Hi, Idon't know. I also think your models look great.
The tutorial here is decent, but quite short and toned down. I personally found great instructive videos on
proko.com . The Human Figure Foundation course more or less follows the same basic principles as the tutorials here, but way more in depth, and explaining every step in short videos. There is a free version, and a paid version, but basically all the essential concepts are included in the free version. The paid version for me is more like a way to show your appreciation and getting a bit of bonus content for it. I highly recommend it.
About the images in wheelchairs: if you aren't interested in drawing an image, just click on the fast forward button. If you feel an image comes up annoyingly often, you can also block it either temporarily or constantly.
About the practicing or not practicing: what other options exist to get better? I could only think of praying for divine inspiration, but then I am unfortunately atheist. So the question can't be whether to practice or not, but only how to find the best way for yourself to practice. And yes, that is also a skill, that improves with practice.
My advice on testing out which way of practicing works for you:
a) ask around what other people do, get a feeling of what methods are on the market.
b) chose one that looks promising, set yourself a few conditions, Like, OK, I'll spend an hour per day for 6 weeks on doing this, or, OK, I will follow this course through to the end.
c) absolutely important: keep your first botched results for record, then after you are done with what you wanted to do, compare them with your final results, so you get a feeling of what changed in your style. It is a natural tendency for people to have their ambitions grow at the same or even a faster pace then their skills, which can give yourself the false impression, that you did not improve at all. Keeping your older stuff for comparison can somewhat help to counter that tendency.
d) once you are done with a few tutorials or courses and get the hang of how practice impacts your skill, start exploring your taste. What is it that you specifically would like to be able to do differently? Can you come up with ways to break it down into simpler parts, that you can practice individually? That is basically exactly what those tutorials do for you, and the natural growth path for an artist is to eventually be able to design their own practices.
I came for example for myself up with a game of drawing one detail in my sight in a recognizable way, but with as few lines as possible. That is so far a game to play by myself, I did it repeatedly for quite a time, and it became a practice, that improved my eye for interesting shapes.
My current practice plan is to go through the different head abstractions of Loomis, Reilly, Huston, Hampton and Brigman, repeat the basic construction until I can do them without looking up the intermediate steps from a script, then try to apply them to drawing from a template instead of from imagination. I don't know yet, what it will eventually teach me, but it whets my appetite.
You can get inspiration for what to practice by watching people debate and explain the different concepts involved in art, but beware of the consumer trap: It only counts as inspiration, if it leads to you actually drawing more. You wont get better at drawing from spending all day listening to people, or reading learned pamphlets.
e) make a habit of keeping some basic drawing tools in reach. So if you see something or hear something, that gives you an idea about what you could draw, your threshold to follow that urge is as low as possible. And the more often you follow that urge to draw, the more natural it will feel to just start drawing.
f) don't think of your drawings as master pieces. 99% of what you draw won't be exceptional at all. Those are just wood shavings, that fall in an endless stream from your workbench. The one piece you are really working at, is to hone your skills. Sometimes you will produce something, that really surprises yourself. Certainly keep those around, but don't beat yourself up if you can't immediately reproduce them. Nobody can be constantly exceptional, but if you keep honing your skills, at some level of practice the stuff you consider to be flawed and trashy will look exceptional to other people.
g) a final warning, to myself as much as to anyone reading this: honing skills is rewarding, once you get the hang out of it, but don't try to reduce art to one specific set of skills. One example for me is PeterDraws on youtube. I couldn't rate his skills in figure drawing or perspective, but watching him do what he does, he certainly is one heck of an artist, and watching him draw makes my pen hand itch to try something similar.
Idon'tknow
10 months ago.
Aunt Herbert
edited this post on December 18, 2023 11:14pm.
