Forum posts by Sanne

Hi Bovetta!

I'm not 100% what you mean. Do you have any examples of what you're doing to show us, and tell us what you're trying to improve about it? It's really hard to give good advice without examples, as they determine the kind of tips we can give. :)

Frawnix's video is very helpful though! Hope to hear back from you with some of your drawings. ;)

Hi scr0lls! Sorry I'm getting to this a little late, but I see quite a few sketches on your tumblr! :) Good going!

It's a really good idea to draw something every single day to help improve, but it may not be realistically possible to put in 2 solid hours a day. It's easy to burn out on and if something unexpected happens, you have no 'buffer' to catch up with. It can destroy your motivation really fast if you feel the big pressure of being behind on things.

Perhaps you could assign about 15-30 minutes to one or two days a week for quick gestures rather than a full 2 hours. This means that if something happens that puts pressure on your schedule, you can still take a day or two doing quick sketches before bed and meet your goal, keeping your motivation up and running.

How's it been going so far? :)

First off welcome to the site! :) Glad to have you with us!

I looked at your drawings and I think you're doing a great job with it so far. I'm a bit curious about your more polished works - it will help us gauge your skill level and figure out what kind of critique will benefit you the most.

You definitely captured the motion in the gesture drawings however, and that's a great first step. :) Keep it up!

One thing you may want to try is to bump your drawings up from stick figures to shape models. It will be of great use to you as a base to work from. By shape models, I mean defining the torso and hips in your gesture drawings on top of what you already have. Adding joints is also important to figure out how the limbs connect.

http://i.imgur.com/W0tTjbn.png

This is one of my gesture studies. If you compare them to yours, you will notice mine have extra shapes and joint areas.

If you haven't already, check out these articles:

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/

They will help you figure out how to advance your gesture drawings to include the things I mentioned above.

Like I said before, these gesture drawings are a great way to make a solid base to work off of. Quickly breaking down the body and putting it onto paper in simple shapes is a very common way for many great artists to start a drawing with. But if your base is missing things (such as joints or a torso and hips) it will make it more difficult. Get the base down, and it's ten times easier to make the final image come out great! :)

Please keep practicing and keep us up to date! If you have any other questions, fire them away. :) We'll be more than happy to help you however we can.

I think the problem you run into with that particular lady is that you're counting the legs. You should focus the spine line on the torso only. :) The spine doesn't guide the direction of the legs after all! They're separate limbs that can go in completely opposite directions.

http://i.imgur.com/8paBUtk.png

I didn't have a direct image of the photo you drew from, so I used your drawing as a guideline (I also apologize for the lack of proper proportions, I just wanted to focus on the motion line). I exaggerated the motion a little.

As you can see, the red line centers on the head, torso and the hips. I'm not counting the arms, not counting the legs or anything else.

Here are some more samples.

http://i.imgur.com/yEpHglO.png

Now I drew all three without a photo sample. I literally just drew random C-shaped lines and then made a pose from it. Perhaps that's something you can try to get more comfortable with it? It really helps to imagine a pose from just that one line to get an understanding of how to build on it. As you can see, the leg positions in no way determine where the spine line goes. If you can work up to that, you'll probably have a full understanding of how to work this and make it happen! :)

Is this helpful?

Welcome to the site! :)

What you want to focus on is creating solid foundations for your work. You can start doing in-depth, detailed anatomy studies and perfecting techniques, but if you lack the fundamental basics of motion and proportions, you're just going to end up swimming upstream.

I strongly recommend you focus on gesture drawings so that you learn to recognize the basic shapes of a body. Simplifying a body is a good way to become comfortable with it!

Check out these articles if you haven't already:

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/

If you can master gestures and practice on those first, the rest will be much easier to follow up with! Feel free to post your practice session results here, we will do our best to give you pointers and help you out. :)

Don't worry too much about proportions right now! Those look really good! I can definitely see there's more motion in your new gestures.

I am seeing some s-shaped lines in some gestures though. They might be throwing you off a little? S-shapes are not as fluid as simple C-shapes and can hamper the feeling of motion. I really see a difference in figures that have S-shape spine lines and C-shape spine lines, and the latter look better. Can you see that too? :)

I'm super confident that you can figure it out though! Practice makes perfect. :D You've already taken one step forward, and I'm certain many more will follow. Feel free to continue posting your practice sessions, I'll make sure to check in regularly and give you tips if you want them. :)

Another brief practice today after I finished up work!

http://i.imgur.com/CXqddSU.png

These are quite excellent looking! You have a great eye for detail and a good grasp on how to make effective use of pencil on paper. :) You're definitely going into the right direction here!

There are two things that stand out to me and are important for portfolio worthy works. I'll try to cover both for you.

1. Your attention to detail is a little distracting in some places. Especially in areas on the faces, above the eyes particularly, the skin looks really wrinkly. I think I understand what you're trying to do; shiny coats can have very stark contrasts between the dark and shiny parts, and horse faces have an uneven surface - it looks like you're trying to get these details worked in, but you get a little too enthusiastic and caught up in it.

I think in this case, less is more! It would benefit your drawings to make the foreheads look smoother. I don't know if you're using photo references. Do you draw what you see or are you drawing (even perhaps just partially) from memory? Do you understand how shading and lighting works, or do you only draw what you see and need a reference to get it right? Knowing how you work with this might help us help you more. :)

2. Horses are lovely creatures to study and draw (and even lovelier to ride and take care of!), but don't forget to broaden your horizons. If you go to a college or university, it is expected that you can produce diverse artwork and think outside the box. I don't know if you only draw horses or also focus on other things, but perhaps your next step can be to draw horses with backgrounds. Your drawings will come even more alive!

If you study diligently and make efforts to improve, these drawings can easily go into a portfolio. But if this is the only thing you draw, I do strongly recommend also studying humans, other animals and environments. You can also practice with colors in different mediums. It will increase your chances of getting accepted and start you off with a really solid base!

As for the difficulties with shading white, I think you did well. I don't have a lot of experience with shading white with graphite, but I do know that white has many *subtle* shades of grey. True white (from the paper itself often) is reserved for the brightest areas only.

https://line-of-action.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/animal-35-1306298476.jpg

Take a good look at this photo. The horse is white, but every shape of its body is defined by darker areas. Transferring this onto paper is a simple matter of doing the same thing you do with darker colored horses, but lighter. It's a matter of practice.

You can also use white pencil to highlight the brightest areas, but this is a matter of experimenting to see how that works with your style.

I recommend focusing on fully white horses to get a feeling for the way they're shaded before focusing on patches of white on horses with mixed colors.

I really hope this helps you out! If I'm unclear with something or you need more help, please let us know. :)

Hi gang! :)

After spending almost half a year without my trusty drawing tablet (my stylus kind of broke and my special someone was generous enough to replace it for my upcoming birthday) I've finally gotten around to drawing digitally again!

I missed it a lot, but I've also gotten rusty. I've doodled on paper before but it's a hassle as I lack a scanner and I don't fancy taking 20 photos to get a decent looking picture of 30 second gesture sketches. Now I set a new mission for myself: try to draw at least 20 gesture models a week (in however many sittings I can fit into my schedule).

Here are the first 7 of this week:

http://i.imgur.com/W0tTjbn.png

I drew the first two without reference to see if I could still moderately improvise gestures and capture motion without using models, and I'm mildly satisfied with it. I imagine my gesture drawings will improve once I get back in the saddle fully. :)

It's my goal (and motivation) to deliver 20 models to this thread every week, and eventually expand into including 10 minute drawings. Once I'm more used to this I'll move on to hands, feet, faces and animals and diligently deliver at least one page of sketches a week.

Feel free to leave comments and share your own! I'm not looking for critique or advice specifically, rather I want to stay motivated to push through with this every week. Posting here should do just that. ;)

Things can be slow around here, but I do my best to pop in every day now just to check if anyone's posted. :)

I fully understand the desire to draw 'perfect' shapes in everything. I promise you though, it's very liberating to let go and just draw. 30 second warm ups put you in a very open minded mood for when you work on longer sessions too.

Drawing the line on action through the 10 minute drawings sound like a good idea! That helps too. :)

Will you be coming back to follow up with us on the new drawings?

Hi Ashyp! :D

Good job on getting out there and working on your skills for improvement. It will open up a million new doors for you along the way, I promise. :)

Your 10 minute poses all look really good! I like that you tried to draw an actual rib cage to properly get the shape down, among other things. You build the image really well on top of that, keeping things proportionate. No issues here!

For the 30 second gesture practices, you mentioned yourself that motion isn't really present here. The reason why is very likely because it looks like you were focusing more on getting the shapes right, than paying attention to the motion of the model. While it really helped you out in the 10 minute pose study, your detailed basic shapes are your downfall in the 30 second warm up gestures. In 30 seconds, your main focus should be quick, sweeping lines.

The best way to do that is by drawing some very basic motion lines before you even start thinking about drawing shapes, as explained 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/

These articles are super useful. They will hugely benefit your 30 second gestures. It's okay to let go and not focus on getting decent looking shapes, or even anything that resembles a proper rib cage or hip bones. To be frank, those things are distracting unless your studies are at least 10 minutes long. Simple circles suffice. :)

I think if you start with the simple motion lines before drawing any shapes, you'll find your quick gesture drawings improving by a lot. Give it a shot and see how it works out for you!

Other than that, you're on the right path. :D (I also love your illustrations on your DA by the way! They're gorgeous!)

It's definitely a combination of layering your coloring right and being precise. The more layers you use, the easier it will be to clean up your work. The downside is that you need to track your layers diligently and also make sure to switch to the right layer every time you work on something else.

You should probably also stick one style of coloring: 'realistic painting' or 'cellshading'. Cellshading only works out right if you limit it to a select few colors (usually no more than 5 total for each thing), whereas realistic painting layers and blends a ton of colors. It feels like this image is kind of stuck between wanting to do realistic shading (soft and blended with a few harsh shades) and cellshading (limited to only a handful of colors and simplistic shading areas). It would definitely benefit from focusing on one or the other. :)

That said, I think texture is really important too! I see a lot of nice texturing in this image, which compliments the subjects (and kind of works well with the whole them as it is), but then in this image I see no textures at all. The same brush was used, the same strokes for each character, each fabric and item. It looks a little lifeless compared to the other.

The other examples you posted do have textures worked into them and they look much better because of it!

My biggest suggestion is to try and work on clean cellshading lineless coloring first. You have to draw with sharp, crisp lines and be conscious of the placement of the shading. It's easier to transition into realistic painting lineless coloring if you have that foundation to build on.

Using differently textured brushes will also be of huge benefit. :)

The purpose of gesture drawings is usually to help understand motion and proportions in drawings by simplifying what you see into a drawing. Faces have rough lines, just like figures, but in different places.

Most commonly people start with drawing a vertical that follows the nose and its angle, and a horizontal line that follows the eyes and their angle.

Based on these two lines, one can draw a rough shape of the face/jaw matching the angle of those lines. One can add ears, usually draw circles for the eye(sockets), the nose and mouth, and even attach a neck. By then usually 30 seconds have passed!

This will help you get familiar with faces and the placement of facial features in different angles and shapes. :) (Which is the whole point of a gesture drawing!) This forms a solid base for when you start to get detailed and make serious portrait sketches.

Does this make sense to you? If it still doesn't, let me know and I'll see about sketching out a couple of facial gesture drawings for you!

I agree with BD! :) Those looks really amazing, especially for someone who (I assume!) has never drawn with a tablet before.

Besides BD's tip, I have another one for you if you still feel a bit clumsy with the tablet: use it as a regular mouse for when you browse the internet. This greatly helped me when I first started learning how to draw with one. I just used the stylus as a replacement for my mouse and it got me really comfortable with it in a short period of time. :) Hope that helps!

They look pretty good, I like them!

One thing I can't help but notice is that your lines look like you draw then in very short strokes. One thing that has hugely helped me get more comfortable with figure drawing is by using quick, long strokes.

The reason this is helpful is because when I narrow it down to a single line to capture the shape and motion of the model, it's not the way the line looks that matters - it's what the line represents. By drawing fast and with large motions, you're able to capture the figure much more accurately.

Right now, your gesture drawing do feel a bit stiff, especially the ones from the first link. Try drawing them again, but this time draw each line in one quick swoop instead of small short sketchlines. The point is not to make it look as accurate as possible, so don't worry if they don't look exact. See how this feels and how it looks. Chances are the ones with quicker strokes look more natural and dynamic.

Once you have this down, you can build on these stick figures to study the models further.

Let me know if this is helpful to you! :) And good luck.