Forum posts by Aunt Herbert

Thanks. I haven't had much of a mind into this for quite some time, but it is nice to hear that someone is still reading it. I hope to get back more to drawing outside, when the weather becomes less harsh.

Obviously I am currently logged in. Despite that, the "Draw" feature insists on treating me as an anon. I get offered the option to Log In, but despite Autofill from Norton active the Login procedure does not seem to complete.

thx for keeping on it

Again, I had 30 minutes monday, and 34 minutes tuesday, now I have 1h 4m monday and a gap on tuesday.

It is still happening. I did not practice almost 2 hours on thursday, but I did practice at least 30 mins on Friday.

thank you. If anything strange happens, I'll report back.

I love your lines and your style. They are clear, clean, exaggerating muscle physiology quite a bit, but with beautiful curves.

The problem with giving you advice is, that where you are makes sense. There are other places you could be, but they would not be clearly superior, just different. So sadly, the burden of finding your way through art space stays squarely with you.

You could start playing some more games to challenge you:

You could go for less details and bigger shapes, to see if you can reduce the number of lines and get towards more graphical elegance via a lower line count.
You could focus more on construction, to get from drawing from observation more towards drawing from imagination by manipulating point of view or finetuning poses.
You could pick a specific artist you like and try to imitate their style....

Those are just suggestions for games you could play. About what you should do.... meh, if I knew that.... maybe prepare for an actual finished piece, one you put a frame around and present it to others.... so you get a better idea about specific roadblocks between where you are now, and where you want to be.

Fixing my current streak doesn't matter so much, as it is rather small at the moment anyways. The problem is, this is already the second time it happened, which kind of defeats the motivational impact behind the streaks themselves. First time I was confused, but didn't think so much of it, as I had other things going on anyways. This time, you can see the 3 hour 20 minutes on 26th of october, they were definitely spread over 26th and 27th october, and the switch happened on 29th or 30th of october, so clearly after the dates were already established.

Something weird is going on with practice log, since maybe a week or two. It kind of randomly rearranges the amount of times for prior days. I tried to go for a longer streak again, but then it randomly changed from 9 days streak to 2 days streak, apparently adding the drawing times of two adjacent days together and leaving one day free?

I think that user deleted their account themselves. The OG post is from almost 2 years ago. What happened in between would be anyone's guess.

I applaud your showing off. Well done!

Just my idea, but I think your gestures could benefit from producing a series, where you only draw the hips abstracted to a 3-d block, and the chest, either also as a block, or as that flat half-egg shape.
Not to continue doing that for all time, but to get a firm grasp about the distance from hip to chest, the angles they typically have to each other, and the graphical effect that produces.
It's not that you have no clue of that at all, or that you are horribly off, but to me it looks like it is the part of the gesture, where you are insecure and winging it, so focusing at that for a short while might help you tighten some screws.

I don't understand your intended process towards a finished product.
Am I correct in assuming, that you chose digital tools to plot spheroids and tubular forms, all with a lot of contour lines to indicate volume? That does produce a lot of lines, but they rather distract from simplicity. And, well, why do you even bother plotting a 100% precise foundation? How will that help you render the final lines?

If you draw manually, you have a chance to pick up proportions and rhythms on a haptic level. I am not aware, that digital drawing does this, as you are mostly placing ready objects.
Or, if you draw manually, you can have a slight foundation, that you can draw over with the final rendering, so the foundation helps, but vanishes into the background or is fully deleted in the end. I am generally not aware, why such a step would be necessary in digital drawing, as you can just manipulate the intermediate lines?

I mean, the fact, that I have no clue, what you are trying to achieve does not equal you are doing something wrong. Maybe I am just stupid or unable to jump beyond my comfort zone. That fact might give an indication, though, why you might not get a lot of reactions: the likelyhood, that others feel about as buffled as me is decently high.

My feedback, don't take it as gospel. I think you are currently focused on identifying individual lines on the reference, but don't do literal construction a lot. That isn't wrong, it makes a lot of fun and all, but it isn't a particularly fast way to progress. The quicker way to progress is instead of trying to draw what you see on the reference, you learn how to draw a mannequin from a fixed set of primitives, simple 3-D forms. Here is a video of one set of such primitives, it's not the only possible one, just an example: &list=WL&index=99
Once you taught yourself to draw such a mannequin in a neutral pose, you stop drawing from the reference, but instead only use the reference to indicate the posture and perspective, that your mannequin should assume. (also, you possibly have to add fatty pouches for less-than-lean body types), and stik with drawing that mannequin.

Doing this, at least for me, is way less fun than actually drawing from reference. It forces me to ignore all those beautiful relationships that I can discover by admiring the reference. But what it does is building some reliable framework, so the next time I skip mannequinization and just return to drawing from reference, my lines will be a lot more convincing, relations will be more on point, I will be more aware of extreme aspects of poses.

I would advise you to do that construction/mannequinization grind at least to some extent, even if you (like me) feel like it is less fun than really drawing from the reference. It's a bit like the "eat your vegetables" part.

About the difference between gesture drawing and figure drawing.... Let me put it this way: most art teachers are renowned for being good at drawing (or painting). They are not renowned as poets or philosophers. Don't start to meditate too much about anybody's specific choice of words, because there is a good chance, they are not even aware of the specific difference you are looking for. And certainly don't expect one art teacher to consistently use the terms some other art teacher has established. If you ask an art teacher for an exact definition of what they are talking about, they will vaguely wave into a general direction, tell you, that "that" is what they clearly meant, and expect you to live with that.
If you want to learn from them, look at what they are drawing, and try to understand their words from that, not the other way round. Drawing is a manual skill, and even pushing someone into the right directions with words alone is extremely hard.

Your technique is up to the task of delivering your message, and your drawing is effective, in the sense, that it looks like you are quite confident about what effect you want to produce.