Forum posts by Kim

What an excellent start and an ambitious goal! I commend you heartily. :)

My advice would be to pick a goal that is much more specific than "improve as much as possible." This is a very fuzzy and hard to measure goal, and doesn't give your brain much to focus on.

A more specific goal might be, "Use a wider range of pencil values for rendering" or "gain a deep understanding of all the joints in the toes"

You could have different goals per day, but make sure it's not as nebulous as "improve" or "improve at drawing"

Often, when you have finished your daily practice, you will review at the end and think, I really struggled with X aspect of this, or I'm not satisfied with X part of these drawings. Rephrase whatever that was as a goal, write it on a post it note, and stick it on your monitor for the next day's practice! :)

I would suggest starting with the 30 minute class mode and drawing what you see, with a specific goal like "Today, I will just try to focus on the way that legs fit into hip sockets in the real world."

Then, follow with 10 - 15 minutes of drawing without a reference, trying to remember what you learned during your study from real photos. Repeat every day or every other day!

2 to 6 hours is an unrealistic amount of practice time for anyone who isn’t paid to practice. Even many college students studying fine art don’t get that much practice on a truly daily basis.

Make sure you’re putting in 15 minutes of focused practice every single day. By focused practice, I mean always have a specific goal in mind before you put pencil to paper, as detailed in this article: https://line-of-action.com/focused-practice-an-exercise-for-real-improvement-in-33-days/

15 minutes per day will at least keep your brain focused on the task of making new and better connections regarding these skills.

Then, add in a few days in the week when you will do longer practices; 30 minutes, an hour, two hours, whatever is realistic.

Unfortunately, your links don’t work for me so I can’t give more specific feedback, but I wanted to provide some comfort that meaningful progress IS possible without needing to devote your entire life to improving.

I don't know of one, but we'd like to add one ourselves in the relatively near future. We've been slowly banking images for quite some time!

Okay, so it was *late* 2016, but the wait is over! This feature has arrived, you can now pick any number of seconds to see each image. :)

We're actually experimenting with a new setup that might make custom times possible, both in regular mode and in class mode. So fingers crossed, early 2016. :)

Awesome, thank you so much for contributing these! :D

Aww, thanks for saying! :) That makes me very happy.

That's a huge step up!

One thing I notice is that you are drawing the torso as a shape that goes from shoulder to hips in about 90% of these drawings. I would encourage you as you continue practicing to work on recording JUST the rib cabe -- that might mean a second shape within your "full" torso shape, or it might mean replacing the current torso shape with a just-ribcage shape. Either is fine, so long as you are training yourself to find the ribs.

The reason I recommend this is that there are these two major structures in the trunk of the body, the hipbones and the ribcage, and they are inflexible. You can rotate them all over the place and see them in different positions and angles, but in reality they don't change that much. But then there's this super important several inches that separates ribcage and hipbones where there are no wrap-around bones. This area is quite flexible and changes shape constantly as the tilt of hips or chest changes, bringing the two major bone structures closer or further apart.

Knowing where the ribcage actually begins and ends and where the more squishy bits live can help oodles in composing very dynamic and active poses, and held you understand how to more realistically shade your figures.

Keep it up! :)

Hi John!

There's some articles on how to use the 30 second window to practice basic concepts here:

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/

Also, see my recent rant here on why you're probably doing just fine in that 30 seconds even if all you produce is a scribble: https://line-of-action.com/forums/topic/can-i-get-some-advice-for-figures/#post-4899

Hope these help. :)

Love it, Yarnick! I can definitely tell who each of the models you were rendering were.

Here's mine so far:

Thank you so much for the recommendations, Simon! Looking forward to checking those out. :)

Awesome! I hope to post a first batch tomorrow. :) Can't wait to see some of yours!

I think people get caught up in needing to produce a "sketch" in each window of time, and to many a "sketch" is actually a semi-complete picture (although perhaps without color).

Almost no one can actually get a "complete" drawing done in 30 seconds. That's actually sort of the point -- by giving you such a short window of time, you are forced to make some incredibly strict decisions about priorities. It demands that you prevent yourself from getting sucked into the "interesting" or "fun" details that leap out at you when you look at an image and instead absorb and capture the direction and energy of the complete figure as quickly as possible.

If all you get in your 30 seconds is a single line that defines the flow of the energy/the weight of the pose, that is okay. That is a success. If you get a few "bubbles" down that define where the hips and torso are in relation to one another, that is also a success.

You do not need to have something that is recognizable to another person at the end of those 30 seconds. You DO need to try and make a clear decision about what you see in that pose AS A WHOLE, and make one or more marks on your paper that record that decision. These are not drawings you're going to put on the wall, these are exercises in perception that you do to "warm up" and put yourself in the right state of mind before you attempt those longer poses.

There is no mistake more common in newbie artists than to get stuck in the "details" trap, to leap immediately to what is "fun" or "interesting" or what they think will make them "better" in the eyes of others, diving into shading or spending minutes or hours painstakingly rendering a particularly pretty set of eyes or hands only to discover an hour later that that beautiful detail is out of proportion with the rest of the body, or at a bizarre angle that disrupts the flow of the pose, etc. etc. It takes a more seasoned eye to be able to resist working in detail and instead start with much more generality.

The 30 second warmups, and 1 second warmups, before the class mode takes you on to longer poses (where you are more likely to come up with more recognizable sketches), are there to try and make you approach those longer poses with the same eye for seeing the whole, for putting details in the context of a larger line and flow.

My advice if you are worried that your 30 second drawings don't look like anything: Stop worrying. Start putting a single line down that captures the direction of the spine. If you have time, bubble in the placement/angle of the hips, ribcage and head. If you have more time, add some lines for arms and legs. Don't have time? No problem. You're learning more than you realize.

Hi IronJeremy!

I'm not sure what kind of unwritten rules you are concerned about. The only ones I can think are that if you are asking for critique, make sure you aren't defensive; receive the advice you get as a gift rather than an attack.

Here is an article we have about getting the most benefit from critique: https://line-of-action.com/benefiting-from-critique/

Here's another about giving useful critique: https://line-of-action.com/giving-good-critique/

Do these help at all? :)