Forum posts by Viva Necro

You have a grasp on shapes and decent shading skills however the issue is a lack of a proper foundation to build upon, and uneven attention on the overall drawing.

For the first drawing it’s clear that the focus isn’t on the person sitting down, rather it’s on the fabric on the chair, with the person drawn after the fact thus giving this appearance of emerging from the chair rather than sitting or reclining on top of one.

The middle drawing is better but also shows a lack of understanding of the importance of foundation, with one shoulder completely ignoring the rough skeletal area you made thus giving this malformed and sagging shoulder, also the lack of feet is made more evident by how much detail you put into the hands which are decent but are lacking in depth, which could have been achieved in the given time of 20-30 minute.

The last one although not the most detailed or clean as the other two, it is the stronger drawing overall. I can roughly tell where the line of action would be, and the volume of the figure is following the foundation set by the rough skeleton. I can tell the model is sitting down and is slouching and might be leaning forward.

Overall, it seems that a quick reminder in the overall process of capturing a figure might be useful. Remember, on average it should take you thirty seconds to draw a stick figure/ rough skeleton of the figure, a minute to add simple volume shapes, five minutes for contour lines, and ten minutes to add shading and highlights. This is done so we don’t lose track of time by overfocusing our attention on individual parts of a drawing rather the image in its entirety. It’s best to leave detail aspect of the figure like fingers and muscle definition for after the foundation is laid so as to avoid it being more of a distraction of the entire image rather than adding clarity as to what is happening in the overall image.

pretty decent work for 10min,

i can see the line of action for each figure and the silhouette reads alright save for one that i'll mention later, but the immediate issue I think you can fix is the lack of confidance in where you make a mark as seen from the scratchy line work done in the legs and torso of each figure.

I think you're rushing into making your contour lines before creating a decent enough foundaition to work from. For example the one figure that had an issue with it's silhouette was the middle one that was labeled evil, If you had properly set up a rough skelenton to help you position where the left shoulder and arms would be, the figure drawn woun't look like it has an arm protruding from it's chest (at least it does to me admittdly). Furthermore, a lightly drawn rough skelenton would help deal with the slight hesitation and impulse artist have to spend the several seconds or minutes trying to redraw or try to "correct" any lines made, which usually ends with the scratchy line work.

Now on the issue of hands and feet, yes they can use work, but that shouldn't be the main concern in a figure study. outside of positioning (which is in important factor, don't get me wrong), their details should be secondary. How i usually deal with feet is to think how the bottom footmark would look, then make a rough prymid-like shape based on the position of the foormarks so i can get a rough idea of what the negative space between the feet is. As for hands, you need to either think of it as two boxes welded togeter ( the palm and the fingers), this could be hard with certain hand gestures, but as long as you know how to use negative space properly you should be fine.

hope this helped you in any way, and keep up the good work.

You're trying too hard to capture the volume of the overall figure with your contour lines, when really you need to focus on establishing the line of action to guide the direction of the rough skelenton to help you build the rest of the body. It's also faster since you're wasting less time drawing lines trying to capture the outline of the body. Hope that was helpful for you, and remeber to keep up the good work.