Forumberichten van Aunt Herbert

One more thought, one little trick I added to my inventory, and on some poses like #10 on the first page and #2 and #4 on the second page, I think you are somewhat starting to develop it anyways, but aren't sure yet what you are doing.

The idea of the bean is to show "the main masses". Especially when drawing very overweight people, I find it somewhat useful to add one or two (three ?) more masses, namely the apron of fat and on women the breasts. Other than head, ribcage, pelvis, those masses do not determine the placement of joints and limbs, but they can obscure the marks for ribcage and pelvis a lot, and especially modify the outline of the torso a lot.

Making a distinction between apron, breasts, and torso helps me to standardize ribcage and pelvis towards their skeletal foundation, and get a better eye for where those are. The apron's form is usually simple enough, for the breasts I often indicate the underside of both breasts in one curvy w-shaped line.

After separating those forms from the torso, the catalogue of possible body types just narrows down to a much clearer taxonomy of simple repeating forms and shapes.

Well, the orientation of the bean is determined by the position of the ribcage and the hip, so you "only" need to find the landmarks, that show that.... which is admittedly hard enough to do, especially when major landmarks are hidden by limbs or just muscles (shoulder...) or even body fat...

To me the upper part of the bean became a bit clearer once I started to more consciously differentiate between ribcage and shoulderline. This means the ribcage isn't as rounded on the top as you still draw it a lot, it is formed like the peak of an egg, with the neck marking where the tip of that egg is, and then the shoulders sitting somewhat independently on top of that egg. The tip of that egg usually isn't visible, at it is obscured by the shoulders, but drawing the ribcage as an egg rather than as a sphere helps with the rest of the anatomy a lot, as it leaves the correct space for the shoulder joints and bones and muscles to fill.

In reaction, it is on some poses easier to understand where that ribcage hides, AFTER you draw in a shoulderline, just as one single line along the clavicles for orientation.

Finding the one perfect shortcut for the pelvis is a chore, especially as the visibility of marks varies quite a bit dependening on pose and point of view.

In a pinch, look at the thighs to triangulate where those hip joints have to be. Other than the shoulder joints, they are 100% fixed to the pelvis, so you can always backward design from the thighs, if you find nothing else.

If the belly is visible, it often helps to trace a curve along the centre of the belly muscles to exactly locate the groin. On a back view, the spine may be visible for that purpose.

It's also a question of what you want to develop the drawing into, which shortcut is the most useful. If you want to improve perspective it's useful to very consciously start with a box, from which you cut out curves to leave space for the thighs and the belly. If you want to focus more on flowing lines, sketching a pair of underpants is often easier and more useful. If a big buttoc muscle hides everything else, just a big circle, or the upper form of that thigh might be the best way to do it.

Oooh kay, so much for useful landmarks, and now to a topic, where I personally disagree a bit with Proko, and that is the Line of Action. The way he sells it is, that it is a single line, so it has to be an easy starting point. I don't find that single line easy at all, because he attaches so much purpose to it. I try to consciously remind me to use it every now and then, but in the end I almost as often don't use it, and in some poses I just don't feel it helps a lot at all.

The exaggeration of the pose part to me is also a bit more complicated than advertised. On a very basic level, it just counteracts a typical beginner's mistake, to unconsciously straighten the torso, and thereby produce stiff poses. So, if you see, that the bean is slightly bent, it is generally a safe bet to draw it bent a bit more. If you see, that the bean is twisted, it is safe to attempt to twist it just a bit more. That is the very base line level of that advice.

But it carries a second layer, namely that exaggerating the pose is also a first step into stylizing the pose, and as with all styles, that is an aesthetic decision, which should be made from the context of your artistic goal for that pose. Exaggerating adds more dynamic to the expressed motion, but sometimes you also want to emphasize calmness, in which case just exaggerating contradicts your goal. It is good to be able to exaggerate, it is better to understand how it impacts the result, so you can do it consciously.

For now, for practice, you probably should alway try to exaggerate as hard as possible to counteract that beginner's tendency to draw stiff torsos, but it is a rule and a stylistic choice, not a law.

Also: If you ever look at your finished drawing and get the uneasy feeling: Somehow the pose looks stiff, but I don't know why, here is your number one suspect to interrogate: Did you bend and twist that torso enough?

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on January 10, 2024 2:20pm.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on January 10, 2024 2:25pm.

I do find a lot to love about those lines, you are focused on the right priorities, your shapes and forms are clear and easy to read.

My advice would be to investigate that feeling of "not being thrilled" a bit more, and try to put your vague artistic ambitions into clearer forms. Do you have any older sketches still available, which felt more promising? Maybe put those next to your newer ones and try to find the essential differences. Could be, you just got a bit rusty and will be back to going forward in no time, but could also be, that you shifted focus on some other aspects since then, and might want to readjust that, and retrain some fundamentals, who turned out to be less solid than you assumed them to be.

Or another thing you could do is practicing critiques by giving a bunch of beginners feedback on how to improve their stuff. That way you get used to defining the quality of a drawing by various measures, and then can apply that practice to your own work, to get clearer ideas about which boundaries you yourself want to push next.

A third option would be to put your shorties to the test, and try developing them into something, that makes you clearly leave your comfort zone. Using one to do a really long time drawing sometimes can turn a vague feeling of "something ain't right" into a clearly visible flaw, that you then can work out. That would be an option if your long term goal is mostly to get better at drawing from reference. If your long term goal is more about drawing from imagination, I found a trick to test your shorties for perspective: Try copying the same pose, but from a different angle. That will put your understanding of spatial relations really to the test.

TL;DR there are no obvious and objective clear mistakes to find on those drawings. Putting your finger on the source of your worries OTOH is clearly a very personal task for you, that will pretty much define your identity as an artist.

"Did you mean that I have to just draw the bean with the head without the hands and feets ?"

Actually, kind of yes. Those 30 sec and 1 min shorties are there, so you can practice the first lines of your drafts a lot. And basically starting a pose with sketching in the bean is a good way to start. The bean doesn't only define the torso, it also tells you a lot about the limbs, because the placement of the hip defines where the joints are, that the thighs start from, and the ribcage, neck and head give good landmarks to find the shoulderline, that tells you where your upper arms can and should start from.

Getting that correct from the start is way more important than deciding whether that hand or that foot needs to be placed a few inches to the left or right. If the extremities are placed slightly differently, the pose will usually still look natural and convincing, if the torso is too stiff, or the major joints just aren't where they need to be, no amount of polishing will save that turd.

It's only a kind of yes, because the bean isn't the only technique to capture the main masses, but it is a good one, and the more practice you get with it, the better your results will look. Therefore, yes, try to focus your shorties as much as possible on designing the head and torso well, and take your time to fiddle around with the limbs in your longer drawings. If a single line, that shows the lengths of a thigh or an upper arm helps you place the torso better, draw it, but the focus has to be on the torso first and foremost.

BTW, that is also the secret of the much misunderstood line of action. Yes, it usually follows roughly at least one of the limbs, but it isn't meant to fully define them, therefor, it is only one single long curved line. It's purpose is to help you align the torso and head correctly. It is more often than not a few seconds well spent to draft it, especially on very dynamic poses, but if you just can't find it, and instead see a more convenient way to design the masses correctly, skip it. On some poses it just doesn't help a lot.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on January 8, 2024 12:44pm.

It did work, I edited my post above.

OK, after looking at your stuff, I don't think you are doing so badly. Ever heard of Dunning and Krueger? They found out, that the people, who are most confident about their skills are the people, who have no clue at all, because they don't know how bad they really are.

And the worst moment when acquiring a new skillset is, when you just got a tiny bit better. Because then you start to realize, how long the way ahead towards your goal really is. I think, that is where you are right now.

Your main task right now is to get through that bump in self esteem. So, here are some pointers from me, where you are probably a bit too critical to yourself right now. Yes, the 30 second shorties don't look like much. Thing is, that is not a bug, that is a feature. They aren't meant to look polished, they are just there to train you in structuring your work process, by looking at the gesture first. I have seen people on this page, who developed completing 1 minute poses into an art form in itself, but that is not what they are meant for. These are just about focusing your first thoughts for longer pieces.

I would personally recommend to ignore the limbs at this stage, and try to focus more on head, ribcage, hip as first lines, but you aren't off by a mile.

And if I scroll through your pieces, the pose before the last, the guy balancing on one hand, that is really a complicated pose to get right, and you almost nailed it, you just did not find a good solution for the head.

On the very last pose, to me it looks, like you got too impressed with her huge boots, drew her legs and feet too large, and then overcorrected and drew them much too small. Been there, done that.

One part of the learning process is to develop a deeper judgment of your own results than just "looks good" and "looks ugly". Try to understand, what went well with the drawing, and what went badly, so you can find and correct specific mistakes and come up with ideas what to focus on in your next drawing session.

Another, maybe even more important part of the learning process is to get used to constantly producing one draft after another. You aren't working at drawing the one professional looking piece, that will earn you your place in a gallery, you are mostly working at your own skills, and the drafts you produce are just the endless stream of wood chips, that fall from your work bench.

You have approximately 5000 really crappy and flawed pieces inside you, and the only way to get them out is to draw them all. Each crappy drawing that you successfully brought to paper is another one off the stack.

Keep them around, mark a day in two to three weeks in your calendar, draw every day until then, then take out those crappy pieces from now and compare them to your latest work then, to see where you made progress. Comparing yourself to yourself a few weeks ago is a fair comparison, comparing yourself to a professional craftsperson, who spend their last 10 years drawing 8 to 10 hours every day is just begging for punishment.

So, to quote a youtuber, who is more a martial than a graphical artist: "Get out there and train!"

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on January 7, 2024 11:30am.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on January 7, 2024 11:49am.

OK, I only saw the first image, and was somewhat confused. Then I scrolled down, and realized the scope of your project, and what you are doing. I can just say, you seem like a feint point at the horizon of my artistic ambition.

Thank you for sharing your work, as an orientation point to work towards.

Your figures look quite great, but in my opinion, you draw way too fast. The 30 sec/1 min poses aren't meant to be completed, they are there, so you spend more time on practicing the foundation for your longer drawings, and less time polishing turds.

I mean, if you ever want to progress beyond first sketches, you need something good to draw upon. If you say, want to draw 10 minutes, but you train to finish your drawing within the first minute, what are you planning to do with the 9 minutes you have left?

This is, why hands and feet are way less of a problem... you don't get a prize for sketching them in seconds, you take all the time you need to draw them properly.

Instead of speeding through the drawing process, I would recommend drawing way fewer lines in the shorties, but instead make sure, they are measured and placed properly and drawn with beautiful and controlled lines. Head and torso is by far enough for 30 secs, even for one minute, if they are designed in such a way, that you can expand them into longer pieces without constantly having to erase them or cover them in clouds of darkness to hide all the mistakes.

I mean, for how much you put down in such short time, your pieces are astonishingly good. I would recommend to really try one of them out, to see how long you can work on one of those, before you reach the point, where everything you could still add will make the piece just look worse.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on January 2, 2024 10:23am.

OK, good, you already understand the basics, that helps a lot.

One typical mistake I see is, that you overestimate the distance between hip and ribcage, thus lengthening the torso. When in doubt, put your hands to your own sides and feel with your fingers how little space there is between the hip bones and the lowest ribs in various positions.

A related beginners mistake, that could be there or not, depending on the references you used, but that I want to mention just in case, is beginner's tendency to straighten the torso. Best immediately practice counteracting it, by trying to make the twists and bends between hips and ribcage as dramatic as you dare to get away with.

A detail, that I started adding right about at the stage that you are now in is the shoulderline, so the clavicula and arm joints. It is basically just one line more added to the top of the ribcage, that helped me a lot to understand, find and depict how the upper torso is formed from the ribcage. I like the way you used an actual ribcage instead of a circle on the figure on the lower right of the first page. You might want to look up some depictions of clavicula and shoulders, quickly, as they are really not sooo complicated, but explain a lot about the upper torso, and the possible range of where the arm joints can be located.

You do depict the limbs as tubes, which I know is proposed in a lot of courses. I am personally not such a big fan of that. My reasons:

a) The shorties, especially the 30 sec ones, should be dedicated to the head and torso. Unless they block the line of sight to the torso, all that is necessary to know about the limbs is where the joints are at, and maybe one line to find their general length and direction.

b) Once you got more time, after you defined the torso, and you get to drawing the limbs, generally their final organic form isn't so much more complicated than the tube form. That's why I personally skip the tubes. Less lines to draw, less lines to erase or to distract the viewer. But that may be just because I am lazy, and is definitely a me thing. If you prefer the tubes, for better spatial orientation, that is certainly not false in itself. Just make sure, that your first lines are dedicated to defining the torso as much as possible.

Sorry, I can't download any of these. You could upload them to imgur.com and post a link here, that's what usually works, and it doesn't take long at all.

Thank you for your service, sincerely!

I read my last reply again, wasn't happy with it. It's not about "stay away from extreme poses, until you eaten your vegetables and done yor studies". The true message has to be: "Twist that torso, darn it!"

The idea of the whiplash pose is to show how much potential tortion energy is built up for that strike. And the best muscles are the biggest muscles are the torso muscles. So, I woke up this morning, with the burning urge to test out what the maximum twist I could get away with,... after 30 attempts I settled with this pose... (the upper shoulder still beats me. There has to be a correct and convincing way, to depict it as actually stretched to the max, but my shoulder anatomy knowledge fell short)

https://line-of-action.com/art/view/9081

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on December 29, 2023 6:04am.

Now it works. Thanks for your service.

Lol, took me a moment to understand what is going on with the chain whip (?). The foundations for head, ribcage and hips looks good, and I like the clean outlines you settled with.

The pose is leaving some questions unanswered for me.

From the position of the shoulder joints I would expect the ribcage to be pointed more towards the viewer, but it's cornercase. The way the upper arm reaches behind the head looks uncomfortable, though.

Ribcage and hips are oriented towards each other almost in a straight line, which rarely happens, unless someone is standing calmly and straight up, and I have trouble believing it should be really that way in such an extreme pose. You sure the torso isn't bent or twisted at all? I would have to see a reference of an actual human being in such an extreme pose to decide. There are some quite weird martial art stances, but this one isn't coming together for me physiologically.

The legs are markedly uneven in proportion. I assume you tried to forshorten the leg, that holds the bodyweight, but even then it is too short. Here my doubts about the position of the hip come up again. If the knee of the support leg pointed outwards instead of forwards, that would make more sense in regards to the straight hip, and I am not sure, whether it is possible to end up with both feet on the same line.

With the extended leg, both upper and lower leg are each almost longer than the entire torso, which is just too long, and makes the problem of the way too small support leg even worse. If it worked, I could chalk that off as a stylistic decision, but it doesn't. Not in the stark contrast with the other leg.

About the overall pose, well, as I said, some martial artists and ballerinas can do rather improbable looking poses, but I wouldn't suggest focusing on those for practice right know. Not when working from imagination or from a manga/comic book reference. The more extreme the pose is, the more your understanding of physiology and anatomy has to be on point, to disperse any doubts. If you find a photo or video of an actual martial artist in such a pose, that would be an interesting study, but to just make it up you lack a bit of graphical "authority".

For a while, I would avoid the combination of straight torso and extreme pose also for a very practical reasons: it is one super typical beginner's mistake to by default draw the torso straighter, than it is on any reference. When you are drawing from imagination, I would rarely trust a straight torso. Emphasize the bends and twists between hip and ribcage a lot, to end up with more dramatic poses. This is also where the whole "line of action" concept comes in, as head/ribcage/hip generally tend to follow and emphasize that line.

If you would want to repeat this exact pose and "fix" it, my first suspect would be to give the position of the hip a very good second thought. I think if the hip would be placed more naturally, you would also find more convincing positions for the leg joints and legs.

Hmm, class still ends with the pop-up "You successfully finished the entire class". No offer to upload, no option to revisit the references again...

Does it possibly have to do something with free and premium features? Like, I uploaded a lot via my premium option directly from my sketchbook. IIRC the upload option is somehow limited for free accounts. May I have run up my counter for free uploads with my uploads via my sketchbook?

If the option to revisit references is then tied to the free uploads, it would be clear, why both options are no longer available for me, and it would be specific for my account atm.