Messages du forum par Aunt Herbert

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!

Hi, I haven't been here for quite a while, and I do like the new menu for the drawing sessions. One drawback, though, when you end your sessions, there is just no button integrated as of yet, that takes you back to the forums and the "your studio" pages. There is a button labeled "home", but instead it takes you to yet another newly designed "home page", just one, that has no fuctions for profile, practice log, etc... I am not sure, what the idea of having yet another "home page" design was all about or what problem it is supposed to amend, but it seems to have introduced additional confusion to the design team, so they missed out on making sure basic functionalities keep working.

Also, making sure your practices do appear correctly in the practice logs takes quite a bit of shenannigans and hectic flipping of pages....

Yes, I did the drawing "in the park" a lot. I have dozens of sketches of people sleeping, sitting, even standing in groups. I found even practical solutions to prevent people from moving too much. Like, if you sit in a cafe, and you see another guest in an apparent state of rest, don't try to draw them outright, they will become uneasy and start to shuffle and move around within seconds, as they will feel observed, even if you are only in their peripheral vision. Instead look for windows and mirrors in the vicinity. If you draw their reflection rather then themselves, they will hold still much longer, as they won't feel like someone is looking at them.

But... this still only allows to draw people, that hold reasonably still. Which really limits the possible scope of motifs. And, walking through the world, looking for sights, that draw my eyes, people in motion are very often much more interesting and expressive to look at. But off course, what I have to draw them is only my memory of a fleeting expression, plus my general knowledge of drawing the human form, and when I try to put the expression to paper, the result is disappointingly between vague and arbitrary. It's like I am not drawing the actual subject, but chosing amongst the poses, that I have repeatedly drawn from photo reference to find the most similar. It repeatedly fails to catch, what drew my eyes, as if the vision turns into a blur, the moment the pen hits the paper. Two or three lines at most, and then everything left to do is to basically apply an abstraction of the human body, based on the ideas about physiology and anatomy I tried to dutyfully drill from someone else's lections.

Which isn't the case for those subjects in stillness, that I manage to draw. I feel like there is a quality to those drawings, that is different from drawing from a photography. Just, that I can't apply the same quality to movement, as I can't refresh my memory.

The frustration part of drawing from memory... well, I do remember how frustrated I was, when I started drawing, and discovered, that I really couldn't draw a straight line or a clean curve without first spending hours on quite boring practice.
There are things, I like to do, and things, that I like to have done. I did not like to practice line quality, but I like to have it done. At the moment, I am just hoping, that the attempt to analyse and exercise my way of memorizing gesture will turn into a thing I will like to have done.

And ofc, instead of doing it, I write essays on the forum. It's like if you know, that you really should do more exercise for your health, and instead you go shopping for athlete's wear. You still can say to yourself, that you have done something for your health, but you postpone the actual frustration of pushing your limits for now. I should really go do it now....

Oh, and, schöne Feiertage, to you, too!

"For example... When you say it's "the undeniable quality of each poem ever, that it is astonishingly easy to remember?" I just respond to that with bafflement. Like I can deny that very easy because I am absolutely awful at remembering any text - poetry included."

OK, let me clarify that part. I am not claiming, that everybody can easily remember poems. What I try to say, if you want to remember any text, it will be immeasurably easier to remember a poem, than to remember any other text. Because all those specific forms, rhyme, rhythm, etcetera, were really invented for the specific purpose to be as easily memorable as possible. That is not a normative proposition about how any mind has to work, let alone a judgment about people, who generally have a hard time memorizing texts, that is a descriptive proposition about how poems work.

The more speculative part of the proposition is, that the perceived aesthetic value of poems is derived from these mnemotic qualitites. Poems are perceived as beautiful, because they are memorable.
Which I then extend as a general aesthetic rule, that even can be used for assessing drawings: It is not a contingency, that beautiful or interesting pieces of art is memorable. We perceive them to be beautiful or interesting BECAUSE they are memorable.

Your denial misses the point, btw. Whether you personally have an easy or a hard time memorizing texts in general doesn't change anything about one text being more easy to remember than a given different text.
Like, a 200 pound weight is probably too heavy for either of us to deadlift from the floor. Which doesn't change the fact, that it is easier to lift than a 400 pound weight. Or, more to the point, that a weight that comes with useful handles is easier to lift than one of bulky, uneven, shifty form, covered with only surfaces, that are either too smooth or too painful to hold tightly.
It's an attribute of the object, not of the person interacting with that object, so differences in the person can't deny the claim.

So far, this is mostly an unproven claim from me, I can't just put up a link to a peer-reviewed thesis that agrees with me. I am open to arguments that speak against me, but I will try to honestly critique those arguments and defend the thesis, and I don't think your argument is a good one.

If my thesis stands, this does allow artists a new approach to the problem of beauty. By examining and testing our own capability to memorize, and discovering what the qualities are, that stick to our mind. When we discover the qualities of an optical pattern, that make it easier for us to memorize its complex forms, then we can use those qualities to improve our art.

The result doesn't even have to be universal. Yes, in contrast to an assumed "optimally normal" neurotype, everyone is neurodivergent. But the real unicorns are very sparse by there very nature, generally there are clusters of people who resemble each other to an extent. Everyone is on a number of spectrums, but very few are at the extreme ends of any one spectrum.

If possibly you and me have a completely different way of memorizing visual information, then it is still unlikely, that either of both of us is completely unique in that regard. There is probably a group of people that memorizes somewhat similar to how I do it, and a group of people that memorizes similar to how you do it.
So our quest to examine how we personally memorize visual information will for each of us still make our art more "artsy" for at least a given group of people. And if our perspectives aren't as far apart as theoretically possible, then that group of people will likely overlap to a big extent and be quite large.

So, who get's to decide what is essential? Your memory! At least for the decision, whether it is memorable art (for you). And that essence could in theory even be vastly different for you and for me, but in practice it most likely isn't, and in either case, whether it is different or not, it is an interesting fact to explore.
This could only be a trap, if it actually turns out that for some reason the two of us have a huge divergence in the way our visual memory works, and then I for some reason go and try to drill you specifically and uncritically in reproducing my personal findings, without even reflecting why they work for me. It can't be a trap on the principal level of me pointing towards a very tight relationship between aesthetic norms and our ability to build memory, be it individually similar or divergent.


On the separate, only losely related topic of the terms: "flow" and "stiffness"
My disagreement with the terms "flow" and "stiffness" is my repeated encounter with advanced beginners, who draw perfectly clean lines, but then feel the need to pressure themselves to draw faster, to improve "flow" and "dynamic" out of fear, that their clean and controlled llines could be scolded as "stiff". Which, if you look at texts and tutorials of art teachers who try to teach flow, has almost nothing to do with what they try to teach.
I don't disagree with the concepts these people try to teach, I just think "flow" and "stiffness" are bad words to describe the concepts, as there is massive evidence, that they open up giant halls of misunderstanding.
"Dynamic" isn't a line quality, it's a concept that belongs to composition. Drawing with a hazelnut broom at the end of a 6 foot pole with your off hand while standing on your head and shaking your feet won't make your "lines" more dynamic than plotting your lines via an algorithm from a mechanic printer, because "dynamic flow" is in a different category from line quality. What it will do is make drawing harder and thereby force you to rely on bare minimum expressions, which then might maybe lead to ideas, how you can still draw something memorable, despite the odds, but this is a huge detour.
Whether shaky, unsteady, uncontrolled lines are more or less "stiff" than clean and controlled lines is quite random, as the concepts just don't really overlap. 

And this is mixed up so often, even from people who should know better, that I just think the terms "dynamic", "flow" and "stiffness" are misleading.

What I am currently experimenting with, and I don't know if it makes sense or could be recommendated, is measuring from memory.
The set-up: I have this site here open, and some youtube-video, usually some music video with boring visuals, like a concert or something.
I start a figure drawing, look at the figure for a few seconds, but before I start drawing, I switch to the youtube-clip, so I can't see the reference any longer, then I try to draw what I remember.
Initial comfort level 1 out of 10, can't recommend, feels about as pleasant as intentionally hitting a wall with your head repeatedly, while chewing on glass..
I spent quite some amount of time learning how to measure from a reference, but there is always the risk of getting lost in detail  Now I expect myself to be able to draw at a certain halfway consistent quality from a reference, and the outcomes I produce with this method are naturally abysmal and disappointing without end.
On the upside, once I am done drawing the few lines, that I can remember, I can still switch back to the reference and compare results. And the comparison does give me a lot of feedback about my methods of measurement. For the sake of clarity, with measurement I mean about the widest range of techniques possible. Learning how to draw an abstract paperdoll of a human body absolutely is just one more method of measurement, like is getting known to tyoical proportions, and I guess this way of "measuring from memory" doesn't even make sense without some of those available.

What I hope to achieve with the attempt is to one day just go to a park and draw from people, that are actually moving around, and still capture the scene, without either having to first unalive them to make them hold still, or at least having to take a photo, and then using my bad photo as the reference instead of the sight before me.

It is quite a hard check against trying to include too much detail. It's just astonishing how hard it is to even remember faintly the positions of the main masses or major limbs after staring at a reference for a few seconds, although in my mind, before I start drawing, I feel like I remember all of it perfectly. Then the pen hits the paper, and all of that confidence bursts away in a heartbeat once I cut myself off the physical reference and rely on the clarity of the "reference" in my memory.

I think this feedback has impact on what I draw when I draw olschool with the reference "on", as I get refocused on essentials over details. I generally dislike the terms "flow" and "stiffness", because they are usually highly ambiguous, lead to a metric ton of misunderstanding and make beginners just attempt dumb stuff to produce "better flow". But I think the question of essential versus detail is valuable.

Like, it is the undeniable quality of each poem ever, that it is astonishingly easy to remember, given the length and complexity of the text, as poems are in essence a mnemonic device developed by pre-literate cultures. Making visual art "stick" to memory is dependent on creating mnemonic techniques, and I think lot of the misguided talk about "flow" and "stiffness" is really aimed at achieving that.