September 7, 2024

Hey Zayvie,

Your proportions look really good for where you are in your art journey. Since you mentioned you'd like to improve, I have a few suggestions.

In my opinion, the reason you’re struggling with proportions is that your depiction of three-dimensional objects on the page is still somewhat vague. It’s like you’re trying to learn step two before mastering step one, if that makes sense.

Here are two aspects I’d focus on to help with this:

Line Quality: Your lines are quite scribbly, which is a common issue for beginners. It seems intuitive to incorporate all the little shapes of the human body while carefully inching toward the correct proportions. However, this approach often leads to something that’s close, but not clear, and it makes it harder to see what’s right or wrong (and also tends to look a little messy). Instead, try using simple, clean lines to define the larger shapes. Focus on C-curves, S-curves, and straight lines. This will help you better identify what’s working and what isn’t.

Construction: In addition to the unclear lines, the three-dimensional mass of the body parts isn’t properly defined in space. For example, it’s hard to tell whether the person you drew is touching their face with their left hand or if their hand is pressed against the wall. This makes it difficult to assess whether the proportions (or their foreshortening) are correct. I’ve done a quick sketch to illustrate this idea more clearly: https://imgur.com/lG6gJsd Once you have this down you can move on to round out these shapes again to make them look more natural. But you need to be comfortable with handling the primitives first.

A great crash course that could really help you is the website drawabox.com. If you’re serious about leveling up your skills, I’d recommend going through their lessons—they can be a challenge sometimes but worked wonders for me.

Hope this helps! Keep up the great work, and happy drawing!

Hey there. Love your bold lines. Are you mannequinizing the subject with an under drawing beforehand? Like a fancy stick figure? It's a good quick way to figure out what size things should roughly be. Figure out where all the joints and masses are with dots, circles, and lines and then start draw over top of that with the contour lines.