Forum posts by Aunt Herbert

Well, your solution IS quite accurate. As is your observation, that youtube tutorials tend to use references that make it easy to apply the technique the makers want to demonstrate.

I think the answer is, if you are most interested in a perspective depiction of, in this example, a hip that is almost vertical to your point of view, then the stickman method isn't the perfect tool. You CAN still use it, and I actually think you got the most out of it in that instance, it just won't produce a very satisfying result (as witnessed by the fact, that you express your dissatisfaction). Tools have limits, and you can push those limits a bit with a lot of practice, but you can't make them disappear.

You are "supposed to draw" it to best encapsulate your desired artistic effect, and if one tool doesn't cut it, switch to another tool.

Frankly, your lines do actually decently indicate volume. Which makes it a bit hard to come up with the one silver bullet tip, that is guaranteed to blow you to the next level.

The big youtubers always push towards more simplification, although I must say, it drives a tear into my eyes to ignore for example Jorges neat muscle contours to achieve it. In case you need a reminder, here is a very short clip, that lists 3-D primitives for mannequinization:



I while ago proko had this idea to completely express a pose (sans limbs) with only a box for the hip, a box for the chest and a box for the head. Sounded silly at first to me, but when I tried it out it indeed gave me some more insights about the orientation of the masses. You might want to try it, too.

As far as I have understood the idea, the way this simplification stuff "adds volume" isn't about changing so much about the lines you are currently producing when drawing from reference (apart from simplifying them and thus losing a lot of detail), it is more a preparation to go beyond the reference and allow a basis for manipulation. Like in, draw a pose simplified enough that you can reproduce the same pose, but from a different angle. And that is actually painfully hard.

As I said, your questions are always insightful and complex. It is not easy to find answers to them, that satisfy myself. But let me try another approach:

I think part of not producing "wasted" lines is to just accept your decision to draw a line as final.

Drawing process:

1. You look at the reference and decide upon the line with which you want to start

2. You measure and draw it as good as you can

3. You look at the reference again, and decide which is your next line

4. You measure where it will fit on your existing drawing and draw it as good as you can.

5. Return to step 3, until either the time runs out, or you decide, that it is OK to stop drawing.

Step 4 can be somewhat critical. It CAN happen, that while you look at your drawing, you realize, that your next line does not fit neatly, because you made a minor or major mistake in your prior lines. If it was a minor mistake, you can fudge your next line a bit to still make it fit and make the mistake a bit less obvious. This WILL off course impact the final effect of the drawing a bit, but a minor flaw in an otherwise well made drawing doesn't ruin everything, it is just a bit of extra character. If it was a major mistake, and you really see no way forward for the drawing, well, sh** happens. Maybe it's time to just start a new drawing.

What Step 4 shouldn't do is reevaluating all the lines you already drew. They are there now, they are just what you have to live with to continue your drawing. If you go back and try to draw all of them better, then you are certainly going to produce a lot of wasted lines, and it is unlikely those new lines will turn out decisively better.

In Step 3 on the other hand, deciding where the line should go, there are two possible approaches. I personally prefer to draw with deep black ink, and I make the decision where to put the next line entirely from my visual experience. This isn't the only way to do it, though.

A lot of draftspeople, and amongst them really experienced and accomplished artists, DO draw with searching lines. Those aren't "wasted" lines. They try out a few possible lines on paper (or screen), before they decide which line they want to keep. On paper, this is done by drawing those lines very lightly, and then, when the decision is final, drawing a very strong and dark line over them. (Digitally it is even easier, as they just draw the searching lines on a different lair, which they then just erase after they made their decision).

This is another way to come to the decision which line to continue with, it just delays the decision process a bit. It leaves a few traces of searching lines, but those aren't wasted lines. They had their purpose, and the artist clearly prepared for it, and the contrast between light searching line and strong final line proofs that purpose, and still leaves the final result look intentional and clean. Searching lines don't change the fact, that the decision, once made, is final. Once the decision is made, you live with it, and don't constantly go back and critique all your prior lines while drawing, or you will never get the drawing done and produce a metric ton of wasted lines.

I got a bit of experience playing trombone in a jazz quartett a long time ago, and playing an instrument, you can never take back the tone you just played. But if it sounded strange, you can either blush in embarrasment, or make the next tone sound even stranger, and thereby pretend to the audience that you made the first tone sound strange on purpose, because you are a total musical genius. And just sticking with what you already did is what produces the better result in regards to convincing the audience.

So, one way to avoid wasted lines is to just make sure, that you pick up all the lines you already drew and try to run with them. And if it still doesn't work out, well it's a short sketch, you'll have better luck on your next sketch.

....and do you feel it impacts your results?

I have tried so far popmusic from the 80s/90s, punkmusic from the 80s/90s (because I am old), but found, that if the rhythm draws me in too much, it does impact my lines quite a bit. It can actually give shorter drawings a bit of extra spice, but makes it hard to keep up enough precision to develop longer pieces.

Then I tried out a few of the tunes that label themselves as "healing frequency" or something. For a few hours they gave me more intensity, but the effect vanished. "Psytrance" worked a bit longer, especially because they got their videos filled with flickering AI art, that I can look at for a while, when I am tired from drawing, and then leave again without feeling I miss something.

Podcasts and youtube essays seem quite neutral. They just drone out the traffic noise and sounds from the neighbors, but neither inspire nor disturb me.

I found OST from videogames works well. "Disco Elysium" was great for a while. A quiet and contemplative atmosphere, without ever getting too much into my thoughts.

What do you folks listen to, and what does it for you?

I like the strong outlines, gives the drawings a bit of a graphic novel/manga style. I don't have specific critique about your anatomy. Looks convincing to me, and you handled the change in proportions from adults to kids well.

M a y b e the shoulders look a bit stiff, especially on the upper two pics. I think the folds from the fabrique interfere with the shoulders and neck a bit too much and thus make the anatomy confusing.

Hi Rincitaporfa,

I am not a staffer, but I hang around here way too often,...

You basically just payed for the extra perks of being able to upload as many drawings as you want, and to temporarily or constantly remove references from your pool, if you are a bit tired of one, or prefer to not draw from a specific one at all...

and of course for the site being able to pay their staff and for the rights to new references, that they keep adding to the site.

Hmm, advice,... looking at what you uploaded so far you aren't a total beginner. I like your shapes and clean lines, and there isn't anything jumping out which you should totally immediately do different. So, I guess best advice is... keep cruising sailor. Drawing daily definitely is good, giving critiques to other artists can maybe give you ideas what to do differently with your own art. I totally caught myself a few times explaining a beginner what to do differently, and then realized, that I heeded my own advice only sparingly, that kind of stuff.

I wish you a beautiful day and a ton of cheap art supply in grasp!

I am not sure, whether you will even believe me, or if you can make something out of it, but I wanted you to know, that my first spontaneous impression of that page was: "This actually looks pleasant!". I am aware, that the aestethique that I saw isn't the aestethique you are looking for, and how infuriating this must be for sure.

I just wished for you to be somewhat more open to the beauty of your own work, and to be more forgiving to its faults.

Sounds very much like you became increasingly tense and insecure during practice, so you started to overcorrect your fine motor control. It would be probably extremely helpful if you found a way to relax, but I have no effing clue what method of relaxation would work for you.

That you aren't perfect at the end of the challenge is normal. Until the end I occassionally started boxes, where the perspective lines converging just led to rather strange forms, that I couldn't "pop" into 3-D cubes in my mind, and the multiple lines necessary to even find all 3 vanishing points and make all lines exactly and perfectly converge in one of them was also quite dependent on my own daily form.

The thing is, if you want to obsessively perfectly see how all the lines meet in a single point, then you kind of need to put all 3 vanishing points on the same paper as the box, and ideally even close to it, which just produces an extremely unnatural perspective, as if you would be looking at the box through a strange lense.

If you go through the world and just observe box-shaped objects like buildings or furniture or packaging and just draw them from the perspective that you see them, you will usually have at least one or even two of the vanishing points quite far away from the object, and the corresponding lines almost parallel, with no easy way to check whether you hit the vanishing point "perfectly". Also, with such long lines it is just a consequence of geometry that even the slightest mismatch in gradient will have a large impact on the distance to the point where it meets another line, so, even if you used a very very huge paper to draw them all, you probably wouldn't achieve all 4 lines intersecting at the exact same point with far away vanishing points, but more often 2 or 3 separate intersections with a small bit of distance between them.

Off course I also chased the endorphine kick to always perfectly hit that mark, and started to try backwards engineering the box out of lines that started from the vanishing points, and then realized, that I had a hard time imagining a regular old box in the intersection of all of the 12 lines I had started such.

To preserve my sanity, upon realizing that, I decided that this just doesn't matter so much. I am practising drawing to achieve a certain visual effect, not to wind myself up over BS. I draw the boxes starting from my visual memory of boxes, that I have actually seen somewhere. If and when a vanishing point happens to be close to the box, then I want the intersection to be quite clean, because otherwise the construction would look sloppy even to a casual observer. If a vanishing point is so far away from the box, that I would need extensive technical gear to exactly check it, then I don't give a darn, and am content if the lines look parallel-ish or somewhat evenly converging on a glance. Because no one looking at my drawings will use a laser pointer to check all my angles and vanishing points.

I had done 5 boxes a day for 50 days, and for me it felt OK, that my results were mostly good enough. I promised myself to keep up a daily habit of this exercise, and then didn't. Occassionally I come back to the practice and realize, that my results still aren't perfect, just good enough for my needs, but that revisiting the practice every now and then is a good idea.

You say the shading practice had good results for you, but now you become twitchy when you try to pinpoint a box. My advice, maybe repeat the shading practice a few times to refresh memory, and resign yourself to only being able to draw boxes that are good enough for casual observers. You drew the 250 boxes, you finished the challenge, you know a lot more about boxes now then you did when you started, including that they are tricky little beasts which look so innocent and easy to draw, but can be demanding if you want to draw them really, really, really perfectly. If you enjoy drawing boxes do it more, but from the sound of it you are currently somewhat done with it, so maybe take a break with them and focus on drawing other things for a while.

In future if you draw a picture which includes one or more box-shaped objects or parts, and you somehow get the feeling like something looks wonky and sloppy and off, you now have a tool and an idea where to start applying corrections to clean up the result. Achievement unlocked: "Basic knowledge of 3 point perspective" Congrats.

You are clearly getting a lot of principles. You use clean lines and big shapes, you are focusing on observing the main masses and the limbs.

You should probably continue doing it until you feel more comfortable, but when you feel ready to go on, here is o n e suggestion where you could go next, manniquinization. Here is a very, very short clip that introduces the idea and provides a set of simple 3-D forms that work well as shortcuts for the human figure. (note, i put the blank spaces into the o n e to make clear, that there are other possible ways forward.)

&

A bit of a worry: You are using a rather soft graphite, which isn't bad, but, the way your lines are spread out indicates that you scan or zoom in your sketches in very high dpi or resolution. Which still isn't bad, it just makes it very likely, that your original sketches are just very small, and you are likely only using your fingertips and at most your wrist to direct the pencil. This is rather typical for someone starting with drawing, but it will become a problem if you want to develop further, because you simply will not have practiced how to use your elbow and even shoulder to produce bigger lines.

I would suggest putting in a bit of practice into that. Just use a big paper, put two points really far apart, and try to connect them with one clean straight line. Make sure neither your wrist nor your elbow rest on something (otherwise it just won't work anyways), and pay a bit attention on how much your elbow and even shoulder have to add to the control if you want long lines. These are just muscles and motor skills that will never build up if you don't specifically train them. Being able to draw actually big stuff cleanly will provide you far more leeway to add details when you feel like you want and need them.

@Mahatma, thank you for the praise. I am a bit afraid that your answer won't help IDK a lot, just because I know their previous entries and questions a bit. They certainly don't suffer from naive haste. Their strength is a super analytical and highly self critical approach to everything they are doing, their flaw is that they constantly raise their bar for being satisfied with themselves, and then struggle to keep their frustration from impacting both their art and communication.

@IDK, sorry for talking third person about you. I often struggle to answer your questions, and that is not because they are bad questions, but because they are actually often quite complex and insightful, but you are looking for simple answers to them.

Most honest and shortest answer to your question: I wish I knew myself.

A bit more elaborate: Suppose, you and me, we were both given the same reference to draw from, and we agreed to both use only a specific numbers of CSI lines to depict it. Probably our results would look quite differently. Then we would somehow hijack Mahatma here and be able to blackmail them into being the referee to decide which of our solutions was just better. They would probably honestly refuse the answer, as no matter how hard they tried, they could probably only tell us things like: OK, I find it easier to understand the pose in this sketch, but I find it easier to read the body type in that other one. This one looks more dynamic, but that one gives me a better idea of the volumn of the body. This one transports the emotional expression stronger, while that allows me to more easily understand the anatomy.

The logical first step to answering your question is what you already did, namely asking it, but I am afraid, the second step will always be somewhat trial and error.

I think, even if we could invite all the famous draftspersons and art teachers into our challenge, Stan Prokopenski, Michael Hamilton, Lovelifedrawing, Karl Kopinski, Kim Jung Gi, Peter Hahn, Eliza Ivanova, Wilhelm Busch, Heinrich Kley, Leonardo da Vinci, whoever... Maybe there would be a cluster of similar lines at the start, but the higher we would raise the number of lines, the more even they would diverge from each other. Even if you asked the same person now, and then a year later again, there would be differences.

So, what is left? We try our best, we repeatedly do it, we compare our own recent results as fairly as possible to each other, and try to hone our own intuition for which lines are truely essential and which ones we can do without. Progress isn't about following the shortest path from point a to point b, but just a lot of wandering aimlessly through unchartered territory, hoping that our grasp of the landscapes improves over time.

I know fully well, that this answer isn't satisfying. It is actually quite frustrating. So why continue with this stupid quest? And, maybe I am misreading you, but from the consistency in your work I don't think so, and I assume the answer for you is the same as for me: You are already hooked to the stuff, and to stop being an artist, you would need a full 12 step recovery program, and even then, those questions would still haunt your dreams.

To end on a lighter note: I always almost find your questions hard to answer, and sometimes I don't even try, because I feel I am mostly looking for an excuse for myself to catch another break before I am back to the drawing board. But whenever I try to answer them, I always find them very worthy to ponder, and attempting to answer them often points me to another path, that I have so far overlooked.

My number one advice would be: Take a breath and slow down.

I remember getting used to timed drawing, and feeling under time pressure and trying to get as much of the figure nailed down in as short a time frame as possible... and I actually got better at it, but I never managed to overcome that all my drawings looked a bit... scrappy? I was mostly content with what I did, until I saw someone post a pic with really nice and confident lines, and being able to draw like that felt like a sci-fi story to me. Something that might happen in a far far future..

I had left the drawing tips enabled, mostly, so I would know in advance when the timer changed. And when I read them, I always felt a bit puzzled or not adressed at all: "Remember, that the assignment is complete even if you just draw that one line of action..." In 30 seconds? That was clearly baby talk, not relevant for me.

The main reason for me to leave the tips on anyways, was to avoid starting a 5 minute drawing, while still believing that I was working at a 60 sec drawing. Because, then I basically had to scrap everything and start fresh after 1 minute in, as developing THAT hasty sketch further just led me to being annoyed about all my bad measurements and my inconsistent line quality.

It took me quite a while to realize my mistake. Nope, the goal of those short warm-up sketches isn't to get used to drawing as much as possible in as short a time span as possible. It's actually OK, if there are only 3 or 4 lines on the paper after 30 seconds. But those lines should be good enough to start a 5 minute or 10 minute or 25 minute or full hour drawing. First lines are quite decisive for the quality of the final piece, so it makes sense to practice them a lot, but the practice isn't helpful if I draw at a completely different pace, just because there is a clock ticking.

So, when I look at your sketches, I am not telling you, that they are bad or something. Yepp, you can be confident about being able to do that, and that general grasp of gesture and proportion you developed so far will actually be helpful for developing further, just, .... If you aim at finishing the figure in 60 seconds, what are you going to do with the rest of the time in a longer piece?

I am currently at a pace, where I start to think about where to add shading, because I fell that the figure is done, after about 4 minutes. I remember when I used to get to that point after about 2 minutes. When I compare the difference in results that makes in a 10 minute or even 25 minute drawing, I know that my personal goal has to be, to step even more on the brake, observe more, think more, measure more, plan my lines better, because I am still way too fast.

You are focused very much on long flowing line, which gives especially your shorties a nice aestethic. In your longer drafts it becomes more apparent, that you don't have much experience with the proportions and relations of the big masses.

Yes, you expressly said, that is not your focus atm. Just in your longer drawings it becomes very visible.

My idea would be to deviate from your path a bit, to get acquainted with the typical blocks that are arranged by gesture, so, to dip a bit more into structure. Typical pathways would be manniquinization (this stuff: ), or focusing on only drawing the masses as boxes, to get more of an idea of their relative size, and how they are oriented toward each other. As the word "deviation" implies, that would probably be quite a break to your current practice, and I don't want to tell you to drop all you are doing and do something different instead. I just think occassionally looking into this aspect of drawing would nicely compliment your approach.

Looking at your lines, I feel like I can't tell you much new. You clearly know the drill, you orient yourself at a functional underlying construction and find clear and deliberate lines to depict the reference.

Also the feeling of not knowing what to focus on, to push past the plateau sounds eerily familiar. You could always go back to some fundamental practices and see, whether you can squeeze a bit extra out of them. About a month ago I returned to depicting all the masses strictly as boxes, and found some extra inspiration into how to perceive the torso, and it gave me a new kick, that lasted almost two weeks, but then the novelty petered out again.

In the end, it's probably about cruising the usual youtube recommendations and look for stuff, that sounds weird on first view and trying it out. At the moment I am more into running music on the headphones and letting my pen go through the motions while the references pass by.

I wish you and me and everybody reading this lines a lot of inspiration.

I often just look for big clean 2-D forms to start with and go from there. I mean, "animals" is quite a wide field anyways, there is a big difference between a bug and a fish, a flying bird and a sitting bird, a snake and all types of mammals, so it is hard to formulate a general method of approaching them all.

At least with vertrebrates having an idea where skull, chest and hip are is still helpful, just as in drawing human figures, and the spine is still the tension, that holds this masses together.

Well, that short clip I showed above about mannequinization is an even shorter term goal then "anatomy". I shy away from using the word "anatomy', cause it brings people to buy books like "anatomy for artists" early on, and then to be overwhelmed.

For me, mannequinization was an important and markable step forward, and it gave me confidence and a feeling of progress for the time being. It also allowed me to better decipher what the purpose of practices more puristicly focused on "gesture" was, as it allowed me to decode those force vectors into actual bodily forms.

The clip above presents a full set of shortcuts, but it is exceedingly brief and short in its explanations. You can definietly find longer clips, with a more complete explanation of how to draw those individual shortcuts, and what they represent. You will also find minor variations between how different artists mannequinize the body. I like this one, because it makes a clear separation between shoulders and chest, which not all such systems do. I remember Love Life Drawing introducing and demonstrating a very similar set, but with way more explanation.