Forum posts by Aunt Herbert

To be more precise, it is the icon that shows I got 1 inbox message. I just can't make it go away, and it triggers my OCD.

Kim, there was this spambot with the french repairshop yesterday, and I posted a joke about it. You deleted the bot post and my joke about it, which is fine, but now I got the "forum post deleted" alert icon stuck on top of my page, and I can't make it go away, because it doesn't link to a post anymore.

People are definitely timid. I mean, just compare the number of people using this site to the number of people even asking for advice, and then to the handful of people who usually dare to give advice.

Also, there is the difference between having a skill, and being able to verbalize what it takes to acquire a skill. You can probably ride a bike, but could you explain HOW to ride a bike to someone who has problems with it?

So, not asking any random person for advice isn't so much an unspoken rule, it is just that asking is such a low probability attempt that most people won't even try. Maybe if you already established an ongoing conversation with someone, you could say "Hey, I noticed, that you are especially good at x, do you have any tips how you do that?", but then still the most likely answer will be: "Aaahm, never thought about that, I just do it!"

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on April 17, 2024 1:42pm.

Moriya, it's just a common and natural beginner's mistake to start every drawing by focusing on one detail first, then the next adjacent detail, and so forth. Which inevitably leads to the problem of minor variance in scale between each of the details multiplying with each other, until the last detail is much bigger in scale than the first one, and off by inches in either the vertical or horizontal axis.

What you describe about your figure no longer fitting into your frame is just a variation of that problem.

And the fix to it is to learn to establish the big overall shapes as soon as possible, so you can measure all details relative to those big shapes, and not from detail to detail.

Besides measuring proportions better it also allows getting a grip on composition.

You will find this principle in several different drawing techniques, named differently depending on subject and the method to establish the big shapes.

You will even find similar effects when you start to investigate how shading works and learn how to establish the big values first.

I have been drawing daily for several years now, and when I am particularly annoyed about proportions or compositions in the result in one of my drawings, and I ask myself: "Did you maybe jump into fiddling with details before you established the big shapes?" the answer is in 90% of cases: "Yepp, guilty as charged"

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on April 16, 2024 9:50am.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on April 16, 2024 10:31am.

I think this video has a bunch of practical tips to try while you still feel insecure about proportions:

I don't see any systematic mistakes, that you could specifically avoid. You are focusing on powerful lines and simple forms. This should be the best way to train your pen and all the squishy matter that holds it to produce aesthetical depictions of the human figure. GJ, keep on practising.

The very simple sounding, but very hard to pull off trick: Learn to establish the biggest shapes first, so you can measure the details from them.

This is going to be important for a hundred different reasons, and unless you are completely different from most other people, it will take you quite some time from understanding the general idea, to experimenting how to put it into practise, to becoming so accustomed to working that way, that you no longer have to constantly focus on it and can start paying attention to other problems more.

But it will fix 90% of all your problems with proportions, be they about composition or about anatomy.

Edit: Maybe a more practical tip for the stage that you are at right now: Not every figure drawing has to capture the entire figure. If you realize, that you started the figure too big to fit on the paper, don't waste time fiddling around with the frame size. Just focus on drawing the parts that do fit as good as possible. So you end up with only a half-pose? So what. You start your next drawing immediately afterwards, and can avoid that specific mistake now. Learning is about making mistakes, realizing it was a mistake, and then not worrying, but just carrying on and trying to avoid repeating that mistake.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on April 13, 2024 4:28pm.

One small extra I would like to have is an edit option for critiques. I am a bit OCD in regards to grammar and spelling, and when I discover typos in my critiques, it itches a bit.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on April 11, 2024 1:02pm. Reason: OCD

OK, here is my attempt:

https://imgur.com/a/26vu0Zx

My thought process was:

#1: Ugh, the way he pulls his shirt around turns it almost into a giant quadrangle, that covers half of his body. Cool, half of the drawing done already.

#2: Making the legs curvy would be a nice contrast to the straight lines of the shirt. Hmm, I saw this abstraction of legs from the front with the double-wave somewhere on youtube, I guess it could fit here well. Idk is emphasizing simplifying, so let's do a bit line economy bingo... 31 lines for both legs, that's ok-ish.

#3. Add the hands and the bit of the head.

#4: Add a bit of hatching to make it look less flat in spite of all the big empty shapes.

This is one way of simplifying the pose.

Edit: Looking at it after publishing I realized, that I didn't really check the relations between the masses. The way he pulls the shirt up in my version would have actually covered the entire head, so I could have saved those lines, too, and it would have looked anatomically more correct. Alternatively, if I wanted to keep the head, I should have been a bit more subdued with the shirt rectangular and made sure, that it didn't rise too high above the shoulders./Edit

A more radical approach could look like this:

https://imgur.com/a/E2TOT15

just portray the most eyecatching-feature, the rectangular-ish shirt, and stickfigure the rest. It certainly is simplified as heck, and no one mentioned pretty.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on April 11, 2024 8:16am.

I think you are actually on the path of "rewiring your brain" already. You observe yourself while drawing, you analyse your problems and break them down into specifics, you feel frustrated about them. You could translate all of this, including the frustration, into physiological functions of neurological plasticity, and you would end up pretty much at a description of how the human brain learns and acquires a new skill.

Untrained humans are not used to look for big shapes.

If you look at any childs drawing, they all start from a symbolic, language-based drawing style. Mama is a human. A human has a head, and legs, and hands, and legs and hands attach to a body, and to improve the drawing I need to find more words that describe more details, that I can add to the drawing.

Then beginning draftspersons discover shapes, and the easiest shapes to immediately observe are usually the smallest shapes, and you can see any number of beginner drawings where people try to accurately draw one detail, then add the next closest detail as accurately as possible next to it, and so on, and so on, but at some point realize, that they slightly mismeasured proportions and relations, and all those slight mismeasurements add up, and at the end, some of those details from the start of the chain just no longer fit together with the details at the end of the chain. That is usually when they either make those details fit by heavily compromising proportions and relations, or break off the drawing in frustration. I know I certainly went through that phase, and I see a lot of beginners in exactly that struggle.

The idea to start drawing from big and simple shapes is the best way to escape that conundrum, as that way you establish a uniform scale and composition for the entire picture. You will still have slight mismeasurements, but they can no longer combine into huge gaps, as instead of a chain of details, you have a hierarchy of scales, which reduces the range of errors to that of a single mistake, not a combination of mistakes amplifying each other.

But between understanding the problem on an intellectual level to becoming able to act on it "naturally", without specifically having to focus on it all the time is still a long way to go, and by the time you understood the problem for the first time, you still have no practice with it.

The way you practice it, is you decide to focus on solving exactly that problem before you start drawing. Then after you are done drawing you look at the result and only think about, whether you solved that specific problem well. If you decide you did it decently, you will get your dopamine shot from that discovery, if you failed, you will feel a bit disappointed. That is basically the rewiring process in action on a neurological level, and how it feels on an emotional level. To make it work efficiently, you have to organise your work such, that you can repeat this experience as often as possible.

Note that solving that specific problem isn't the same as drawing a more beautiful picture. Beauty is about more than a single problem, and while you focus on one skill, other skills may even deteriorate a bit, and the overall result might look uglier. This may lead to frustration and the feeling, that you did something wrong, but you did not. You focused on a single problem, and once you feel that solving that specific problem becomes more natural you can go back to analysing your overall process and identify other skills that you also need to practice, find other problems to solve.

A practice that I did at that stage, which I feel helped me personally was "line economy bingo". But I have to add, I wasn't especially focused on figure drawing, as I was mostly into urban sketching. The rules I set for myself: I walk through the streets, until I find an interesting shape. Then I try to draw that shape with as few lines as possible (CSI-rule, one line is either an I for a straight line, a C for a curve or an S for a double-curve) A bingo is achieved, if any observer could recognize that shape without me pointing at it.

One advantage of the game: as I defined the depiction from that shape, I naturally used the whole size of the paper for the shape, and once I had established it and decided it needed more details for clarification I did not fall into the temptation of expanding to neighboring shapes, thus I automatically kept the hierarchy intact, and all additional details were always in direct relation to that initial shape.

If I found the shape of a windowsill interesting, the result would always be a draft of a windowsill, with as many details as I thought were necessary, not suddenly a draft of that windowsill, plus the window, plus the next window over, plus the house wall, and the car parked before it, and the roof, the chimney and the clouds above.

I think the recommended practice in drawing human figures is to stick to an established abstraction of a human body, and strictly and always start each drawing following the "line of action first, then head, ribcage, hip, then joints, then limbs" pattern. Or alternatively you could learn Reilly rhythms and strictly learn following that pattern.

This will not necessarily make your drawings nicer immediately, but it will make you focus on the big shapes in a human figure. Some people will keep sticking to this abstraction throughout a whole successful career, other artists will do it for a while, and find other, more personal ways to draw, once they no longer struggle with identifying big shapes on a human figure. But for focusing on big shapes in humans, it is pretty much established best practice.

You are developing a good sense for pose and volume in space. I would even think maybe for 30s/60s you are producing too many lines. The idea is to find a good drawing rhythm that you can keep steady whether you start a short or a long draft, so that in theory every shorty you draw could be the foundation for a lenghty work.

I wouldn't worry about hand and feet in such short sketches of a whole body. If you sketch in their outlines as variations of quadrangles around the 2 minute mark, that is still plenty of detail.

I think you are doing great, and I don't feel like I have special details that I can point out. I am just not ahead enough in any technical regards or in experience.

I want to tell you about the one surprise moment I had, and that was looking at your 25 minute drawing. Really nothing bad about it, I marvel at the details of the face. What surprised me was, that it doesn't contain any big amounts of shading. My personal experience is, that after 7 to 8 minutes of drawing I usually feel like I am being "done" with my basic linework, and switching to picking out shadow forms and introducing values into the drawing is all, that is left to do. You chose sticking with improving actual linework right till the end, and it doesn't look like wasted time either, because your linework is actually at least a class above my own in that drawing.

So, now I feel guilty about my own sloppy lines, and I totally blame you for that! Live with it!

My impression of those sketches: You draw very methodically, starting from a good foundation of the body, developing very clean and beautiful lines.

Your question about finding your mistakes: I think your "mistake" might be, that you long reached a plateau that allows you to be very comfortable in what you do. Which isn't bad, it keeps building confidence in your drawings, which shows in your lines. But if you want to push beyond that, it is up to you to raise the bar, to find challenges, that you aren't comfortable with yet, to actually dare making mistakes again.

I could brainstorm a bit about typical challenges you could try:

-Explore longer drawings, including shading and possibly hatching could be an idea.

-Test your foundations by drawing the same pose you see on your reference, but from different angles, that you have to construct in your imagination.

-Try to stylize your figures by expressing the same with even fewer lines..

-....

These are just challenges that came to my mind, because I personally want to explore them in future, there must be many more, and which ones you chose will be very much informed by your identity and expression as an artist. You will have to trust your own curiosity to lead you away from safe havens.

I love your solution to a very specific problem: How to present the art journey with all its many steps, without just spamming everything with the sheer mass of output.

As a fellow user of Line of Action, there is off course the added thrill of recognition: "Ah, I know this reference, interesting how Valentine solved it differently", and also "Ah, I know the problem Valentine is working at, interesting how she(?) approaches it"

Hals- und Beinbruch from a fellow traveller!

One immediate thought: Yes, I agree, that a number of poses here are .... hard to grasp. Thing is, I started my habit of daily timed drawing not here, but on quickposes.com. Then that site ran into issues, as the masters of the interwebs made the creators of quickposes.com aware of a dirty little thing called copyrights, and how that does relate to earning money with a site that lives of depicting photos. quickpose.com was down for a time, and I ended up here as an alternative. I do love about line of action, that it has a forum, where at least the chance exists to talk with people about drawing and exchanging experience. But occassionally I check back in with quickposes.com, and you might try it to.

The images there are just from a different set of photographers, and they feel much more intuitive to grasp silhouette and movement. In comparison line of action images feel like at a higher level of difficulty. Which, by now, I somehow enjoy. Daily quicksketching to me has partially an appeal that is comparable with solving crossword puzzles, or sudoku.

I frankly would be curious for your opinion, if you go try out a bunch of images on quickpose.com, post your results here, and tell me whether I am crazy, or if you get the same feeling.