Messages du forum par Aunt Herbert

I am not an expert on cow anatomy, I can just say, that the hindquarters look perfectly natural to me, while I have some doubts about the physiology of the front side and head.

I feel like there should be some type of shoulderbones visible, to indicate how the neck, forelegs and torso connect, and the connection between neck and head also lacks definition.

It depends on your goal for the piece, whether that is actually even a problem. If you go for a children's book depiction, the flatness doesn't even matter so much, but then I would probably stylize the eyes a bit more to look a bit bigger and rounder, and generally try to fuse as many straight lines as possible into smooth curves for maximum cuteness.

If you aim for naturalism and/or perspective, the lines you chose for the front part do not sufficiently indicate the geometry in 3D. For example, the intersection of leg and head make clear, that the head is above the leg, but I couldn't tell, whether it is resting on the leg, or extended towards the viewer. I believe if the way the neck connects all the other animal parts was made clear, that flatness would be reduced a lot.

As I said, I am not an expert on bovine anatomy either, I just feel like my eyes keep searching for where the front shoulder would go, where and how the neck curves up to the head, and... shouldn't there be something from a right front leg peeking out somewhere, too? Can cows in that position completely hide that one leg by lying on it?

The tip of the front hoof also looks a bit off. Too small, or too pointy, maybe?

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on December 4, 2023 8:46am.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on December 4, 2023 8:49am.

Your lines are clean and very deliberate and controlled, and I like your shapes. You seem to be struggling a bit with depicting body fat on overweight models for some reason. Just an observation, I don't exactly have a silver bullet recipe for that, but maybe just keeping an eye on that may help you find a solution.

The girl on the upper left side of your 5 minute page has an interesting mistake: you focused a lot on drawing her big hair, and as a consequence drew her entire head too big in proportion.

The 10 minute figure seems to have posed you more of a problem, than the shorter timed stuff. Maybe just bad luck in the random choice of image. Me personally, when on the final draft something shows up, that I don't feel confident with, I tend to use the forward arrow to get a different choice, so the session doesn't end on an anti-climax.

OK, got 3 more.

Bingo 4 is almost cheating. If that doesn't work I will have to reconsider some life choices:

13 lines, and there probably could have been fewer:

https://imgur.com/JJbGlDe

Bingo 5 should be clear, I think,... 21 lines

https://imgur.com/7PGfZYu

Bingo 6 I saw on the way to work, but only drew it on the way home. It looked a lot simpler, than it turned out to be. I pondered the old problem of when there is enough detail added, and whether more was necessary to clear up the context at around line 30, then I lost concentration on line placement and orientation and added a bit of a mess on the very left side. 35-ish lines total:

https://imgur.com/fG9BtLa

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Some general observations about finding simple shapes/pattern in urban environments: The simplest ones all seem to be either technical or architectural.

There are ofc also people and some animals in cities, but they usually aren't willing or able to hold interesting poses long enough to make good motifs for a stylized drawing. Unless you catch someone sleeping in a public transport or in a park, it is less a question of drawing from observation, and more a challenge of drawing from memory, which seems to be the next harder task after mastering the drawing from observation task.

With warmer weather the chances to actually find someone in a relaxed pose outside is better, but at -1 degrees Celsius with light snowfall, there is no chance at all.

And then there are plants, usually trees or brushes, and they pose a special problem: Being essentially fractal structures, it is very hard to find good shortcuts to actually draw them as individual entities. The usual solution is to jump to some level of symbolism to depict them, starting from the old classic child drawing of a brown vertical line for the stem, with a green circle for the crown on top. Architectural schematics usually don't go beyond that level of detail either, and the question of how deep to explore and depict their fractal nature seems completely arbitrary, and therefor not really well suited to go competitive in regards of line economy.

So, back to technical and architectural motifs, and one pecularity thereoff, that does have an impact on line economy, and that is repetition. There are tons of repetitions in both types of motifs, identical rows of windows or bricks, columns in a roster, etcetera, and while they cetrainly drive up the line count like crazy, (and make the draft process extremely hard, as you have to be extremely disciplined to echo the identical repetition, without inserting noise) on the reception side they do not make the motif look a lot more complex. To a viewer 3 columns of 4 files of identical window frames look hardly more complex than a single window. Don't know exactly, why I find this thought intriguing, but for some reasons it bothered me today.

A very related thought: If you zoom in just at the centre of the upper part of a modern glass window, complete with its integration into the stone wall of a house, you basically see nothing but almost a dozen of perfectly parallel lines, with only the shades, textures, colours and angles (the angles of the planes in between, relative to the point of view) between those lines varying.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on December 2, 2023 2:01pm.

You do have a good grasp of proportions of the human figure, and on the simpler poses the static construction makes intuitive sense. They look like people standing comfortably and secure.

The line work on the other hand looks searching and sketchy, a bit trial and error, until one of the lines looks right.

If you want to develop cleaner lines and grow towards a more finished look, you should probably spend time doing some courses on drawing the human form. I think figuring out tricks like working from an anatomical foundation all from just practice and your own invention would be a way longer and harsher path to follow, and with uncertain results.

There are free courses and cheap courses. I can recommend proko.com, even the free version, but it certainly isn't the only available course.

Aaargh. 2 and 3 would have needed more lines for clarification. 2 is actually a car tire, and 3 is one of the historical window frames in Hamburg, so no actual bingos, there. But now, that you mentioned it, I see, why they aren't as clear, as I thought. Getting actual feedback IS better than playing solitair and just guessing, what is enough to define the visual idea, and what needs more information.

I'll post some new attempts tomorrow.

OK, here are my first 3 bingo entries: (i hope the link works)

bingo 1: 15 lines
https://imgur.com/4HI47Mu

bingo 2: 8 lines

https://imgur.com/C3Zc058

bingo 3: 13 lines

https://imgur.com/WD8Tlqo

So, the # of lines are noted on the drawings, I would say those are bingo 1, bingo 2, and bingo 3, for everyone who is willing to take a guess at what is depicted, and the next person posting a bingo here, for us to guess, should therefore name its artwork bingo 4, etc.

Polyvios, I don't even exactly know, what a study group is. Is that a forum feature, that could be useful for this type of exchange?

From doing it again this morning, and from past experience, one of the challenges after having found a good motif and the right lines, is stepping on the break. A good bingo, i.e. an interesting shape or pattern that conveys a lot of information with sparse means, is also always a great center piece for a drawing, and begs to be expanded. So telling myself, "Nope, that is enough to convey the information, stop it with the embellishing" is really hard.

On the other hand, the actual drawing portion is done really fast, with about a dozen lines or a few more or less, so it is good to keep the motivation for drawing started on a low energy day.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on December 1, 2023 12:04pm.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on December 1, 2023 12:05pm.

OK, here is a little challenge, that I mostly developed for myself to keep urban sketching interesting. I always dreamt about playing it in a kind of friendly competition with other people and compare results, but I never got a group of people organized to play it with, so I mostly did it kind of solitairy game mode.

Here are the rules:

#1: Chose any simple object or point of view around you, but don't tell anyone which it is.

#2: Draw it with as few lines as possible. Count the lines you use.

#2a: For purpose of this game one line only counts as a single line, if it follows the CSI rule: It has to be either a straight line (I), a simple curve (c), or a bent curve (S) with no more than one change of direction. If a line changes curvature more than once and starts to squiggle around a lot, it counts as a series of lines, which have to be counted separately.

#3: When all are done, everybody compares drafts. Each object, that can be identified by all participants counts as a "bingo". The person, who's "bingo" was drawn from the least amount of lines can feel themselves as the winner and celebrate/be celebrated appropriately.

#4: In new rounds of the game, all objects, that have achieved a bingo are excluded from further rounds (at least for the day or session), to keep everybody on their toes. I found it necessary to include this, from my experience of urban sketching. Roads are part of every city, roads are always marked with traffic signs, and sketching a traffic sign is a cheeky way to make sure you win the first round, which is totally within the rules of the game. But if everyone just kept sketching traffic signs on further rounds, the game would become boring quickly.

As I said, since I invented the game, I only played it in solitairy mode, but I do feel it helped my development as a artist quite a bit.

a)Drawing with few and simple lines helps focusing on drawing clean lines.

b)To find stuff to identify with few lines, you have to start watching your surroundings for simple and expressive shapes. This helps overcome the tendency to get lost in unnecessary details when sketching, and also develops clearer, more stylized results.

c)The goal of the game is not to achieve photorealism or any other specific artistic goal, like mastering perspective (although skills in drawing from perspective defintely help) but to communicate clearly with visual means. This does open the possibility of inventive ways to "cheat the system" without breaking rules, (I never forbid symbolism for example, although written letters should probably be excluded, or the game might divulge into an assembly of four-letter words) and bending rules can be an excellent way of overcoming monotony in daily practice.

Noooow, the most obvious way to start a forum game would be for me to take the first step and post a few examples. Here are the true reasons, why I don't do it for now: a) It's getting dark outside in Hamburg right now, the thermometer shows -2° Celsius and it occassionally snows, and I don't feel the drive to put on warm clothes to go do a round of urban sketching right now. Not even a short one. b) I could probably start searching through some of my old sketchbooks and scan some examples from there, but I don't want to get lost in memories right now. Also, the spirit of the game is to produce new art, not re-upload old stuff.

Maybe I will post some still life sketches of furniture or household objects in a bit later this evening. Tomorrow I got an early shift, and I will take pen and paper with me and at least draw a few bingos on my way home and post them here.

Sadly, the activity in this forum seems to have died down quite a bit, since I was here regularly in march, so I don't expect a lot of responses in a short amount of time. But if someone reads this and has a first go, before I post again, it would make me extremely happy.

I think the desire to sort poses by difficulty could be widespread, but to fulfill it, there is a technical obstacle to overcome: someone would have to sort and rate the poses by difficulty, and difficulty is also highly subjetive, and influenced by the chosen method and exact aesthetical goal of the individual exercise.

A first step towards ordering the images by difficulty could be to include a rating scale for each image at the end of the exercise, when all the images included in the exercise are presented again, so participants can leave their individual subjective rating.

It would still take a very long time to gather enough data to start sorting such a huge database in a meaningful way, and there could be still a few problems with data bias. Naturally only data from people, who rate images could be gathered, and the mood of people finishing a study could produce outliers that skew the overall pool.

Next step after collecting lots and lots of data about subjective impressions of the difficulty of individual images, the question how to meaningfully use this data would have to be decided. How would for example newer images with fewer overall votes be compared to older images with a lot of votes?

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I find the desire to rate and/or sort images by difficulty understandable.

I suspect the technical challenge in implementing such an option to be at least cumbersome, and would not neither want to volonteer to such a task, nor to pressgang anyone else into doing it, but it might be doable.

I have problems with applying the Loomis method, too. My fix at the moment is realizing, that the centre of the initial circle is at the broom line, while the circumference has to extent all to the dome of the head. I find it easier to practice this from approximately front views, with the centre of the circle at the intersection of broom line and center line. The goal of the practice is purely to get used to drawing the initial circle big enough, so the cut-outs, etcetera make sense.

My hope is, that getting used to the different size, then translates easier into finding the right size for other views.

Generally I feel, like the Loomis method was expressively developed to draw from imagination. So, applying it to draw from life or to draw from another depiction is a secondary, different, and more taxing step.

My best results for drawng from a depiction usually come, when I don't do the whole Loomis schpiel with circles, cut-outs, etcetera, but instead focus on distinct shapes. Having practiced the Loomis method is then helpful, as it gives me a working memory of measuring, plazing, and sizing the shapes, and reduces the risk of distorting the head or face.

Strictly applying the Loomis method to a depiction is harder for me, and generally leads to worse results, but it is a valuable and necessary practice for me to improve my results when NOT strictly drawing by Loomis.

I feel like to get it right, I need to practice three different steps:

1.) Using Loomis to draw from imagination, to get the basic shape internalized

2.) Projecting the internalized shape onto depictions to get a reality fix and scrutinize my understanding of the method.

3.) Ignoring the conscious demands of the method, but relying on the subconscious support of it, when working on a piece for effect.

I do best, when I keep cycling through all 3 methods in practice, not just focusing on step 2.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on November 27, 2023 1:07pm.

Die Pastellfarben geben einen sehr angenehmen Ton, auch die Linienführung ist sehr klar. Die Proportionen deiner Zeichnung sind allerdings sehr surreal.

Wenn du das zu ändern wünscht und lernen willst natürliche Proportionen zu verwenden, dann wären die beiden klassischen Varianten entweder Reily Rhythmen zu lernen, d.h. vorgegebene Proportionen für den menschlichen Körper zu erlernen, oder die andere Variante zu lernen den Körper aus seinen Massen heraus zu konstruieren, und diese dann mehr und mehr deinem wachsenden Verständnis von Anatomie anzupassen, so wie sie Stan Prokopinski auf proko.com vermittelt.

I like where you are going. Some advice about the use of this masses, especially in the 1 minute practices. You draw the masses, and in the next step, you draw the outline of the body around them. The advantage is, it becomes clearer what you do for critiquing, as the auxiliary drawing and the final result is easy to distinguish, the disadvantage is, you don't fully utilize those masses to achieve an optimal result, and in the end, you don't draw to be easily critiqued, but to stun the viewer with your results.

Those masses of the torso that you draw ultimately represent the ribcage with the shoulders and the pelvis. I would advice looking up a bit how those bone structures actually look like. "anatomy" "ribcage" "pelvis" should give you plenty of results. To put it into my own words: The ribcage is a flattened egg, with the underside cut off in an arc. The top point of this egg is where the neck meets the shoulders. The shoulder joints are to the left and the right of this point.

The pelvis is a bit complicated to put into words, some describe it as a "bucket". Unfortunately the butt cheeks also determine a lot how the actual hip appears, and as big muscles, they can vary between persons and poses. The most important part for the underdrawing is to get a grasp, where the hip joints actually are, as they determine how the legs connect to the torso.

The part of the spine between pelvis and ribcage isn't very long, and there is a natural beginner's tendency to "overstretch" it. Occassionally feel your own torso bones with your hands while drawing, to get a reminder how small the gap between pelvis and ribcage actually is.

Now, if you manage to start forming your "masses" closer to the actual bone structure they depict, you can still easily fit that into a 1 minute sketch. And, unless you draw a particular weighty or muscular person or body part, the outline of the figure isn't so much "around" these structures, it is "made" from the bone structures, (plus the muscle, fat and skin that covers them.)

And I would keep the mental focus of your practice still on the 1 minute sketches. The longer drawings are good to build up a bit of endurance and experiment a bit, but the key skill you have to build is still getting really comfy with a convincing basic structure, and the decisions that make or break it have to be simple and familiar enough to put them down under a minute.

Edit: A word on problems with proportions. I think there are two basic truths to approach those. One: All human bodies (or faces) are to an extent similar, if you want to save a lot of energy, concentration and time while drawing, just hardcore drill those similarities into your muscle memory. Some people do that more on practice and repetition alone, some find it more helpful to look up methods of people, who have defined and simplified those similarities. For the body, Reilly has developed a system to easily memorize those proportions, search terms would be "Reilly rhythms", for the head Mr. Loomis is probably the most used go-to guy. Problem with those methods: They focus on stylized portrayals. If you draw from reference and want to very strictly stick to Reilly or Loomis you will sometimes be thrown off, just by how dissimilar humans can actually be. And when drawing from imagination, strictly sticking to that method can lead to all your stuff starting to look a bit same-ish.

But the other truth is, troubles with proportions (with humans or any other subject) are a problem with your "meassuring" method. Most people when thinking about meassuring in drawing have an image of someone holding a pencil in front of him, with one eye closed. But the most basic problem of meassuring while drawing isn't meassuring more exactly, but meassuring often enough. Meassuring just means comparing points with each other. On the reference, and on your draft. Is point a directly above or below point b, is it directly to the right or the left, or a bit off, and how much. How long is the distance between point a and b compared with the distance between point c and d? If you feel like you really messed up a draft and have to start all over, the reason usually isn't that you slightly misjudged, say, the length of the arm compared to the width of the shoulder, but that you wholly concentrated on the arm and ignored the width of the shoulder completely while doing so. And the remedy to that is to learn to break your focus on the part you are drawing for a moment, compare it with "all the important" other parts, and then switch back into focus.

How do you learn which are "the important parts"? Mostly by cursing and having to restart the g*****n drawing. How do you learn to meassure often enough? Mostly by cursing.... you get the picture.

Also starting with big forms before adding details really helps. It just cuts down the amount of necessary measurements you have to pay attention to at once by a lot. Sooooometimes, you can go the other way. If you have to meassure a really long distance and are uncertain about it, adding in an extra detail to separate it into several shorter distances can help. Don't overdo that, though, some of beginner's typical chicken-scratching lines come from a fear of judging distances.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on September 19, 2021 12:05pm.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on September 19, 2021 12:14pm.

I guess rechecking the basics of anatomy is never a waste of time, but what I really mean is: You check for proportions while drawing anyways, so there will be a natural growth just by practicing.

If you come to a point, where you feel dissatisfied with your style, you can switch it up, either by varying your tools and means, or by looking into special techniques and methods. But that pretty much would have to be an artistic decision following your very own taste. For now, there are no obvious problems with your sketches, so there can't be obvious advice from anyone else. The burden of coming up with problems is all yours, Mr./Mrs. Artist. :D

What you maybe could do is critiquing other artists. Looking at some "beginner" stuff, reflecting on what you would have done differently, and trying to put it into words, can give you a new point of view on your own skills and techniques. And if you see something which gives you the feeling: "Maaan, I wish I could do that", then there is some inspiration for further development right there.

My feedback: I am really impressed. Very reduced, yet narrative lines. Your figures look stylized and elegant, but very lifelike and dynamic as well. I could hide behind claiming that "my style" is different than yours, but the truth is, I would like to be able to consistently do what you do, and would have a hard time to consistently mimick your results.

What author/mentor/tutor/method you would say helped you the most, and do you have a rough estimate on how many hours you dedicated to them?

You must have been really good those years ago, or you didn't forget much. You are a bit rusty with some proportions, and your lines could be a bit smoother, but I don't see a specific mistake that jumps out to me. I would say, just get more practice in. And, actually the advantage of those short sketches is, they allow for a lot of repetition to train your ole muscles up to speed again. Those extra 10-20 secs won't change much, when you are back in the flow.

First of all, your hands are really clean and neat. Way better than your heads and poses.

Looking at your poses, I think the problem starts with your underdrawings. You draw one circle-ish form, about head sized or a tiny touch bigger at the point where the neck meets the torso to represent the ribcage, than a loooong spine, then another tiny form that is more square-ish to represent the hip. Then you draw a body over it following your old habits.

That is not how a torso works, and that is not how an underdrawing works. Ribcage and hip almost completely determine the shape of a torso. Touch your sides, feel the distance between your lowest rib and the upper bone of your hip. Unless you are in a reeeally awkward overstretched position, you have a hard time fitting an entire hand between them.

I highly recommend proko.com "Figure Drawing Fundamentals" course, where I learned a lot, but from my memory one of the first lessons is "the bean". Draw an egg-like shape that represents the entirety of the upper torso, draw a circle, that represents the entirety of the hip, then join them like a sock, into which you had put two spheres. It resembles a literal bean very much. Try to make them look 3-dimensional like two real spheres, that are closely connected. Look at the sides, that connect them, often one side is pinched in, while the other is stretched out.

Don't draw anything else, until you are really used to it, instead just start the next draft for practice.

With your heads, you kinda try to use the Loomis method, but you don't really do. You start with a sphere and draw a face over it. Loomis has this whole procedure: Start with a sphere, find the browline from eyebrows to the tip of the ears, draw a center line, determine cutouts at the side of the head, etcetera, etcetera.

I know, I struggled with finding those cut-outs, too, but they actually are important, as they help determine the height of the nose and the chinline, things that you are wildly guessing about. hairline to browline is 1/3 of the face, browline to tip of the nose is 1/3, tip of the nose to chin is 1/3. Chinline goes up to the ear, which is in the lower back quarter of the cut-outs for the sides of the head.

Maybe read up on the Loomis method. Mr. Loomis original book can be found as a free pdf on the net, and there is at least a dozen youtube tutorials teaching the Loomis method step by step.

Bit of a warning, Loomis heads are idealized, when drawing from reference you will find, that natural heads don't always follow his proportions 100%, but understanding his method still gives a good starting point.

Oh, and don't worry about quickdrawing while practicing Loomis. Following all this steps will take its time, don't hurry. Stop the timer or switch back when the reference changes. But really stick to drawing the foundational structure, don't spend time on embellishments before you are really comfortable with finding the size and position of all the features of the face from every angle.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on September 18, 2021 6:28pm.