Forum posts by Sanne

In 2017, I drew a whopping 1 full image. This year, I've drawn nothing up until the rebuild of the site. That's a lot of downtime from drawing!

I'm trying to get 2 to 4 drawing sessions a week in, about 10 minutes each. I find that any longer I can't physically sustain the act of drawing anymore, everything gets crampy. I forgot what I used to do when I drew frequently to help soothe aches, or what to do during short breaks that wouldn't suck all my attention away.

What kind of hand exercises do you prefer to do, to help your hand stay loose and comfortable? And what do you like to do during short breaks when you're in a class mode?

Don't Starve is a fun game for that!

I'll be honest, it wasn't the greatest lol. But I played on a private server with a friend against bots, so it wasn't that terrible and I had a lot of fun doing it. ;)

Hey Swen, looks like the image file you're trying to display isn't working correctly. Remember that an image file has to end with a filetype extension like .jpg, .png and so forth. :)

I also wanted to let you know I'm loving the force surface lines! It's extremely useful to see in action.

Hi Bart, your link wasn't working correctly so I fixed it up for you.

I agree with eoincassidy that more confident strokes (trying to capture things with a single stroke instead of repeatedly sketching in the same place) will help the fluidity of your gestures a lot! I'd concentrate on that and take it from there.

@Line: Image upload on the site is only available to members with a subscription. Some people also don't like posting things to multiple places and prefer keeping things tidy in one place. :)

I always recommend using your tablet pen as your regular mouse for random browsing. Point and click games would work just as well! I even played first person shooter games with my drawing tablet in the past.

The most important part is to allow yourself time to get used to it. It can take a few weeks to a few months before your brain adjusts and it starts to feel natural. Just don't stop using it, and you'll see improvement relatively quickly.

Hi Holytokes!

There were some strange formatting issues going on with your post, so I fixed it up for you. :)

This is a great start for your first gestures! You're doing a good job trying to find the action line and it shows. Maybe your next step can be to reduce the number of brush strokes for each gesture? I'm working on this too, the more you capture with less, the better you train your brain to see the shapes and motion and translate it into a drawing. You can get more scritchy with in-depth studies or gestures that take longer to complete, but for short timed gestures, less is more!

Doing gestures is as much about learning anatomy as it is about how proportions and perspective work! While gestures are limited in what you can learn from them, they're great warmups to progress to more detailed pieces later on.

I think the best way to decide what to practice is to have a specific goal in mind. It doesn't matter too much what comes first.

"I want to learn how to connect all the limbs of a person to the torso by doing a 30 minute class twice a week."

"I want to learn how to capture the motion in a pose better by doing 10 gestures at 60 seconds each three times a week."

"I want to learn what shapes a body is made of by doing 5 gestures at 2 minutes twice a week."

Pick one thing to focus on for about a week, maybe two weeks, then formulate a new goal for yourself. You're going to get to all of them eventually, you don't have to fret and feel pressured! Just pick whichever seems the most interesting right now, go for it, and then reevaluate your goal to see what's up next.

Getting a better sense of anatomy is a good goal! What specifically do you feel you struggle with the most?

From the two sketches linked, I don't have a whole lot of critique on the anatomy. Am I right in seeing that you have two layers? (One with the basic shapes with a reduce layer opacity, and the other building on top of the basic shapes.) It might be worth it to try and draw everything on one layer and in one color, so you're forcing yourself to capture the gesture with less strokes, and maybe a thinner brush. This helps to simplify the form in your head and trains you to recognize complex shapes and draw them accurately as minimal shapes. It's a good exercise that can speed up your drawing and improve your sense of anatomy.

Hello Bauke!

10-20 drawings every day is a very ambitious goal. :) Is there any particular reason you went with this, and how much experience do you have with drawing already? Do you have a specific thing you want to improve first?

I concur with Line that I'd love to see some of the underlying construction. The outline is not a bad thing, but it can be hard to understand how the joints connect and bend if you're not focused on those things. The gesture on the bottom left for example has a nice action line for the spine, but the left am doesn't have an obvious elbow joint and feels more like a noodle than an arm with motion. It would help your gestures a lot to use joint points, it allows you to do effective foreshortening and judge and create proportions better. Our article on joints might be helpful to you:

Gesture basics #3: Joints

You're absolutely on the right track and I'm eager to see your progress as you go along!

Oh wow that is so exciting!! Congrats Kim. :D

I would be happy to have my animal drawings included!

Oh wow that's a noticeable difference!! I was recently suggested to trust myself more, and to try and draw more single lines rather than a bunch of small ones. You're definitely on the right track to more confident gestures. :)

One thing you might want to focus on is to try and figure out which lines you could have drawn with a single stroke. For example, the front of the torso and the back of the figure on the bottom could have been created with only two pen strokes. One for the front arch of the torso, and one for the curve of the back. It's been helping me a lot to capture the gesture doing this, because on my next session I'm seeing instant improvement.

This won't happen overnight, but I think it'll be a helpful goal to work towards!

Diversity has been one of the most requested features for our tools, including different bodytypes. As a 6'1" overweight woman, I've personally been bummed we don't have anyone in the tools representing my bodytype and general size. Now that we can submit our own bundles, I'm considering modeling for the figure study tool to contribute. :)

Are you asking because you're interested in contributing too, or are you asking for more diversity?

Hi Hornet!

When you click "Browser", click on and image and then click "Open", or you drag and drop an image onto the page, the Upload button should appear below the textbox. It doesn't show until an image is selected.

I just tested it, and it appears fine for me.

If you're selecting and opening an image to upload, can you confirm that it shows that the image is ready to go and the Upload button is missing?



If you see the image but not the Upload button, try disabling all your browser plugins and see if the button appears. If it does, enable each plugin one by one and test until you find out which one's messing it up.

If none of this works, can you please let us know what browser, device, browser version and so forth you're using so we can help troubleshoot this?

I used Habitica briefly a few years ago. It was fun, but it also had a lot of features and methods of handling things I didn't really take to.

I'm kinda interested in seeing LoA be part of it though, I'm in a place where I could realistically make good use of the site again if I don't spread myself out too much. So, I guess my vote is "I'd probably use Habitica because of LoA additions" rather than "I use it and would like a LoA addition", if that's worth anything. :)

I think the most important thing to learn about a tablet is that it takes time to relearn your hand-eye coordination. It will feel awkward and most people struggle at the beginning. Using your tablet as a mouse to do random browsing with is a great way to get a good feeling for the tablet, without frustrating you because drawing is hard. I think on average it takes most people 1-2 months to get a good feeling for it and be able to draw without thinking too much about it!

So, allow yourself time to adjust. 99% of people who are awesome with tablets had to go through this. Don't give up!