Pain & Growth

Let's face it, growth requires pain to push ahead. The long hours studying between regular gestural drawings can be draining, but it proves to be well worth it in the long run. I am new to this website and I'm trying to improve my skills as an artist. Hello, everyone!

How do you determine your first few strokes before you work in proportions?

Find the line of action, draw it.

Which sounds oh so simple, but really really isn‘t and just... I mean I spent a good year or more with my 30s poses looking like sperm mostly ok? Sperm is fine if that‘s what you can draw in 30s.

Also I might not really think about proportion in a class until I‘m getting into 5 and 10 minute drawings. Too busy with other stuff.

Also also there‘s not a whole lot of deliberate thinking in the short poses except about the mechanics of slamming the idea down. Line of action. Head. Shoulder and/or hip markers. Rough in arms and legs. Scribble hands and feet. Balance curves and straights. Are negative spaces about right? Should there be a torso outline? Rough in the volume of the torso. Rough in muscle gestures that are missing, rough in major shadows. Are there clothes, accessories or background details that are missing? Do I have a gesture for hair? And at that point I‘ve gotten well into a 10 minute drawing and I probably am nowhere near done since I haven‘t done gestures for facial expression yet and the hand and foot gestures are more scribbles than anything else.

If I‘m pushing a figure sketch past class time, I‘ll usually do a proportion check on it at that point. Nothing fancy, just some simple canvas flipping, maybe a more intense check on how negative space works.

Thank you for the advice, I appreciate all of it! I am strong in painting detail and recgonizing how space works, but I guess my struggles are with the foundations. It's funny, I've been drawing all my life but I've been practicing a lot of bad habbits and never formally learned art since I'm self taught. Recently, college has taught me how to shrapen my skills. I came to this website as a recomendation for human anatomy. I'm trying to learn realism after being a cartoonist for so many years.