1 hour practice

here's my 1 hour practice please give me some constructive feedback

https://imgur.com/a/KOUQE1u

Some notes:

thanks for the responses last time they helped me out a lot. These past 2 week I've been more focused on 30sec and 1min poses I've been trying to dial it back a bit on detail and I've been trying to get more fluid lines. Even though in some poses I still have scratchy lines but I'm more conscious on the lines I make and I'm trying to fix them

I've been having trouble with my proportions lately so any help on that would be nice

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.

M. JianPhoenix,

Try changing your hand from a typical writing hand style to an artist drawing hand style. It will help create longer, more elegant lines. I know it may feel clumsy for a while to draw that way. But that clutz-y feel will ebb away with time, and your drawings will benefit from the change in how you hold your pencil.

(A larger size paper will also help you feel freer to remove from your elbow or shoulder.)

I think if you focus on your lines. Say as you did with your core drawing lines: But only draw as many lines as needed to create body core lines; not complete the figure, which would help you immensely. Rember the brain can interpret quite a bit of information from drawn lines as well as the open un-drawn spaces on the page. Not all stripes of your pen need to touch each other for the brain to understand the figure as a whole.

I would advise drawing the least amount of lines. Try not requiring all of the lines to continually touch each other will help you see that the whole outline of the figure need not be present for the viewer to understand the structure is a solid object in space.

All the best,

JCML Fine Art

Way to go, JianPhoenix, so far so good! Excellent job on your gestures, lines and spaces, thus far.

My criticism for you would be that though your anatomy is far more recognisable in your 5 and 10 minute attitudes, in terms of the "scalloped pail" for your ribcage, yet I'm not getting enough of the freedom of flexiblity and TLC (tender loving care) in the overall anatomy study. Would you kindly please check out the human proporiton guide illustrations in the Andrew Loomis books; for example, Figure Drawing for All Its Worth & Successful Drawing, in PDF and book form online?

The reason why you would and should do this thing is as a result, you'll improve your relationships of the human bodies with time. Though your first attempts would be a bit too stiff and blander, you'd constantly improve over time.

Good luck to you.

Cheers.

Polyvios Animations.

Way to go, JianPhoenix, so far so good! Excellent job on your gestures, lines and spaces, thus far.

My criticism for you would be that though your anatomy is far more recognisable in your 5 and 10 minute attitudes, in terms of the "scalloped pail" for your ribcage, yet I'm not getting enough of the freedom of flexiblity and TLC (tender loving care) in the overall anatomy study. Would you kindly please check out the human proporiton guide illustrations in the Andrew Loomis books; for example, Figure Drawing for All Its Worth & Successful Drawing, in PDF and book form online?

The reason why you would and should do this thing is as a result, you'll improve your relationships of the human bodies with time. Though your first attempts would be a bit too stiff and blander, you'd constantly improve over time.

Good luck to you.

Cheers.

Polyvios Animations.