Messages du forum par Aunt Herbert

Aaahm, I am otherly convinced, that for expressions/portraits the timed class mode with the 30 sec and 1 mins shorties doesn't work well. I personally always change to the "All the same time" mode for that, select 3600 secs as time limit, and change images manually.

The most commonly cited basic head construction is from Mr. Andrew Loomis, first developed in "Fun with a pencil". You can still find the original pdf for free on the interwebs, and tons and tons of people expanding on it. Caution: Loomis invented a quick method to draw relatively impressive looking faces with little prior practice, but they are all "from imagination", in other words, a bit random.

If you want to learn how to match Loomis' heads with a specific reference, I advise to start with repeating his basic construction without reference a lot. That is exactly, why I think a quick gesture timed class makes no sense for it. You do your "shorties" basically offline, from "imagination", without reference. And drawing the Loomis construction properly will take you way more than a minute anyways, so if you tried a quick gesture mode, you would only ever end up with a few initial circles.

Also search for images of Loomis head, and you will find some highly stylized, robot head like looking derivations of Loomis method, that is what a lot of professional use for solving head placement, lighting etcetera.

After you repeated those offline practices often enough to feel confident with Mr Loomis construction, and want a reality check, try applying the method to drawing from reference. When you are confronted with a real person's face, with all its specifics and flaws, you will start the process to learn how to match Loomis idealized rhythms to reality. And if you try to do it on a timer, you will just revert to what you practised so far, and produce idealized, non-distinct features, which you could have done offline as well.

BUT: Setting the timer to infinity doesn't mean that you should ignore the basic benefits of quick sketching, you just have to do it yourself. For example, if you spent 5 to 7 minutes to do a head construction, and then 50 more minutes on embellishing it with a lot of details, to only then realize, that it just looks crappy and always will, then you wasted basically an entire hour to effectively practice head construction for 5 to 7 minutes, and 50 minutes practising to polish a turd, which is utterly useless. If you had stopped yourself in time, you could have done 10 simple head constructions and thus used 10 times more of your time on effective training.

As for good beginner practice for still objects and landscapes alike, one essential link: drawabox.com. Go there, try it out, do it, even if it feels strange at first, it absolutely makes sense, and is explained much better, than this site or me or anyone else could explain to you in a shorter time.

Ok, I did one session and scanned in all the shorties too, to give you an idea with what I mean with: you are drawing way way way too much in that first minute. (I probably should have increased the contrast while scanning, the shorties are a bit hard to see)

https://line-of-action.com/art/view/9071

You aren't supposed to finish the entire drawing in under one minute, the idea is to find a few lines to build a long form drawing upon. If you finish the draft in one minute, what do you plan to do with the rest of the time, once you go to 5 min, 10 min, 25 mins, or longer? Keep embellishing a flawed and hasty foundation? That way only lie tears and frustration.

There are 3 elements and 2 relations you need to get right, the head in relation to shoulderline/ribcage, and the ribcage in relation to the hip. Don't fixate on finishing the outline, don't mess around with drawing entire limbs. If head and/or torso are partially hidden behind limbs, you sometimes need to indicate that, but stick conceptually to drawing head and torso, not the limbs. If the limbs are stretched out in an epressive manner, that clearly informs the curve of the spine, use at most 1 line to indicate 1 limb. The foundational core of each pose are head and torso, and the short poses are all about focusing on only sketching out head and torso.

It also needs to be said, that for all my preaching, I myself still suffer from sloppy and hasty lines and constructions a lot. There are a lot of people, who do these first lines way more beautifully designed and executed with more intent, than I do.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on December 21, 2023 11:34am.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on December 21, 2023 11:52am.

Actually, you are drawing way way way too much in that minute. I'll do another class tomorrow and upload my shorties, too, so you see what I mean.

OK, one thing popped up for me on both images, and that is the way you indicated the... middle mass? I know the tutorial isn't very explicit about why that has to be there, and what it's good for. Here is the secret solved: It's meant to indicate the ribcage. (plus shoulders)

a) I recommend proko.com figure-drawing-fundamentals course, which has a similar concept like this site's tutorial, but way better explained. There is a premium version for money, but the free version contains all the important informations.

b) the ribcage is actually a pretty simple form, it is basically an upright standing egg, just flattened a bit, and the lower curve cut off along the lower ribs. I do recommend to use this as a shortcut for that upper torso mass. The peek of the egg isn't easy to see, because on top of it to the sides sit the shoulders and clavicula, (directly on top of it is where the neck starts, ofc) but if you know what this "mass" is supposed to indicate, you will have better luck deciding the size and placement it needs, to inform your drawing.

To let you immediately in on the secret of the lower body mass, it is the hip. A good shortcut for it is basically drawing a slipper underwear, and then indicate where the hip joints are, which are (other than the shoulder joints to the ribcage) always in a fixed position towards the hip, and can be easily spotted, as those are the joints, where the upper legs start from. Really indicating the hips correctly is often a bit more complicated, so for a starter I do agree with the tutorial, that indicating them with a circle will do for now, just try to make that circle big enough to fit the buttox into it.

The line of action, namesake of this page: I find it a remarkably complex concept, and I don't always use it consciously. The idea to find it is to think about the longest simple curve, that you could fit into the silhouette of the pose you are about to draw. I find it complex, as it combines the idea of indicating the dynamics of the overall pose, but often also helps indicating the placement of ribcage, spine and hip, properly. Which is a lot of information to pack into a single line, and I am personally meh about the pedagogical value of placing it so front and centre.

The idea with the timed practice is, in the shorter warm-up lessons, don't get hasty, but focus mostly on placing the torso correctly. You won't finish your drawing in time, and that is OK so. Getting the first lines that indicate the torso right is most important for the final result, so the short timing only allows you to draw those lines, and thererfor get more repetitions in for the basic construction, than for limbs or even fancy details at the end. So, don't get hasty, just draw a few lines before the timer runs out, then repeat finding and drawing those very lines with the next pose.

-Pencil control, I think there is one site that everyone agrees teaches that best, and that would be drawabox. If you go there and read the description of what you are supposed to do, and you feel your eyes glaze over, shake that feeling, actually doing it isn't as boring as it sounds. On the other hand, you won't be able to avoid a bit of repetitive grind. You are basically training your hand-eye coordination and your fine muscle skills the way a bodybuilder trains their abbs. Try to experience it in a meditative mood, keep your initial attempts as control samples, and cherish how fast you will see actual improvements in contrast to those meager beginnings.

If you can express your idea with fewer lines, you can put more attention towards placing and designing each individual line, thus increasing your line quality.

For example, imagine the outline of a limb, say, an upper arm. If you use four or five short lines to indicate its outline, it will look ragged. If you instead find one smooth curve, that incorporates three of the shorter lines, and another line, that summarizes the two remaining lines, the lines themselves will look smoother and less often interrupted, because they are, and the viewer's eye will have to process less individual informations to pick up the form, so they will perceive your drawing as looking more elegantly.

As everything in art, line economy is a rule, not a law. If you draw an old man's face, or the muscles of a trained bodybuilder with very little bodyfat, well, the reference themselves are a bit ragged and show a lot of details and texture, so you can get away with more lines and still look decent.

Worst case is a young and pretty girl. Female anatomy has a higher body fat percentage then males, which smoothes out all the lines. If you draw a young girl with too many individual lines, she will always look like she is either severly dehydrated or suffers from connective tissue weakness. Ever heard someone wax lyrically about "female curves"? I am quite certain, this is were the trope originated.

Polyvios, I hate to rain on your parade, but that is not a drawing tool, that is just Stan Prokopenko's sales page. The reason is is called Timer may have to do something with time limited offers. And yes, proko does a good job on most of his stuff, but I don't feel he deserves THAT level of advertisement. My suggestion for viewers of this page would be rather this course from him: https://www.proko.com/course/figure-drawing-fundamentals/overview

... and the comment that the free version is enough for most purposes. You can upgrade to the full version after you think you learned so much, that it is worth it.

EDIT: !!!

Ooooh, my bad. I missed the "Add To Session" buttons instead of the "Buy Pack" buttons under the first 6 entries. It is indeed a drawing tool. Mea maxima culpa, Polyvios!

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on December 20, 2023 10:10am. Reason: me being blind

Hmm, I think I see, why it took you so long. There is pretty much no difference in the amount of detail from the first sketches to the last, which probably means you paused a lot on the warm-up sketches. I mean, fair enough, you used the site to provide templates for drawing for you, and put in 90 minutes of work, which is good. But I advise you to test out the timed practice experience as intended. For the 30 second and 1 minute sketches at the start, try to not pause them, but rather really try to find a few essential lines that define the figure for you. Don't fret if you aren't done, you aren't working at museum pieces, but at improving your skills.

Line of action isn't the only way to find initial lines, but it's a good and tested starting point, and I would recommend to sticking to it for now, as good as you can understand it. A long curve vaguely along the spine, indicate masses, then joints, but when the image flips, you are done and start with the next image. Try not to hurry and start drawing hastier, so you get in more lines, instead draw fewer, but more meaningful lines.

This helps you to really get an eye for the pose quickly, learn a bit about analyzing your drawing process, and to prioritize what you are drawing. The first lines you draw often decide the quality of the end result, so separate them out, practise them more often than you practise finishing a piece, learn to keep stuff simple and to organise your sketch from the first lines. That is the idea behind the timing of these classes, and although it will feel strange at first, it does have its definite benefits, which you are currently missing out on.

From the figures you drew, it is a mixed bag. Some of them clearly show, that you already know quite a bit about the proportions of the human figure, on some of them the proportions are off, but in a way that emphasizes their expression. Which is good if you can do it with intent, but can become a road bump, if you can't control when it happens. Some of them, well...

You have quite a high ratio of searching lines, where you attempted one thing, then corrected it, and again. If you ever want to get to a clean looking finish, the goal should be to reduce those, so you don't have to constantly break your flow by erasing stuff. Part of it to learning to integrate the moments for planning and pre-shadowing your lines into your workflow. (pre-shadowing means, you move your pen over the paper without drawing first, to get a visual clue, if your hand movement succeeds in doing the line you want it to do, only then you draw the line. takes discipline to get used to it, better start early. The method is explained well on drawabox, I can provide links if you want)

Part 2: I actually hadn't done poses for a while, as I was more interested in portraits, so what I wrote above was mostly from memory. And the topic was: This is how I think the tutorial is supposed to be followed.

I just went and did a 30 minute class, to fresh up my memory about how I actually do it usually. First: Ouch, drawing isn't like cycling, I get rusty quick in solving specific drawing problems, when I don't keep up practicing them.

But, what I feel is most important about the "action line" part, and how I do practice it, isn't so much about actually studying the human figure, but about finding the balance between composition and details.

The old beginner's mistake of wanting to focus on all the details first is still in my blood, and the quick poses force me to find big lines first, to get an idea of the overall image sketched out, before touching any details with a 9 foot pole. So the problem I am focused on isn't so much: "Where does the tutorial exactly want me to put down those lines?" or even "Where would Stan Prokopenko put those lines?" but "How can I identify this pose with as few lines as possible?"

The quick poses are about finding shortcuts for the overall design. LoA, Proko, they offer general solutions for this shortcuts, but in the end, it is me, who has to work from these shortcuts, so I put them, where they help me to understand the pose. Following the advice of smarter people is generally a good idea, but when applying it to a concrete model, I often skip those advices, and just draw the most prominent lines, that I do see.

Having followed proko and LoA changed what lines my eyes are drawn to, but leaving the ladder you climbed behind you is also a valid move, as long as you don't forget where you are going to.

Now, when the site switches from quick poses to increasingly longer poses, the problems of the thesis are revealed. Quick lines can be thrown down without much measuring, and give a good impression, but when the time frame increases, all that is left to be done is adding more details.

And what details allow is to measure with a lot more precision, and suddenly the imprecisions in proportions are revealed. So the skill I am practicing is balancing details and composition.

If I plop down the base lines for a 10 minute or longer drawing within 30 seconds, the measurements are so far off, that the result starts to look crappy when I start adding in details. So for those longer poses, the initial lines have to be more precise, and measured, and without details finding marks to measure from is hard. Which for me means that during a timed course with increasing time, I actually switch my overall strategy several times, and the learning experience a lot comes from being aware of that juggling act between following a grande design, and using details tactically as a tool to successfully measure, instead of zooming in on a single detail from the start and losing all sense of proportions as a result.

Frankly, I don't focus on the action line myself very much, unless I spot one clearly. It is a bit of a part of theory, related also to Matessi's force drawing method, where if I watch someone do it repeatedly on a video, I start to get what it is all about, but I don't get why they have to describe it in these exact terms. To me it is quite metaphorical language, just not plain english. It kind of makes sense in theory, and it sounds like a very simple concept, but if you try to apply it to a random template, it can turn out to be way more complex then advertised.

My main reason for having the tutorial on is for getting a warning before the timing for the next image changes. But on the days when I want to focus on being a good student, the idea, as I understood it and practice it, is to find the longest simple curve, that you could fit into the silhouette of the template.

This is an extremely condensed shortcut of the form, something that would stick in your memory even if you saw a shadow of the template for a blink of an eye and only out of the corners of your vision. One line to describe a pose, I think the concept was originally developed by dance choreographers, who invented a way to note down choreographies in a simplified way.

To your practical example:

Your image shows two poses, and you use the word "sedentary" to describe them. I would agree for the girl in the wheelchair, and the action line for her to me would be almost curled up.

The standing girl I would rather rate as "static", and the action line would be almost a vertical from her head to the foot which supports most of her weight. It wouldn't be completely straight, as she isn't standing completely straight. Her hip is tilted to the side to shift her weight a bit, and I would try to tilt the action line to cross her hip bone orthogonally. If she would be standing in a more dynamic, off-centre way, i might decide to draw the action line from her head towards the extended foot.

If you don't find any convincing action line, in a pinch, you can still try to just guess where the spine should be, that is usually good enough for most purposes.

I find the action line a bit easier to understand, once you get better at the second step, allocating the masses: head, ribcage and hip. I mentioned proko.com before, and in comparison this site has an overly simple description (basically you are instructed to just draw two circles), that makes it harder to build on. Proko spends quite some time showing how to develop effective shortcuts for the ribcage and hip, and how they define the torso.

A typical, typical beginner mistake is to draw the torso too straight, with not enough angling between hip and ribcage, and if you train your eye on finding the action line, you often find more convincing solutions for the placement of the masses. But then, to get a feeling for what that darn action line is supposed to accomplish in the first place, you need some experience of having struggled with placing those masses.

The problem with the tutorial on this site, it abbreviates very complex concepts into just enough sentences to fit onto a one page description and a few pop up messages between poses. When I showed up here, I knew those (or very similar) concepts, explained to me in way more detail from Stan Prokopenski, and I understood, what they are talking about.

And it probably makes sense for the concept of this website to keep those descriptions so extremely short, but it feels like an ambitious kids cartoon explaining how the drive shift of a car is assembled. It is all technically correct, but a bit sparse for practical application.

About the photos on this page: Well, the wild west crazy times of the interwebs are past us, copyrights exist and are stringently enforced, so LoA can only work with photographers and models they can afford. And those are basically fellow artists, who do their best of providing us with useful templates for drawing. And with about as much of a mixed success as our own attempts at drawing. Being a bit heretical, quickposes.com has a very similar set-up to LoA, and frankly a lot of their poses seem to be just easier to draw from. LoA's templates indeed have a tendency to be rather challenging.

I think the #1 potential LoA has, is that it combines the timed poses mechanic with a forum. But it takes us as a community to learn how to successfully exchange our thoughts about our practice and art in general to grow this forum into a vibrant space.

Hi, Idon't know. I also think your models look great.

The tutorial here is decent, but quite short and toned down. I personally found great instructive videos on proko.com. The Human Figure Foundation course more or less follows the same basic principles as the tutorials here, but way more in depth, and explaining every step in short videos. There is a free version, and a paid version, but basically all the essential concepts are included in the free version. The paid version for me is more like a way to show your appreciation and getting a bit of bonus content for it. I highly recommend it.

About the images in wheelchairs: if you aren't interested in drawing an image, just click on the fast forward button. If you feel an image comes up annoyingly often, you can also block it either temporarily or constantly.

About the practicing or not practicing: what other options exist to get better? I could only think of praying for divine inspiration, but then I am unfortunately atheist. So the question can't be whether to practice or not, but only how to find the best way for yourself to practice. And yes, that is also a skill, that improves with practice.

My advice on testing out which way of practicing works for you:

a) ask around what other people do, get a feeling of what methods are on the market.

b) chose one that looks promising, set yourself a few conditions, Like, OK, I'll spend an hour per day for 6 weeks on doing this, or, OK, I will follow this course through to the end.

c) absolutely important: keep your first botched results for record, then after you are done with what you wanted to do, compare them with your final results, so you get a feeling of what changed in your style. It is a natural tendency for people to have their ambitions grow at the same or even a faster pace then their skills, which can give yourself the false impression, that you did not improve at all. Keeping your older stuff for comparison can somewhat help to counter that tendency.

d) once you are done with a few tutorials or courses and get the hang of how practice impacts your skill, start exploring your taste. What is it that you specifically would like to be able to do differently? Can you come up with ways to break it down into simpler parts, that you can practice individually? That is basically exactly what those tutorials do for you, and the natural growth path for an artist is to eventually be able to design their own practices.

I came for example for myself up with a game of drawing one detail in my sight in a recognizable way, but with as few lines as possible. That is so far a game to play by myself, I did it repeatedly for quite a time, and it became a practice, that improved my eye for interesting shapes.

My current practice plan is to go through the different head abstractions of Loomis, Reilly, Huston, Hampton and Brigman, repeat the basic construction until I can do them without looking up the intermediate steps from a script, then try to apply them to drawing from a template instead of from imagination. I don't know yet, what it will eventually teach me, but it whets my appetite.

You can get inspiration for what to practice by watching people debate and explain the different concepts involved in art, but beware of the consumer trap: It only counts as inspiration, if it leads to you actually drawing more. You wont get better at drawing from spending all day listening to people, or reading learned pamphlets.

e) make a habit of keeping some basic drawing tools in reach. So if you see something or hear something, that gives you an idea about what you could draw, your threshold to follow that urge is as low as possible. And the more often you follow that urge to draw, the more natural it will feel to just start drawing.

f) don't think of your drawings as master pieces. 99% of what you draw won't be exceptional at all. Those are just wood shavings, that fall in an endless stream from your workbench. The one piece you are really working at, is to hone your skills. Sometimes you will produce something, that really surprises yourself. Certainly keep those around, but don't beat yourself up if you can't immediately reproduce them. Nobody can be constantly exceptional, but if you keep honing your skills, at some level of practice the stuff you consider to be flawed and trashy will look exceptional to other people.

g) a final warning, to myself as much as to anyone reading this: honing skills is rewarding, once you get the hang out of it, but don't try to reduce art to one specific set of skills. One example for me is PeterDraws on youtube. I couldn't rate his skills in figure drawing or perspective, but watching him do what he does, he certainly is one heck of an artist, and watching him draw makes my pen hand itch to try something similar.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on December 18, 2023 11:14pm.

OK, that's a Loomis head, well done. I like how you designed the features of the face. Clean forms, clean lines. From the big eyes and triangular chin I sense a bit of manga/anime influence, am I right?

I find Loomis great for working from imagination, but applying him to draw from a model (let's not kid ourselves, from a photo) is tough. If you draw the face lines free hand, and then fill in the face, it works swimmigly, but if you stare at a photo, and try to decide where those damn circles have to go, to fit to THAT specific face, it suddenly turns into a puzzle box. I switched to Reily Abstraction of the head, which is kind of the same deal as Loomis but with even more additional lines, which makes my problem even worse. But it is always a fun visual puzzle.

If you want to stick with drawing from imagination, you could try to develop a few distinct characters, and then try to stick with always the same face, but from different angles and or with different expressions, so you could use them in a graphic novel or such.

Your foundational work so far looks solid enough to drop a thought about how far you want to go with rendering. If you just keep the head construction as is, but repeat the outlines and the features with a dark marker, that would absolutely work for telling stories.

The more you want to go into depths, shadows and texture, the more extra work you need to define the exact topographie of all the features of the face. There is a whole series of head constructions from different authors beyond Loomis, I know so far about Reily, Steve Huston, Michael Hampton and Brigman....

Oh, if you want to train portrays from a model, don't use the class feature, chose long repeat times (3600 sec is max, that's an hour), take your time, and switch the fotos from hand, when you are done. Portrays work a bit different from poses in that regards, don't let you get confused by the site features, they are more geared towards poses. which are easier to start from first simple forms. If you try Loomis heads in 30 sec mode, you won't get far beyond skull circle, browline, center line and maybe starting to think about where to place the side cutouts, before the photo switches

Ahhhm... impressions about what? I see two buttons (?) indicating images in your post, but there is nowhere to look at them or open them. A lot of people use imgur and link to that, if they want to show something in forum. It is really quick to set up.

I am not an anatomy expert, but I think there is also a shorter muscle above the clavicula, that looks like an extension of the shoulder muscle. If I remember correctly, one is for lifting the upper arm to the side, while the short one is to move the clavicula upwards towards the ears. And it's not the green neck muscle, that one is for moving the head to the side.

The important thing, on a really shredded shoulder, the muscle doesnt stop underneath the clavicula.

https://tse4.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.hw7_Suxf-xoHOE96qUKVnQHaEK&pid=Api

checking, if the link works

One thought about the top 1: The way you indicated the hip does not fit to where you then decided the upper joints for the legs should start from. Those joints are called hip joints for a reason. I don't know about the OG image, but I guess the problem isn't with the legs, but with the hip. You indicated it far too horizontal, with an almost straight spine.

Same problem with the lower pose, although it is less obvious. Spine is too straight, the angle between hip and ribcage should be more dramatic. I think it is less obvious, as you cheated a bit on both the hip and the ribcage. If the ribcage was at a steeper angle, the shoulders would be a bit less upright, and the way the lower arm protrudes from the shoulder wouldn't look as uncomfortable.

Wanting to indicate the spine too straight is a common beginner mistake. If you don't see other clear indicators for where the hip should be, the joints are usually easy to spot from looking at the upper legs, and their position towards the hip is pretty much fixed. Shoulder joints towards the ribcage are way more flexibel in position, but the neck should always be visible, and usually the solar plexus can be at least guesstimated to orient the ribcage.

Also, don't be afraid to pretty much always try to exaggerate the bend of the spine. It helps counteract the beginner mistake of normalizing it, which leads to stiff poses. Even if your bent is stronger than on the OG photo, you end up with a more dramatic pose, which usually looks great, anyways.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on December 11, 2023 6:59pm.

I am admittedly treading on a bit of thin ice here, as I myself haven't found the impetus to dedicate myself to drawing from imagination in a structured manner. I have been wanting to get there eventually, but for now I kind of always get stuck on yet another problem I want to overcome in drawing from observation first. I at least bought a mannequin, now.

But the general plan looks sound.

For step 1 I think the source numero uno that has to be mentioned is drawabox.com. Great introduction to the concept of line quality, short and crisp, and then goes straight into explaining how to solve the most important problems in perpective drawing. I also love the pedagogical approach, as they provide a good experience of how important structured training for art development is, and how fulfilling it is to watch your own fast progress.

Been there, done that, can recommend, would do it again, 10/10!

Step 3 I would recommend doing a course first. I personally did the Figure Drawing Fundamentals on proko.com. Stan Prokopenko offers free courses and paid courses, but the free courses pretty much include all the essential stuff. I think the idea behind his paid courses is rather, that if you found his teachings valuable enough, you can send him some money, and get some extra freebies as a sign of gratitude.

The human figure course on proko.com starts first and foremost by explaining what basically the torso does, "the masses", before he adds a more detailed explanation about the joints and limbs. I found his lessons and assignments convincing, easy to follow, and feel confident in applying what I learned from the course. I am pretty certain the principles taught apply equally to drawing both form observation and imagination, just I personally have been glued to one side so far.

There are probably other good tutorials on the topic, too, but proko.com is at least extremely solid, 9/10, I would say.

For gesture drawing from observation, you need stuff to observe. You are already on line-of-action.com, but I feel quickposes.com also deserves a recommendation. Very similar concept, just without the forum and critique aspect, but a different set of photographers and models, which actually makes more of a difference, than I would have expected.

The step 2, the mannequin... all I can say, quite a while back I experimented with just trying to draw a model that I could observe from one side also from all the other sides, and the attempt drove me nuts. Which is why I decided to get the mannequin, so I could solve the 99 problems with perspective, that immediately appeared. Now I just need the drive to rate drawing from imagination higher on my to do list, and to find the energy to finish my other projects quicker to get to it.

A quite popular author for gesture drawing seems to be Mike Matessi, who is associated with the Force method. I personally must say, he is certainly a heck of an artist, his style is amazing, and the results he and people who studied his method produce are top notch. But to be heretical, I personally just don't understand, what he is talking about, when he explains his stuff. Clearly a lot of the words he uses are quite metaphorical, and when I can watch him or an accomplished pupil perform their drawings on video, while rapping Matessi's explanations in an inner monologue style, I kinda start to understand, what the words are meant to convey, but to me, his private language just ain't simple english.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on December 7, 2023 8:28pm.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on December 7, 2023 8:29pm.