Forum posts by Kim

Hey Abi,

Do you have a specific goal for what you want to improve? Or is your goal to just "get better"?

Since there are hundreds of things you could work on improving or noticing in any given drawing, not have a really specific goal for what you want to be improving this time very often leads to your brain being overwhelmed and not focusing on/improving anything.

Pick something really specific -- more expressive use of line weight. Being daring with color. Picking up on the subtle variations in different noses. Focus on that one thing for your daily practice for at least a week. Improve on that one thing. Continue onto a second week, or pick a new thing. But definitely don't try to "get better at drawing."

In general, there's no one right way to do your construction. Is there one method that feels better to you or makes the most intuitive sense? If you are getting started, it may help to just pick one method and keep at it, even if you are confused; practice is the only true way to make progress, after all! It's hard to learn everything at once, so definitely break it down into bite sized pieces by limiting the scope of what you're focusing on learning and improving at any given moment. As you're working, try to notice what you're doing better for that stated goal, not the huge range of other skills you might work on next.

Once you're feeling a little less confused with the basics of one method, you can challenge yourself to try another.

Remember: It takes a lot of energy to learn a new skill, and your body is fine-tuned to survive by not wasting energy you don't have to. That frustration you feel is your body asking you, are you really sure this is important enough to you to spend this energy learning it? Tell it yes, you are opting in, by keeping at it!

Thanks for your interest and your offer! I am unable to accept this type of help. The site is not open source, and we need to treat the security of our users seriously. Thank you though. :)

Yikes! Thanks for reporting that! :)

first of all, you have a wonderful site. I really like quality of the images and the UI so far. And I just happily contributed $5 to the funding, but some things about it put me off a little bit.

Thanks! :) I am thrilled you like it and I deeply appreciate your financial support.

First is the subscription thing. Even knowing that contributing gives me some subscription time along with it, it sounds counter intuitive to me, paying now, so you can build stuff that I’ll have to pay again to access some time in the future.

It's not an unusual funding strategy; you can see it commonly among game kickstarters especially. It's a way to fund the work that needs to be done to keep the site up and running for years to come, to utilize that solid new foundation to enable the many features that people have wanted from us for ages, and to create a way for the site to thrive into the future; being a 100% free site with no premium options for the last decade has meant we are held back from the features and photos people most want. Our core offerings also suffer as surging demand results in slowdowns and even complete site downtime, without the resources to put a better foundation under us. I don't want to have to repeat this fundraiser in a couple more years, and instead hope to give the site premium offerings that let the entire community (even the free users) see the site remain strong and improving for another decade. :)

Also there’s no pricing as of now for the subscription, so that makes it even more uncertain.

I'm still working to finalize the pricing; I should have it out very shortly, and I'm sorry there's been a delay on that! It is definitely weird to have the one without the other, you are totally right.

Another thing is about the features. I don’t know if there was a research to which features the users asked the most or any metrics about user behavior

The features to include and what order to put them in our fundraising goals was picked based on several thousand emails from the last couple of years as well as two recent focus groups conducted among art students starting to graduating from art school, some of whom had used LoA before and some who used another tool.

Another thing is the link at the end of the session, when the asking for contribution appears being “No, thanks. Line of action doesn’t help me”. I don’t know if that’s supposed to be a joke or to make people feel guilty on purpose, but it’s annoying specially when you have already contributed.

I'm sorry you don't like these reminders; asking people to take a serious look at whether or not they value the site at least a one-time payment of $1.49 worth, especially given that many use it daily and have done so for months or years, has by far been the most effective at getting people to participate in supporting us. With 31k consistent users per week, the realm of possibility for what we can achieve for the site together is huge!

I'm sorry it continues to nag you since you've already contributed; please bear with me for a week or two more. :)

Hi arcline1,

Because so many people have historically used the tools without having accounts, we're not linking fundraising donations to any particular account right now. What will happen is, once the new features are built, we'll be emailing out codes to backers, which they can apply to an existing account, a new account, or even give to a friend (or perhaps family member who is on their way to art school?)

So you'll have the opportunity shortly to link your benefits to this account or some other of your choosing. :) Hope that answers your question!

Hi! If we meet our fundraising goals that will allow us to finally shoot our own photos instead of relying on the types of poses photographers want to shoot and donate on their own, we will definitely have more "casual" poses. :)

What length of time did you do these in?

You may be trying to do too much in too short a length of time, and thus missing some of the fundamental focusing benefits of gesture drawings: https://line-of-action.com/happens-30-seconds-isnt-enough/

You don't need to produce a perfect or even "readable" sketch when doing a gesture drawing. These are warmups and practice exercises, not fine art you're going to display. Pick one small goal for each little practice window, such as "capture the line of action" or "capture the angle of the head against the angle of the torso using only two lines."

Save perfecting proportions for longer sessions, and aim to really see your reference as a whole, and record what you notice about its "flow" with a few confident strokes.

What program are you talking about? You are free to draw with pencil and paper.

We don’t offer image uploads right now, but never fear. Simply use an image upload service like Imgur, Photobucket, Imageshack, tinypic, Imagesafe, or any other. Most allow you to create a free account.

Then, once you have uploaded your image and have a url for it, use this tag to embed the image on our forums:

[ img ]http://yourimageurlhere.com/img.png[/ img ]

(Take the spaces out from the img tags)

Make sure that the link ends in a valid image filename, like .png, .gif or .jpg

Hi there! Have you tried this technique for your 30 seconders?

https://line-of-action.com/gesture-basics-1-line-of-action/
https://line-of-action.com/gesture-basics-2-torso-and-hips/
https://line-of-action.com/gesture-basics-3-joints/
https://line-of-action.com/happens-30-seconds-isnt-enough/

Also, do you have some examples of your work we could look at?

That is thrilling to hear! So far I'm not seeing NaN:NaN anymore since that patch, but I'll keep my eyes and ears open. :)

Don't beat yourself too much about missing a day! Just feel good about how quickly you got back on the horse. :)

I would use the same thread if I were you -- it will make it easy for all of us to see your goals and your progress over time! :)

Releasing a patch regarding the "too fast timer"... fingers crossed! Please let me know if this performs better for you tomorrow.

Still looking at the NaN:NaN bug you also mentioned (I'm pretty sure this is what the NA-NA-NA you referred to was.) :)

Thank you, this is VERY helpful!