve. head in centre, shoulders slightly behind head, belly slightly in front on head, hipps in the centre again, but slightly tilted forward.

Good: you find rather clean and abstracted outlines for the features of the figure.
To improve: Try to distance yourself a bit from the outlines and to indicate the simple 3-D building blocks, those outlines belong to, a bit more.

Also, I think your measurement of proportions is still a bit shaky (these hands look rather small, for example), but that is something that improves automatically during practice.

Just posting to confirm, that the practice time tracking is currently a bit wonky. Sometimes times are just not recorded at all, sometimes they don't seem to be recorded in the ongoing session, but do show up after closing the page and logging in again, sometimes they work fine as intended. Haven't detected a clear repeatable pattern yet, but overall it happens quite often.

I think there is another problem with the new features, though. If you restart a session, you will be offered a quick start option, that says it will repeat all previous choices. Instead it just produces a single picture without any timing.... EDIT: Couldn't reproduce it on purpose, but it happened more than once before. I'll let you know, if I manage to reproduce.

Thanks! I love it!