Mensajes en el foro por Aunt Herbert

One thing that struck me is, that most of the photographers have their individual style of posing and lighting, and sometimes I wish there would be a button to just depict photos from a specific photographer (which obviously would only be possible for photo studios who have submitted a sufficient number of images).

Some of the image styles allow for, or even beg for, testing out a specific drawing style, which just might make little to no sense with references from another photographer.

You are often 90% there, but you would benefit bigly from finding especially a foundation for how the hips work, and for how ribcage, neck and shoulders go together.

Topmost drawing is top notch. One could debate whether a different drawing style could bring out the figure more dramatically, but any criticisms would be purely in the range of choice and taste. Then the lowest drawing, your shoulders and hips just lose symmetry in a way a human body can't and wouldn't work.

To get an idea for the torso, I would start drawing a bunch of figures from a regular upright front, side or 3/4, standing approx up right.

As foundation for the head, you can use basically a circle with a jawline.

The ribcage is an upright standing egg, with the top at the neck, and the lower curve of the egg cut off at the lowest rib bone (in an inverted v-line towards the sternum from the front, joining the spine almost horizontally in the back).

The shoulder apparatus sits on top of the ribcage. Most important is the bone that is the clavicula in the front and forms the shoulder blades in the back. It starts from the center top of the ribcage, has a bit of mobility of its own, and is usually well visible on nude or scantily clad torsos, as this bone has generally little muscle or fat tissues covering it. At it's other end is the joint where the arm bones start, with a few very compact muscles around it.

For the hips your main concern is to make sure, that the joints where the thigh bones start are in a rather fixed position symmetrically to each side of the spine. As a shortcut for the foundation you could either just draw a piece of underwear, a slip, which has a relatively simple form, that is easily reproducable and shows most important infos about the hip, or you could use a box around the entire buttox, and think about the thighs as cut-outs from this box. Looking for the crotch is the usual method to determine the center of the hips.

The throughline through head, shoulder, hips is the spine, and its range of mobility dictates prettty much which poses a body can take. A common beginner's mistake with the spine is to overestimate the distance between hip and ribcage and thus lengthening the torso, or to "straighten" the spine by underestimating the angle the masses have to each other.

If you get used to arranging these bony masses consistently to form the foundation for your poses, your random inconsistent mistakes will pretty much disappear. The mental trick is to stop observing the body purely from the shape of its surface features, but getting used to imagining where and in which position the underlying bone structures would be, and how they produce those shapes you see on the surface. This foundation provides you with a hierarchy of proportions, and thus reduces the amount of observations and measurings you can do wrong.

If you take artistic liberty with other features of the body most casual viewers won't even notice, but if you get the proportions of these basic torso structures wrong, you are headed straight into uncanny valley.

Yes, he definitely has published books. Just as a decision making aid for whether it is worth buying one, you could start by taking a look at this mini series:

where he explains his ideas. There are more videos of him and people who follow his method online, that show the frankly incredible results he gets from this.

Also, you succeeded in re-sparking my own interest in him, so I'll watch the videos, too, and see if I can maybe be less brainnumb this time.

My own immediate instinct would be to still push you towards form and proportion, but I am not the truthinator incarnate, especially not in regards to the artist you want to be. I think I can help you out by namedropping Mike Matessi and his force drawing method. He is definitely the current superstar in regards to line fluidity. The results he and his pupils achieve with the method are definitely top notch, I just personally won't be able to share much experience with what he does or how it works, because for me a lot of the english words he produces turn into a foreign language.

If you would be willing to dig a bit deeper into that side of the art, and then share some practical insights when critiqueing my stuff, I would be eternally grateful to you.

OK, first observation: the skill level you show with this sketches is rather inconsistent. It kinda ranges from, "OK, I'll start explaining from first baby steps" to, "Ah, no, that is actually decent" to "Wow, that one looks pro" (the skier made me think that).

Sometimes you nail it, sometimes you are a mile off with the proportions. So, you need to develop a functioning method to measure proportions. And I am not talking about holding a brush in front of you with a straightened arm and a goofy face, but something that consistently works, fast, and in any kind of environment you happen to be drawing in.

How about cheating? You don't actually measure, you learn some proportions by heart, by repeatedly drawing them a lot. That obviously only can work on stuff, that repeatedly actually HAS the same proportions, but luckily human faces and human bodies are generally similar enough to each other to just grind their proportions by heart.

First guy who came up with that cheat was famously Leonardo da Vinci, and he was really thorough with measuring a looot of proportions. Luckily for us, some time has passed since then, and generations after L. d. V. spent a lot of time and thought into how to economically memorize the important stuff.

For memorizing the proportions of the face and head, nowadays everybody cites a guy named Andrew Loomis, a professional illustrator who lived from 1892 to 1959. His main work was probably "Creative Illustration", but I think his most famous one is called "Fun with a Pencil". Like the name implies, it was basically a small side project to sell his knowledge about illustrations as entertainment project to hobbyists and families. It contains the famous Loomis head, a fun little way to learn how to draw human faces within 15 minutes. And it actually works. Draw a circle-ish thingy here, cut it off like that, draw another circle like so, et voila, this looks unmistakenly like a human face.

Good thing, that was long enough ago, so all copyrights have expired, and you can check the pdf of those books for yourself on the interwebs.

Now, a Loomis head isn't really a measuring device, and Loomis himself didn't use that method for his own professional work, a Loomis head is "an abstraction". It teaches idealized proportions of an idealized human head. It is purely a method to draw from imagination, and all that Loomis guaranteed was, that you would be able to draw "some" human head, not necessarily that specific one of the exact person that you want to draw a portrait of. But, if you keep drawing a dozen or so daily for a good time, you will develop a spidey sense for when the proportions in your own drawing start to leave the range of what is plausible on a human being.

Loomis-heads are probably the simplest abstraction for the human face, and if you image search for them, you will find a slew of very abstracted once, that literally look like robot heads. Those are the most useful to actually grind, and if you ever see a clip of a professional artist starting to draw a human head, there is at least a 66% (or so) chance, that the first few lines they put on paper will be exactly that.

There are other abstractions of the human face. Reilly (more about him later) adds additional lines and circles (rhythms, as he loves to call them) to indicate the muscles around the mouth and at the cheeks. Avaro came up with an abstraction of every possible plane on the human face, and you can buy full-sized Avaro heads, which are especially useful to reproduce the shadows a human head will have under variable lighting. George Bridgman, Steve Huston, and Michael Hampton have come up with abstractions, too, constructing the head from squares or from triangles...

You can invest time into each one of these people, and it will be time well spent. On the other side, you can find very honest statements from serious artists on youtube, that tell you, they feel like they spent too much time on that, and wish they had spent time otherwise. Learning at least one abstraction of the head will help you out, if you find yourself having a hard time to figure out, where exactly this or that feature of the face should go in your drawings.

Now that is the head, what about the human body? There is off course the method that this site is named after, "Line of Action", and if you do the tutorial here there will be a few short sentences about how to find the "line of action" first, then "the main masses" (which generally correspond with head, ribcage and hips". None of those snippets is wrong, I just feel like they are awfully short, which is probably a necessary consequence of webpage design. I personally learned a method, that is at least very similar from this course: https://www.proko.com/course/figure-drawing-fundamentals/overview which takes a lot more time to explain the concepts. There is a premium version of the course, but I recommend doing the free version first, and deciding whether what you learned from it was worth it to pay the sum Stan Prokopenko wants for the premium. All the essential infos are in the free version, the premium version seems to be more of an elaborate buy-me-a-coffee button, that gives you a few extra videos of Stan applying his lessons to a specific model. I don't know the exact history of that method.

The essence I found in this method: If you understand how the ribcage, the shoulders, the hips and the head relate to each other, you can draw convincing bodies. If you mess up, everybody who never held a pencil in their life will be able to tell you: this looks wrong.

A second famous and I guess related method is by a guy named Reilly who has a whole system of rhythms, that teach you how to divide the body, and the face, and basically everything up. I think if you here the name "Watts atelier", they are basically the living descendants that carry on Reilly's tradition.

I'll end my rambling wall of text here, I hope there were some interesting tidbits within it.

I am afraid there is a problem with your link. I get a 404 page not found from imgur.

OK, I think you have developed a decent understanding of the poses the human body is capable of. Especially the sketches were you focus on the underlying foundation seem very natural and convincing in proportions and range of motions.

But when you switch from foundation to final figure, you suddenly become insecure about proportions... maybe try starting with foundation anyways, but draw them very lightly or with a hard pencil that leaves little traces, then draw your outline over it with a softer = darker pencil?

And one other aspect, that holds you back is line quality. That you draw the same line several times until you are confident with the results doesn't matter so much for your foundations, but it looks insecure if it happens on your final outlines. I would recommend checking out drawabox.com, at least the first three or so chapters, and generally to adapt a technique called "shadowing". You plan your line beforehand, whether it is curved or straight, and where exactly the ends are supposed to go, and then you move your pencil several times along the preplanned line, until you see "a shadow" of that line before your inner eyes, and only then do you draw the actual line. The result should be, that you can do the outlines with perfect, confident lines, and don't have to "search" those lines leaving traces on the paper.

It takes quite a bit of discipline to get used to that, as it will probably break your drawing routine quite a bit. If you watch any video where Stan Prokopenko actually draws something, you can see his hand twitch a bit before every line he puts on paper, as he definitely preshadows each and every line. I personally tried to pick it up, too, but I am generally a bit too sloppy and undisciplined to really get used to it, but even practising it ocassionally helped me get my lines way cleaner. If you get to the point, where each outline and each feature is presented by one single clean line, the overall impression of your drawing will immediately jump up quite a bit.

Then on the longest pieces you added a bit of shadows by improvising a few scribbles about where you thought the figure needed to look darker. I don't think that improved the figure, instead it reinforced the problem with your somewhat shakey line quality.

Now getting shadows on a figure looking good is a bit of a science in itself, or maybe two or so sciences overlapping. There are a bunch of websites and videos that explain how to shade an egg. You should watch some of those, to understand what values are, what a terminus is, why reflected light is a shadow value and why medium light is a bright value and why all shadow values always have to be darker than all bright values to produce clean brights.

I know that sounds like a confusing warble of words, but if you use those terms as search words, and looks for eggs, you will find good explanations.

And science part 2 of shadows: You must find a way to distinguish shadows from lines. Shadows do have outlines, shapes, usually along the terminus, and it is often okay to draw those outlines and shadow shapes as lines. But if you just want to fill in an area with a given value, and randomly scribble into it, the eye will pick up those scribbles as additional information and will be confused, so you have to find a way to "camouflage" those scribbles, so the eye knows that is just the value of an area, not a bunch of additional details. Easiest method is with soft graphite or coal, where you can just softly rub over the area to smooth it out. If you are using ink or harder graphite, or just want to demonstrate your skill by NOT smoothing stuff out, you need to learn hatching and crosshatching. You present the area with a pattern of parallel lines, that is so regular, that the eye knows, it isn't a bunch of extra details, but just the darkness value of the area. Learning hatching or crosshatching is probably science 3 or 4 or 5 or something, as deciding the direction of the hatching lines is somewhat close to black magic.

For now, reading up on how shadow values work, and paying attention to keep your shadows smooth, not scribbled, and with clear seapartion between values should be enough for your next task,.... after you improved your line quality.

About your proportion mistakes... I still have them occur on some of my drawings, they become less over time with experience with the human figure, but if you want to push faster, there are also quite a number of different measuring techniques, that you could research and practise separately. I use a half-remembered mix of several, that I picked up over time, and do a lot of it subconciously anyways, until I annoy myself with wrong proportions a lot and task myself with retraining one or the other thing.

OK, feedback #1: Do an old man a favor: check your scanning software, I am certain there is somewhere a button that let's you adjust contrast and brightness. Rip up the contrast to 100%, the page will probably turn white when you do that, then lower the brightness until the drawing reappears.

Ideally you should chose a bright enough paper and a dark enough pencil, so that isn't always necessary and you can control the amount of contrast you want while drawing and don't have to always mess around with it while scanning, but the combo of dark paper and timid lines makes it really hard to see, what you are even doing for a pair of old eyes.

The lines, that I do see look like you are on a good trajectory. You are focused on finding essential lines that show the gesture, and design and execute them cleanly and confidently, and you even know how to exaggerate the poses for quite a bit of extra swagger.

I think you are at a point with your short sketches, where basic beginner advice reaches its limits, and you have to make some artistic decisions about where you want to go next as an artist yourself.

If you want to start really celebrating your lines, and keep to a caricature style, you could try switching to an ink brush. Pentel GFKP Japan worked best for me, not too expensive and reliable ink flow. Ink brush gives your line weight a lot of variation, (which might take a few attempts to get used to, but you'll figure it out) which will make your good line quality really apparent to the viewer.

If you want to go photorealistic instead, it's probably time to read up a bit on theory about how light and shadow works, and get used to doing longer drawings.

Another step into the wild would be to come up with short stories or jokes and try to do short series of three panels with a continuous narrative, to get used to drawing from imagination. Your foundation in drawing from observation should serve you well, but it is still a separate skillset.

My advice would be to try to improve your line quality, so you can find one long line instead of scratching a ton of attempts. Now, that is easier said than done, and will take some practice. To understand the concept of line quality I recommend drawabox.com, at least the first few lessons before it goes into actual perspectivic drawing.

And then, do a lot of short drawings, a minute or so, but still try to take your time for every line. That will lead to a lot of badly measured figures with really wonky proportions. Don't try to correct them, just do the next one, but try to focus on controlling every line. You won't get your figures "finished", that is OK, that is not what your goal is. You will feel a lot of frustration while doing that, and that is a good thing. Frustration is the emotion that occurs, when your cortex tells their neurons, that they don't do their job the way they are supposed to, in other words, that is how learning a new skill feels on a physical level.

You can look into some short measuring techniques, like finding three dots on the reference in a straight line, just to compare distances, or looking for vertical or horizontal relations, but a lot of measuring will eventually have to run in the background of your mind, while you focus on a thousand other things while drawing. Repeatedly drawing the human body is also kind of a measuring technique, as you get used to the proportions. But for now, your measuring just isn't there yet, and it is more useful to accept that and improve the line quality instead. Your figures will look wonky for quite a time to come, but if they are at least drawn with clean, long, and decisive lines they will already look a lot better.

Oh, btw, found the title of the old-timey book. "Drawing with Pen and Ink" by Arthur L. Guptill. Can be found as free pdf on the webs if you are curious. Doing the exercises from that book is also straight at the border between stupid and genius to me. I would say the skills that book teaches are nothing anyone expects from an artist nowadays in the digital age, but trying to practise them, and observing your own experience and progress has kind of a low-burn psychedelic component. Plus ofc, there are tons of incredible prints from accomplished masters of ink in that book, capable of lifting your vision of what is possible while crushing your self-esteem if you dare to think of your own skills in comparison.

With the time and discipline matter.... my dirty secret: having no life helps. I successfully survived on the dole without becoming homeless a while back, and I learned 2 lessons: Never pay money to be happy, and never pay money to find friends. And don't waste your life trying to earn more than you need, fight like heck if someone tries to make you. I ended up with a half-time job and an incredible amount of excess free time to get rid off, and free computer games get either boring or annoying after a short while. Learning to draw is perfect to fill the god-sized hole in my soul without having to self medicate with hard drugs or alcohol.

I am looking forward to see some more of your works, and I'll certainly add my 2 cents to them. May the ole spaghetti monster sprinkle your path with parmesan until we meet again!

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on March 20, 2024 2:13pm.

I think the word "appeal" is a bit touchy. My guess is: there are schools of art, long and complicated theories about which skills to train and what is real art, and what isn't. And then there are those madpersons, who don't give a dime about all that art theory and do something completely different, and everyone agrees, that is just interesting to look at. Off course, there are way more madperson, who don't give a dime about art theory, and their stuff is just boring as heck. The difference is called "appeal".

I think trying to systematically practice "appeal" is a fool's errand. That's like trying to find a course, that teaches you "success"! You will probably find a lot of such courses, but you can be guaranteed each and every one of them has been set up by a con, who tries to transform the content of your wallet into the content of their wallet.

OK, I thought a lot about the phenomenon, and I got kind of a theory about what happens with us, and how to deal with it.

First thing to realize: drawing isn't exactly one skill. Emphasis on the number. Not one, but a multitude of different skills. It starts with knowing how to sharpen a pencil, holding the pencil the correct way, drawing controlled lines with a decent quality, conceptualizing a drawing, learning how to measure proportions while drawing, identifying interesting 2D-shapes, understanding bodies in three dimensions, simplifying forms, getting used to common forms like the human figure or the face, understanding light and shadow, learning to differentiate shades and how to use them, ..... and so forth and so forth and so forth.

There is pretty much a separate tutorial for each of those individual subskills and probably a thousand more. Probably each of us has at least done one such tutorial, and probably quite a few more. Now, while doing a tutorial, at first it feels a bit awkward, but in a good tutorial the scope of artistic expression you have to focus on is quite tight, and you will see quick progress after a while. Then you try out more and more tutorials, and add more subskills to your general drawing skill. But now, you are no longer throwing one ball in a perfect curve, you are juggling a dozen or so.

Also, frankly, some of those subskills are just contradictory. There are about a thousand exercises to perfectly measure every dot on the reference and to perfectly copy it onto your page, be it proportions, shapes or darkness values, and then there are almost as many exercises to find a "looser", "more dynamic" way to draw, and that is only possible if you stop obsessing over every dot on the page.

So, we are juggling a dozen balls, and some of them drop by the side, and we don't even realize at first. And then, one day we look at our latest drawing and realize, that that one, and the last dozen we drew before that are just incredibly fugly. Which is a valuable, honest, aesthetically sound observation, but not really a craftperson's observation.

I think the real solution is to get better at self observation and self diagnosis. "Cool" and "Lame" just aren't useful categories for that. If you would try to give a child or a total beginner a honest and valuable feedback, you wouldn't just tell them "Your drawing sucks, git gud, nub!", even if that is your actual first impression. Instead you would first show your respect by appreciating what actually good qualities the drawing has, and there just isn't a single drawing in the entire world, that has no redeeming qualities at all. And then you would check your mental library for that catalogue of subskills, you encountered over time and think about which one would be most valuable to focus on for that specific artist.

So, part of our journey as craftsperson is to be able to identify the balls we dropped, so we can remember to pick them up again. "This drawing sucks" doesn't help, but "well, at long last I got the proportions correct, but my line quality is back to total chicken scratches" or, "OK, those lines are long and confident, but this was supposed to be a human figure, and those proportions look like something from an alien monster movie" are way more valuable.

Because we know what exercises we did to achieve that subskill, and once we realize, that we have been slagging, we can focus on retraining that. And the word "self" in self observation and self diagnosis is also somewhat important. Because if you just show me an image of your last drawing and ask me for advice, I will most likely tell you about the subskill, that is most present on my mind, and that will most likely be the one, that I am currently practicing. Which could by chance be the one fitting to the source of your disappointment, but it could as well be a totally different one, because we are different people on different journeys.

A practical example of my recent slump in quality: I realized, that my drawings were really falling below standards, that I easily passed long time ago. First attempt at self diagnosis didn't take very long: We had a really bad winter at my workplace, and I had to do tons of extra shifts to jump in for sick colleagues, so I felt constantly tired and exhausted and stressed out, and I did my daily practice with gritted teeth, not with real interest into quality, just to keep in the habit of drawing, and to remind me, that a universe beyond my stupid job exists. Under this circumstances it wasn't surprising, that the results looked ***, and once I realized that, I didn't worry for a while.

Now, the job situation has cleared up a bit, but somehow my drawings still were off, and it took me a while to realize the stupid detail I missed. When I started drawing I drew with graphite or charcoal. I did some tutorials about holding the pen more like a brush, that is at the end, and controlling it from my elbows and shoulders, and less like a first grader, who is leaning to write and barely controls its pen with its fingertips. Later on I switched to ink, and during this winter I returned to charcoal. What I really forgot about: charcoal pens are wooden pens, and you sharpen them by shortening them a bit. So over time the pen got shorter and shorter, and I retrained holding the remaining stub almost at the tip and drawing with my fingertips alone. Which feels natural, because that is the way I write, and like probably everyone else here, I learned to write before I really got into learning actual drawing techniques. It's the lazy way to draw for me, and it felt awkward and like a lack of control, when I first switched away from it, and it feels awkward and like a lack of control now, that I have to go through the motions and again get used to holding the g****m pen correctly.

This is one stupid ball I dropped, and now I have to pick it up again.

Self diagnosing your results is kind of a very important subskill in itself. It is trained by adding more insight into all the other different subskills you accumulate on your journey, and by occassionally remembering those that you trained a long time ago, and checking whether you still make use of them.

The notion of "Take a break from drawing"... I am wary of that. On the one side, it can absolutely work, especially if the problem that currently impacts your drawing quality the most is the sheer frustration about the low quality of results. This can become a vicious circle, and taking a break has decent chance of stopping that.

On the other hand, drawing daily is a valuable habit, that we want to keep. And if our #1 choice to solving problems, that we encounter within the habit, that we want to have, is taking a break from that habit, then "taking a break" can become a habit in itself, and "taking a break" is a habit to stay away from, because it can end the artists journey for good if it gets permanent.

So, the ideal way to fix an ongoing quality problem is to self analyse and understand which subskills you have to retrain.

If you just can't figure out which one that is, and your frustration grows so much that the frustration becomes a problem in itself, I think the second best way is to keep "practicing" every day, but completely change the content of that practice. Do something completely different than you used to do, change the medium, change the motive, change your style, and if you feel like you can't draw anything well, then start doing stupid stuff, like trying to draw as bad as possible for a while.

Also, don't just look at the skills, also look at yourself and your surroundings. From stupid things like "how long is my pencil" "how is the lighting" to more existential things like "where are my thoughts and what else is going on in my life".

Art is a journey, and we all will pass through bogs and landfills on our way to the peak at the horizon. But as long as we keep walking, that **** can't stop us.

I think I somewhat "conventionalized" my practises after getting deeper into drawing and doing some tutorials from dudes that actually knew how it works. Main influences were drawabox.com and https://www.proko.com/course/figure-drawing-fundamentals/overview, but also a lot of stuff that I either heard someone talk about on youtube or saw someone pull off on this here site.

But the experience you are getting from PPP is definitely valuable. Learning how to simplify complex forms, and learning how to start a drawing from the big forms instead of getting lost in details immediately is 99% of what most beginner tutorials are jumping through hoops to get into other people's heads. Well, maybe not 99%, but at least a solid 30% or so. And the experience to enjoy doing "stupid" things, and to just see what happens is probably at the core of most general creativity courses, for which people pay tons of monies.

Things I personally did and had fun with for some time:

-OK, I was quiet impressed by some old-timey book about drawing with ink and improving line quality, that Proko and Marshall had mentioned in one of their podcasts, but from which I sadly forgot author and title by now, but a good while I just spent time practising beautiful parallell straight and curved lines. It always felt hard to do and like I was making little progress, until I cleaned my room some day and found one of my first attempts at doing that, and realized how much I had actually improved in rather short time.

-I think I had a perfect streak of drawing daily on quickposes.com of over a year, but then the site had some organizational issues and was even down for some time, so I landed here, and am still struggling to get my streak of uninterrupted drawing beyond the 70 day mark.

-One "game" I came up with is line economy bingo. Ideally it should be played in an urban setting with several people, but I never found someone to play with, so I did it solo: Find any one object, detail or sight in the vicinity, don't tell anyone what you are looking at, and try to draw it, while counting every line via the CSI method. I stands for a straight line, C stands for a simple curve, and S stands for basically two opposing curves that meet - line an S, d'uh. Each one of those count as one single line, anything more complicated has to be broken down into individual lines and counted. The goal is to be the one that uses the least amount of lines to draw, what they see. If everyone else recognizes what that thing is, it counts as a "bingo".

The idea is, if you use very few lines to produce a recognizable shape, then a) you can focus very much on drawing each line especially beautiful, and b) you develop an eye for impressive and recognizable shapes.

-I got used to draw with a clipboard in my left and a pen or pencil in the right and spent quite some time "urban drawing". One especially daring attempt,... I was walking down the street, and whenever someone came towards me, I tried to memorize how they looked, then once they passed by, I tried to sketch them from memory. The results looked incredibly fugly, and I postponed the project until a future, when I would feel more confident with the human form.... well, spring is around the corner, if the weather isn't too bad, I might give it another shot soon.

-I spent quite some time "portraying" trees. So, not drawing nice symbols, that would easily be recognized as some tree, but actually drawing a specific tree, with the exact ways the branches and twigs and leaves are, like you would portray another person. Drove me nuts, but also taught me a lot about randomness and the problem with fractals. The original plan came from some childhood memory. A lot of people see faces in all kind of stuff, and children especially so, but for me it was so bad, that I was actually afraid of quite a lot of trees and walked quite long ways to avoid coming too close to them because the m****f**** faces in their twigs and branches looked reeeeeally sour and angry, and the way they waved madly in the wind didn't make it any better. I always wanted to be able to draw "that", so people would understand, what I was so scared about from those "harmless" trees.

-One project I tried about half a year ago, was to just learn the abstractions from Loomis, Reilly and some other guy, which name currently evades me, to get a perfect foundation for drawing the human head. Might take that up again, if and when the constant demand at work finally goes down a bit more.

I hope I didn't shock you with my wall of text. I love drawing, but I also love talking about drawing, and I am a big fan of any kind of stupid ideas in general, so if we can try to establish some conversation here, where we just brag or laugh about our latest fits of genius, I would be happy to post my 2 cents ever so often.

Well, that looks certainly interesting. For me personally, it's been a long time since I did digital drawings, I just do analogue and scan it in.

That said, PowerPoint is a peculiar choice. Yes, it has off course graphic options, but it is first of all a presentation software. Your works in a weird way have the charm of someone using a rolled-up newspaper instead of a brush to get color on their canvas. It produces results, and the fact that these results stem from a sub-optimal tool is obviously part of the design choices.

The boring and conventional advice on how to improve on your works would be to suggest using an actual graphic program. But that would off course ignore all the fun you are having with abusing PowerPoint.

I do remember a long time ago I toyed around with some CAD-program. I forgot the name by now, and I can't say I ever understood enough of it to do something actually useful with it, but it had a tool, that made toying around with Bezier curves quite intuitive, at least for me. I was member in a graphic novel/manga forum, where people regularly posted all kind of challenges and I answered to some of them with my Bezier curves comic strips.

The reaction was uniformly irritation: "Dude, that doesn't look like manga or marvels or anything, that looks like cheap 1980s videogames, why are you doing that to yourself?" I loved it, BECAUSE it looked like those videogames, but I didn't have the stamina to just keep it up versus zero positive reactions from anybody else.

I wish you better luck with your project, and well, you are doing a quite unique thing there, so maybe in hope of getting more of a conversation going, how about you try to say, improvise a mini-tutorial for what it takes to turn Powerpoint into a graphic program? How do you have to approach that, how do you conceptualize a piece and get it from start to finish?

Well, kind of. The timed classes are a practice tool, which allow to refine some stuff, but you also need to know what you want to work on, to get the best result with them.

Several people have different interpretations for what to do with that tool. Some people try to train to really get a completed drawing done within 30 seconds, and if someone just loves the challenge, and keeps at it... I have some people achieve incredible results with it, but I am not certain whether that really leads towards any particular advanced techniques..

My understanding of what the tool is best to train with, is the first lines of a drawing. Why would you want to train them separately? Because according to one drawing philosophy, most of the quality of the later drawing is decided by the quality of your first lines. And the short timer helps you to avoid waisting time on "polishing a turd", i.e. spending a lot of time to add more bells and whistles (or usually rather shades and corrections) to a flawed start, instead you better spend more time training to find a good start. For example, if you spend 15 minutes drawing and erasing and redrawing the same stuff, and then kind of draw some shadows over it, to make it somewhat look better and cover up obvious flaws, and it still looks crappy, you would have probably learned more by practicing your first lines 30 times in the same amount of time.

That method of drilling "quickies" comes with a theory of how to approach drawing a figure, and there is also a bit of a tutorial mentioning some concepts like line of action, and drawing the masses first to capture the pose, but it is extremely brief. I found this side: https://www.proko.com/course/figure-drawing-fundamentals/overview promotes a similar technical approach, but spends a loooot more time explaining the individual steps toward capturing a pose and constructing a human figure from it.

Besides the "classes", there is also the option to chose a certain timing and to stick with it, which may be more appropriate, depending on what you want to do. For example, I am convinced, that the shorties work well for figures, but don't work well for portraits, especially if you want to apply some common portrait techniques like Loomis or Reilly, as they just take at least 5-10 minutes to properly finish the initial construction.

However you use it, the site provides you with a selection of poses and references, and getting used to really "drill" your stuff, i.e. doing lots of repetition in a certain approach towards different references also made at least me more comfortable with daily training, and with not always planning ahead to creating the next masterpiece to hang into a museum and then be frustrated with the result, but to focus on watching myself try out and acquire a bit more of a technical approach to drawing.

Think of it like a benchpress in a gym. The benchpress itself doesn't make your muscles grow, and doing a single repetition on it won't either. But if you get used to regularly strain your muscles with it, you will see differences in your results.

BTW, the site quickpose.com has a similar selection of timed poses, if you start looking for more variety after a while, but it comes without a forum to ask questions.