Forum posts by Aunt Herbert

I wouldn't force it either. It's occassionally interesting to check where your borders currently are, as they can move quite a bit over time, but if something straight out feels like wasted time, then it probably is, at least for now. To produce satisfying art you need to find a satisfying production rhythm. From your dedication to art that I have seen so far, I can almost guarantee you, once it is time to move on, your own curiosity will come knocking at your door.

My inner mad scientist proposes a bit of an experiment though: Have you considered trying out a second drawing session at the same day (if you can make that fit your schedule off course)? Just to get some data about, once you knocked yourself out by focusing hard on drawing over a set period of time, how long it takes you to mentally recover, and what external conditions might influence your recovery time.

I repeat, as I said before, don't worry about the limbs until you figured out what ribcage and hips do. Focus on drawing head, ribcage and hips.

OK, several things:

a) Yes, starting with simplified gestures to get a working muscle memory for drawing the pose is definitely a way better idea than jumping right into complicated anatomical details. If you get accustomed to the pose, you will find big landmarks to measure your proportions from. If you try to add up itsy bitsy details instead, you will become crazy, as every bit of mismeasured relation bitween two details will multiply, and at the end, your drawing will just consist of a bunch of little shapes at vastly different scale.

b) ...and when you start getting into some more details, the limbs aren't the best place to start from. Keep the arms and legs as simple lines for quite a while, until you are confident how to draw "the torso". And I put "the torso" in quotation marks, because ideally you should stop thinking of it as one thing. It's the ribcage plus collar bones on the upper side, and the hip on the lower side you are interested in, and they aren't solidly fixed to each other, but connected by the spine, which has its own typical range of mobility.

Ribcage is a standing egg, with the bottom cut off in an inverted v-shape, on top of the egg sit the collar bones. For the hip either draw a pair of undies, or draw a big box, that contains the buttox, and think of the legs as cut out of that box. Collar bones and hips indicate where the major joints have to end up, and until you are confident enough to pinpoint them, any attempts to go into detail with limbs will end up as a lottery: If you get the position of the joints randomly correct, you might end up with a decent drawing, if the joints are positioned off, you can spend hours working hard, and then realize that you won't get away from that uncanny feeling, that something is off with the drawing.

c) That said, your curiosity about legs being drawn strangely s-shaped has an answer. It has even two answers, as there isn't just one, but two possible s-shapes, depending whether you look at the legs from the front or the side.

The s-shape from the front is mostly visible in athletic persons with really shredded legs. On the front of the thigh, you got the quadriceps, and its most prominent line goes from the outside of the hip to the inside of the knee, which lines up with the calf muscle which arcs from the inside of the knee to the outside of the foot.

Seen from the side, the bone structure is almost linear, but it starts near the front of the hip and goes to the back of the foot. Above the knee, the anterior quadriceps extends into a curve ahead of the bone, below the knee, the calf muscle extends into a curve almost completely behind the shin.

Big caveat to my explanations and sketches: My own anatomical knowledge is at most half-baked. If someone wants to show up to beat me with some real facts, I'll instantly and happily yield.

Edit, That side pose is drawn badly, it only works if the person is holding themselves with the hands to prevent falling on their back, as I drew the bone structure too vertical. Should have positioned the foot a good bit further to the rear to show the leg in a stable position. The hip joint in a relaxed and stable position should be pretty much exactly above the start of the toes.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on April 30, 2024 11:08am.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on April 30, 2024 11:27am.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on April 30, 2024 11:55am.

Very focused on construction and on big and clear lines to show the pose. I especially like the big figure second from the right, the pose shows a lot of swagger.

The term this page uses for those "lessons" you mention is practice goals. There is even a button on this site. that asks you to select a practice goal from a multiple choice selection, and if you didn't change it for four weeks, you get a reminder. But that is only a minimal crutch, and after you get more experience with different approaches to drawing, these selections start to feel incredibly vague. There is the option to type in your own words, though.

Ideally you should select a specific practice goal for each of your drawing sessions, and try to put it into your own words and/or visualize the effect you are going for. Those different tutorials offered you different tools for your toolbox, now it's up to you to learn to distinguish between them, and to select and chose consciously which specific tool fits your artistic vision best. In a faraway future, when we approach the horizon of mastery, we probably want all of this tools at our disposal.

And I know, that sounds all great and almighty, like I figured that all out, and I absolutely haven't. Compared to a lot of other draftspersons I lack discipline and tend to just wing it a lot more often than is good for my artistic development, but having given a lot of feedback to other artists here, I at least have seen it done right by some people, and occassionally I succeed in getting it right myself.

I think (I hope) becoming aware of the general problem, and at least trying to address it by attempting to become clearer about my goal for every session, before I just start scribbling away, is a step into the right direction. On the upside, trying to define my next practice goal for drawing is an uplifting mental exercise when I am stuck at work, or forced to do boring chores. How successfully I then manage to stick to it when the pen meets the paper is another question.

I think you are still stuck in the same loop, and not in your drawings, but in the way you look at them. What is that constant obsession with better or worse all about?

There is just an array of things, were the question better or worse stops making sense. Which is the best color? Is a racecar better or worse than a rose petal?

You are experimenting, some of the stuff you try out ends up more on the side of conventional and pretty, some ends up more on the side of wild and energetic, how are other people to know, how far they are off your original intention?

How about you try out this practice: at the end of a drawing session, sort your own drawings by which ones you like best and which ones you like least, and after you done that, try to verbalize, to put into descriptive words, what you like about the ones you like best. Then in your next session, you can see if you can push those qualities further.

That way, I hope, you get used to understanding the qualities you yourself are looking for, and neither be constantly depending on other people's feedback, nor regressing towards beating yourself up for imagined flaws.

Well, so far most tutorials I found about drawing heads in one way or another come down to learning to draw an abstraction of an idealized head, to get used to common proportions and placement of the features of the head.

The most commonly used abstraction is from Andrew Loomis, the one from Frank Reilly I suggested adds a few extra features to determine mostly the cheeks and some features around the mouth. George W. Bridgman has an abstraction that is built up from squares and blocks instead of circles, which he generally prefers because they are easier to manipulate in perspective. Steve Huston's abstraction is based on triangles instead, and he emphasises dynamic more. Michael Hampton also has one, but I don't know a lot about it. John Asaro has made a map of the planes of the head, which is useful to construct how shadows fall in different lighting, and you can buy Asaro heads printed out to check for shadows while drawing.

About how "atrocious" abstractions are... well, you draw them a few dozen times, until you no longer have to check the order of lines while doing it. While training that, you also get a good idea which proportions the artist of your choice feels important to measure while drawing. Then later, whether you go through the full hazzle of drawing the entire abstraction every time or not, you will profit from the muscle memory about those proportions.

I have read a lot of your comments about being insecure about your drawings, and blaming yourself for not being able "to determine the correct simplification" for example. Well, these abstractions, at least in the first drawing from imagination stage actually deliver a whole lot of exercise, that you can do "objectively" right. It's a lot of work, sure, but you also get quite solid guard rails how to do it.

Otherwise I would have recommended the more popular Loomis abstraction, as it is the simplest one to pick up. But being simple also means that you get earlier into artistic improvisation and having to make aesthetic judgments, which, from your comments so far, seem to be an area in which you generally don't feel so comfortable.

OK, if you want no abstractions at all, there is this guy, Tony Swaby, on youtube who draws excellent portraits with charcoal. He describes his own method as observing shadow values, and he is quite outspoken about how he thinks exercising line art is an oppressive waste of time. He definitely has a pleasant voice to listen to, and a great choice of reference materials, and I spent quite some time just listening to him and drawing from his reference photos. You could do that as well, maybe his explanations fit your intuitions about drawing better than they did fit mine.

I have seen some other portait artists which, like Swaby, have what I would consider a painterly approach to drawing, namely instead of developing the face from lines they start with the darkness values first and block out simplified forms. They typically work with paint brushes on a rather large canvas, and start with quite big brushes. I didn't look so much into them, just because I would have to rearrange my setup quite a bit to use those tools. Also I am a bit suspicious that those people might have forgotten a bit about their own beginnings, as they rarely mention proportions, but clearly have a quite keen sense about them, which in my experience does not come naturally to most beginners.

I have no search term in mind to help you out finding them, but if you look for portait drawing videos a bunch on youtube, the algorithm will certainly bring up examples.

There might be still other approaches to portrait drawing out there, these are just the one that I encountered so far.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on April 27, 2024 11:59am.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on April 27, 2024 12:02pm.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on April 27, 2024 12:09pm.

Have you considered trying your hand at Reilly abstraction of the face? It's a very controlled step by step method, and I could imagine you enjoying that approach.

That sounds suspiciously like you might not be a mark 5 drawing robot, but a human being! I would let that check out!

Jokes aside, 2 hours focused concentration on a task IS exhausting. Most people wouldn't even get the idea to aim for training to draw more than that at once. I personally rarely rarely have a day, where I manage to draw 3 or 4 hours, but those are especially inspired days, and then its generally not in a single setting.

I know that professional artists and some enthusiasts manage to draw 10+ hours at once. But I think getting there is less a problem of strictly developing drawing skills, it's more a question of getting used to regenerate efficiently when taking breaks. Or even using mentally less taxing parts of drawing, like filling in large shapes, for regeneration.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on April 24, 2024 9:10am.

Quite a few of them look really good. I especially like the way you separated and sorted out the darkness values on the last figure, it clearly shows the volume and has a nice punchy visual effect to it, bit of a "That's how I meant it!" vibe.

Minor tip for figure #5: If a lot of the figure is blocked by a prop, like in this case the wheelchair, it is totally valid to ignore the prop and just draw the parts of the figure that are visible.

You are currently focusing on constructing the figure from simple 3-D forms, which is good, as it will build up your intuition about perspectivity. I would recommend switching the form that you use for the torso away from a large rectangular form to something called "the bean".

For a really detailed explanation of the bean, here is a link to a good course, you don't need the premium version. https://www.proko.com/course/figure-drawing-fundamentals/overview

The concept in my own few words: Try to draw the ribcage as an upright egg, with the lower half of the egg cut off in an inverted V-shape along the lower ribs. On top of the ribcage draw the colar bones, connecting the neck and the shoulder joints. Draw the hip separately from the upper torso, either as a block or as a pair of undies. The rectangular block you are currently using corresponds to those forms in that the collar bones are what you now draw as the upper edge of that block, and the hip corresponds to the lower edge.

The bean isn't immediately visible in all poses, but focusing on figuring out where it has to be teaches you a good idea of how the torso can move. It is more important for now, than finishing all the limbs in each drawing. There are some drawing tipps, who tell you to focus more on the forms underneath the surface than the outlines, understanding and drawing the bean is what is mostly meant by them.

Edit: the form that is proposed in IDK's video for the torso works also. Instead of "the bean" it uses two separate boxes for the ribcage and the hip. The important takeaway: Don't draw the torso as one single shape, separate ribcage and hips.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on April 21, 2024 10:10am.

Looking at your stuff and thinking what general useful advice could help you best, but I can't come up with much. Maybe a detail I found helpful in drawing stretched out feet: I often draw the forefoot as just an extension of the leg, with the heel as an appendix attached at a 90° angle, instead of the entire foot as a separate entity, that is attached to the leg.

And I don't think simplifying has a definite obligatory list. To me it is not "This has to be simplified in this way, and that there has to be simplified in that way". It is more like looking for things, that possibly could be simplified, and then trying out, whether it looks good. Like, here are 2 lines, that almost line up, if I fuse them into one line, does that look strange or cool? Here is a bump, that indicates a muscle, how does it look, if I just ignore that muscle and flatten that bump into a straight line in fusion with the rest of the limb? Hmm, I see a relatively simple 2-d shape formed by different outlines and shadow shapes,... if I just draw that 2-d shape, can the eye still translate it into a part of the figure, or does it look weird?

Simplifying generally is a good thing, because what is simpler to draw is also simpler to read, but off course you also always lose some information when doing it. So it is trial and error, whether the remaining information still translates into an object, or turns the whole image into an abstraction. And people who are really good at simplification sometimes hit that sweet spot, where the image is just at the vexing border between object and abstraction, which can add quite a bit of extra funk.

The maximum simplification of pretty much every pose is off course a mere stick figure, but it looks boring as heck, because it is pure abstraction. The other boring extreme would be a 100% detailed photographic representation, like you would get when you just put a tight grid over the figure and copy all the squares of the grid separately. Finding the goldilock zone between those extremes is more a matter of taste, and willingness to play around, than a matter of rules.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on April 20, 2024 5:35pm.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on April 20, 2024 5:47pm.

The one guy I had in mind, and I could kick my back for not noting down his name, was a a guy who actually drew figures from live with charcoal, in a single non-ending big swaying motion of perpetual circles. When he started doing it, I was certain it would all end up in a giant mess, but after a few motions it started to turn into a very good looking actual drawing. I tried to follow the advice he verbalized while drawing, but just couldn't translate his descriptions into practical behavior on my part. I tried just imitating him, and produced something, that didn't look that bad at all, but nowhere near anything, that I would want to present to anyone. His method was strange, but I felt a bit of envy for his results. That is what I meant with actual legitimate artists, who might approach a topic from a really weird angle.

Another guy comes to mind, still no name, but one of the lead figure designers for Riot Studio of Arcane fame, so absolutely a demigod in my books. He showed off his work method, and... well, he definitely cured me from my prejudices against searching lines. That guy started to draw one vague line, and another, and another, until his screen had almost turned into one solid black plane from all the attempts, then he switched to another mask, drew the one line he finally settled on over that mess, deleted the rest, and it was an absolutely ace looking crispy clean fighting pose. I told myself to never ever again judge someone for using searching lines (if done right)

But yes, 10 second drafts, maybe as a very specialized tool to train something very particular, but I don't see much use for me personally either. 30 second warmups, as warmups, I find useful as a reminder to go for the big forms and don't start with details, b/c if you start with details you wont have squat on the paper after 30 seconds. For me 2 minutes is my "laziest" time, I can confidently finish the figure without bothering to go for shading.

I see, that you prefer to start with a quite detailed perspective foundation from neat boxes, and it makes sense to me that you prefer that methodic approach. I don't draw out a very neat foundation for figures very often. I kinda have internalized enough of one to wing it most of the time, and when I feel that my drawings become weirder than I prefer, I occasionally discipline myself by drawing a dozen actual foundations.

But I did experiment a bit with Reilly abstraction for portrait drawing, and, absolutely, trying to really combine an elaborate foundation with timed drawing is like trying to learn juggling with 20 kg dumbbells. It might be theoretically possible to do, and would certainly look impressive as heck, but the outcome seems uncertain, and the mere attempt may be dangerous to your (mental) health.

In the end, learning to draw for me is like learning home repair. It isn't a single skill, it is about learning what tools exist, what tools can do which jobs. and which tools fit your personal goals best.

I think the fascination with "fluid and dynamic lines" versus "stiff lines" is a strange and badly defined topic. I get it on the very basic beginner level, what drawabox teaches, translated as "don't accidentally chicken scratch" (unless you know what you are up to and consciously decided to chicken scratch for aesthetical reasons).

On advanced level, the only big name I found, that is actually trying to give a coherent definition of what the different between "fluid" and "stiff" ought to be seems to be Mike Matessi, and I have two big beefs with him: The one, more obvious and immediate one, his english descriptions of what he does sound like a foreign language to me, and the one more fundamental one, which probably also causes the first one, is a throwaway line from one of his interviews: "Yes, off course I learnt all the boring perspective stuff in art school, like everyone else did, but now..." Well, Mr Matessi, I think the reason your method works for you might be those boring times at art school, that actually not e v e r y o n e had the privilege to attend.

Just grinding 10 second drafts definitely aren't the silver bullet to get there (and isn't something even Mike Matessi would recommend). And I definitely had requests for critique here from people who just drew very neatly and cleanly, and then felt bad about their lines being "too stiff", .... and I don't get where the problem is.

Similar thought on this video:

To me it translated mostly into how hard it is for Peter Han, after a distinguished career of 20 years working 9 to 5 (plus definitely crunch times and overhours) as a professional artist, to break out of his mold. And yes, he is definitely a fantastic artist, and his dedication to still be willing to search out an area, where even he risks making mistakes is inspiring. Doesn't change the fact though, that I personally lack at least 2 decades of drawing experience to come even close to the mold, that he attempts to break out of.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on April 19, 2024 9:30pm.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on April 19, 2024 9:46pm.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on April 19, 2024 10:05pm.

Sounds about right, and most importantly it seems to work for you, as the result is convincing. It conveys a lot of information efficiently, which gives the viewer that pleasant feeling of quick recognition.

Only little caveat, the "all" in "all figure studies" is a bit of an overgeneralization, just because there are quite a number of different techniques, styles or priorities someone else could have when figure drawing. I have seen some people on youtube start their drawings in ways that looked at first glance extremely weird to me, and nevertheless end up with astonishing results.

Idon't know, sorry if I find that a little bit funny, but how do you expect timid people to express their timidity in a more appropriate way?

I think the #1 natural expression for shyness is to not react at all. After all, all kind of reactions have to be interpreted and validated by someone else, and then those reactions can potentially be regarded as dumb or patronizing or unhelpful or silly or...... and that is what timid people are afraid of.

I have been reading your posts on this forum a bit, and I think a part of your artistic problem is a self fulfilling prophecy loop based on your anxiety about your own self worth and your expectation.

To explain what I mean, I'll contrast with my own drawing style. I think one aspect that characterizes my drawings is, that I always very quickly jump to the conclusion "Aaah, that's good enough, let's start doing something else". So I get a lot done, and I have a 95% experience with a lot of subskills, and if all of that comes together the end result can occassionally be impressive, BUT... there is also always that rough and dirty and unfinished feel to whatever I do, because there is never a real 100% in the mix. And it doesn't bother most people a lot, and people who give me critique often tell me that it looks bold and confident and carries emotional weight. Which is true, but it still bothers me personally a bit, that I don't have a real choice in the matter. For me, getting my lines to really look smooth and pretty, or cute, or really clean, or "girlish", or diligent, seems just outside of my grasp, because at every step on the way, I get to "Aaargh, that's good enough, let's do something else" just way too early.

For you on the other hand "That's good enough" never seems to be even possible. You start with sky high expectations about how every result has to look, and if you don't exactly reach it, you despair and beat yourself up publicly for it. And when you start your next drawing instead of focusing 100% on actual drawing, you are at least 50% already in the process of self-critiquing every dot you left on the paper, and start overcorrecting and then overcorrecting the overcorrection. Which actually lowers the resulting quality instead of improving it.

That said, your actual results aren't nowhere near being as horrible as you seem to perceive them. You are actualy a good draftsperson, and your results show that you improved a lot over what a complete noob would produce.

Now, from some experience with anxious people in my life, I know that trying to help them can run into a lot of risks. If you just tell them "Don't be anxious", no matter how soothing you intended that to be, the reply may just be "Now that is just rude. I can't change who I am."

If you instead come up with exercises for them to lower their anxiety, then they will just become anxious over whether they did the exercises correctly.

If you feel defeated and tell them to search help from someone else or to adress their issue on their own, they will feel rejected.

I mean, in this case you asked someone a question, that they had no answer to, and so they chose not to answer, and you are reading into that that you broke some unspoken rule, and now everybody might hate you for it? And if they wouldn't secretly hate you, they would have found a somewhat more appropriate way to respond?

I remember a conversation either with you, or with someone with almost the identical user name, which quite abruptly ended with me being told "I heard everything you said already a thousand times, and I already told you, that I am not interested in that, how dare you keep saying that!" and a threat to be blocked. This wasn't a response that was especially inviting to carry on a conversation, and furthermore, it did not change my conviction, that my answers were still correct and actually the best possible answers to the questions that were asked. If you ask questions, you have to live with people either giving no answers, or other answers than you wished for.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on April 19, 2024 9:55am.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on April 19, 2024 10:35am.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on April 19, 2024 10:49am.