Forumberichten van Kim

I think the use of "skeletons" is extremely common, and largely recommended for artists of all skill levels.

By "noisy", do you just mean that you find you have too many line and start to get confused? It sounds like you may be drawing the initial skeleton too dark. Have you ever done practice exercises for controlling the darkness you are laying down with your pencil? You may find that this will help you to start feather-light, so that your later lines are easier to lay on top of the skeleton without creating a visual cacophony. Plus, they're really relaxing.

Gradient exercises are simple to do. Basically, draw 5 boxes, about 1 inch by inch, on a piece of paper. Fill in the boxes from the darkest your pencil can possibly create, to the lightest it can possibly create. It should take 5 minutes tops. Then go on to do your normal drawing practice.

The next day, draw 6 1x1 boxes, and fill them in from the darkest to the lightest. The following day, draw 7 boxes. The idea is to get ever finer control over the pressure that you put on your pencil, until you can create 20 or more distinct shades of grey with a single pencil.

About never quite putting them in the anatomically correct place -- this is just practice, and the fact that you are able to look at your drawing and say, this is not quite right, shows progress! Mentally review each of your drawings to see where you went wrong, and just make a mental note of it for the future.

The other thing about working really light, starting with your skeleton, bubbling in major regions, and then going back and doing your sketch on top of it all, is that you aren't really expected to get each layer 100% right from the get-go. The skeleton layer is your best guess, the spheres layer is your next best guess (and can deviate slightly from the skeleton), and the actual lines are your final guess, and again, can deviate from what's underneath. Each layer improves upon the last.

This being the case, having super-fine control over how hard you are pressing so that your preparatory layers do not interfere too much with the "final" sketch is of the utmost importance.

Hope this helps! Sorry if I misunderstood the question. :)

Now that we have the new expression practice tool available, I'm going to try and re-start my quest to do 100 drawings of faces, each with a minimum of 5 minutes spent on it.

With the craziness of my schedule, I'm probably looking at 1 to 3 faces per day.

Is anyone else interested in getting on board the 100 face challenge with me? :)

With my schedule I think my friends bend over backwards to avoid adding stuff to my to-do list. So I think I will just have some very surprised friends! ;)

I sort of burned out on my 100... I've been thinking that perhaps if I did a 100 of all fun images, like gift art for my friends of their D&D characters, with the goal being to loosen up, take risks, and feel confident just drawing, I might be able to rekindle my 100 fire!

The lines look much more decisive to me, und3c1ph3r3d!

Admin to the rescue! duplicates deleted. :)

I'm glad you got the image tag working, those are very cool. I really need to get back on the stick again. I just did a digital painting for a friend recently and it was much harder than it was before.

Whoooa! I love what you did to that windom! I'm such a sci-fi junkie.

Check this for how to post images, it's pretty easy: https://line-of-action.com/faq/#forumimages

Go go go! :D Please do share some of your results?

Good GRACIOUS! Eight days? I am certain we are all very impressed! I know I am.

I think those topics are indeed a bit broad. I would pick just one for your next 100, and possible even drill down further -- "Light And Materials" could turn into "Shadows on fabric" or "highlights on glass" as a focus for 100, for example.

Those sound like wonderful goals, Lokken! :)

Hi there! Welcome to the site. :) Do you have a particular practice goal in mind at the moment?

Not sure where to start with critique? Check out these two guides:

Benefiting from critique
Giving good critique

Sorry for the late reply -- I know many people who are in wildly unrelated careers to their degree. Simply having a degree will unlock many many doors that you would not expect, and I no longer think of degrees as being a straight line to a specific career for the vast majority. I have a Bachelor of Arts in Visual and Critical Studies myself, and now I run a web development company and do a lot of heavy-duty programming (which I turn out to love, go figure.)

Not having a BFA, I'm not sure how to advise you specifically. Does your school have a guidance center? They will often keep a record of what their graduates went on to do, and sometimes their average income 1 to 10 years after graduation -- you could go ask them what people from your department have done with themselves historically! :)

I'm unaware of one! We're actually smack-dab in the middle of working on producing a hands & feet practice tool, thanks to the very generous support of this community. :) I've been documenting our progress as we go! Here's the most recent update:

https://line-of-action.com/forums-repaired-and-progress-on-hands-feet-tool/

We're also already at work on the next tool after hands & feet, which will be for environments. My expectation is that after that, we will begin raising money for a faces/expressions tool.

On the other hand, now that I think about it, I've seen a number of artists jump straight into the stick figure stage while gesture drawing. To me this is a little crazy, but it definitely works for some!

On youtube there are even some boggling people who start at just drawing the fully formed human -- I am impressed by these videos, but also find them disheartening as they tend to rank highly when a student does a search for gesture drawing. I think it creates the wrong impression and sets a too-intimidating bar. I also wonder if those artists have not just trained themselves to see "outlines" very accurately, and wonder how solidly their foundations are rooted in underlying anatomy. What would happen if they had no model, for example? I really don't know.

To summarize my follow-up rant: Artists work very differently. You will probably need to experiment to see what works best for you!

My best advice is to work large, so you can fit a skeleton and eventual flesh inside/on top of the original gesture and still see the details.