Forum posts by balance

hello yotastrejos

nice drawings, your detail work seems to match up pretty well with the reference points you've highlighted in your drawings - i'm not super clear on what you mean by learning the landmarks but from looking at your drawings i assume it has something to do with identifying joints or other large body structures.

as i've done before, i want to recommend the guided practice that this site offers. it doesn't have to be followed religiously, but the varying drawing duration really makes you focus on different things. i think your "landmark" method is probably helpful in its own way, but you need a variety of perspectives and practice methods to get better.

looking at your pictures, it seems as though the points you're focused on are pretty close to their reference counterparts, but the form as a whole is pretty far off. this is most likely a result of being too focused on the details rather than the core of the pose, and this is what shorter practice sessions are really good at emphasizing. since you don't have lots of time to take in the details, you're forced to pick a few general forms, usually the spine and maybe some limbs. when you do this at first, your drawings will be pretty unweildy, but don't give up! remember, you're just comparing what you draw to the overall structure, so your drawing doesn't have to be very good. honestly your first attempts in the 30 second range should probably only focus on the spine. 1 line, no erasing, try to get it right, move on to the next one. it may seem simple, but if you're trying to place that line in 3d space in your head, even that one part of the body can take a while to master.

once you're used to doing these quick assessments of form as a whole, try to work them into your longer sessions where you're learning landmarks, and you'll find that having a general frame to hang all of your detailed pieces on will help make your drawings come together as cohesive wholes.

have fun practicing!

hello siwead

this is a nice gesture drawing that communicates a lot of movement and form.

i think the main problem here (as you say) is the time constraint, though i don't think in the way you imagine.

first of all, if you're self conscious about how your practice pieces look, then compare them to your own pieces and spend some time thinking about how your drawings have improved. the size of the improvement can be as small as you like - maybe you're just working on drawing straight vertical lines, maybe circles, maybe a specific body part and its constituent curves. there's always something to be learned from how your drawings change. if you find yourself panicking a bit less, then feel free to compare your drawings to ones that you consider high quality, or maybe even the reference image itself. there are lots of levels of practice.

second, if you're getting paralyzed by complexity, maybe you're thinking of too much at once. this site has a really solid explanation of a progressive practice session (short practice first, then long) that i think is a good framework on which to model more flexible practice. the key takeaway is that the time constraint is there to get you to focus on different levels of detail at a time. the shortest practice sessions only give you time to interpret the core of the pose, maybe even just the spine, then as you get into longer and longer sessions, you can start to consider maybe the orientation of the limbs, the hands and feet, then the smallest appendages, folds of skin, facial expressions, etc. i wouldn't take the time restraints this site mentions as canon, but they're a good starting point, and if you hit a point where you're getting paralyzed by placing a line wrong, it might mean that you're giving your brain time to look at details that are small and not relevant to the level of detail you're considering.

as an example, if i were practicing drawing different perspectives of an object on a table, let's say my shoe, i wouldn't start with practicing the entire shoe from each point of view, but rather i would start with a defining shape or line and how that changes based on where i'm looking - maybe it's a bounding box, maybe it's a line that runs down the tongue of the shoe, maybe it's a basic wedge that represents the foot in the shoe - regardless of what i chose, i would start with that simple feature then add smaller ones in each longer practice session. your average tree is the perfect example - short practice sessions only care about the trunk, the center of gravity and structure, but as you move further into detailed practice, smaller limbs and eventually leaves make it into the picture.

if i were you i think i would limit the bulk of my practice to mostly very short drawings, maybe even 30 seconds or less, with a few longer sessions once you've warmed up. not only will this help you get your eye in and help you learn the core structures that you're drawing, but it'll actually get you into the habit of doing that with every drawing, not just the short ones. i found that my own figure drawing improved a lot once i started warming up and treating each drawing as a sequence of increasingly detailed studies, starting always with the guiding gestures.

good work and happy practicing :)