Aunt Herbert的論壇貼

I highly disagree with the "never a straight line on gesture" part.

One cure for a balloon body problem is to make sure, to counteract curves with straights on the limbs, for example.

Also, "flow" isn't the only possible focus for gesture drawing. If you want to emphasize perspective and massively simplify geometric forms, you will use tons of straight lines.

There must be 1000 other good reasons to use straight lines on occassion.

I can tell you, what I am trying to do, can't guarantee it's the best way, as I feel like I am not done with it to the amount that I can give a final judgement.

Step 1, I try to focus on simplyfied geometric forms when drawing from reference (over for example fluid dynamic lines or beautiful shapes, or exaggerated poses). I am almost more drawing a posable artist's mascot than a human being, except that on overweight people I also add paunch, breasts or massive thighs as independent "masses", if they are voluminous enough to decisively influence the outline of the body.

Step 2, When I am done with my daily practice, I chose one or two poses, that I like most

Step 3, I try to draw the same pose, but from a different angle. like 90° turned to the left or right, or turned up or down by 45°. I am keeping the OG for comparison, to make sure, that I keep the size and relations identical.

From experience I feel, like this taxes my perspective thinking quite a lot. I think I get the benefit of drawing from reference that way, namely avoiding to settle down on a small range of same-y poses, but I also get the challenge of drawing from "imagination", in that I have to develop a really distinctive concept of the underlying foundation.

The goal is to learn to be able to manipulate a reference, to make it fit my artistic vision.

ATM the time and energy it takes me to "manipulate" a reference in this way feels like 5 to 7 times higher, than straight up drawing it. I hope that practicing this will lower the difference a lot, until manipulating a reference feels natural.

Once I feel satisfied with my practice in this regard, I'll have to check out, whether this solves my problems, or whether I will have to come up with an idea to deepdive more into physiology in regards to human range of motions and body mechanics.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on February 8, 2024 11:24am.

After you finished your session, in the session review, you can just right-click on the images you want to save and use window's save image option. Just tried it out to be sure it works, functions smoothly. If you want to put them several of them together into one file, you still have to do some editing, but you don't have to screenshot anything.

Hmm, let me start with the easier part. Watching videos of people showing how much they improved in a year has problems:

Someone who puts up a video has the intention to tell a story. They will always chose what fits the story. That isn't even evil or deceptive, you can't pack your entire experience over a year in a video that is still at a digestable length. But when watching that video, the fact that it is edited can lead you to false conclusions. That person documented their experience over a time, and they are proud of it, and they celebrate, "Look at the cool thing I achieved!" That does not mean, that they exactly planned from the get go to exactly end up right there, or that their development path is the one and only possible way to go, or that, if they ended up with a different result, they wouldn't still have found reason to celebrate their development and make a video with the content "Look at the cool thing I achieved!"

If you watch other people, be aware that you can only ever see their public side. That's like looking at everyone's Facebook page and wondering, why they are all happy and constantly do cool and interesting stuff. They don't, they just don't post about anything else. So if you compare yourself to them, you will always look bland and boring and stupid in comparison.

The "cool thing" is that they developed. If we are in a depressive mood and willing to beat ourselves up, we can misread those videos and look at everything that we developed differently and bash it as "wrong" or "wasted time". But that is mostly us being unfair to our own progress and development. The time we spend training our fine motorics, the thousands and thousands of design decisions we constantly make over our practice time DO have effects. I don't know if you have kept some very old drawings of yourselves around, if you have, try to look at them, and remember, that if you have kept them for so long, those were probably drafts, that you felt extremely proud about, when you made them, so probably some of the lucky strikes, that occassionally happen. And still, you wouldn't draft them that way anymore, because you evolved. And if you try to channel your memories from that time, and try to look at what you draw now, with those eyes you had back then, you would have been amazed at what you now consistently can do.

The grind part, well... I am at the moment not enthusiastic about my progress, or about my results right now. I set my goal to draw at least 30 minutes a day, and currently those 30 minutes can get awfully long. Drawing just to not break the chain is a bit stupid, yes, but it does keep me drawing one more day, and then one more day, and it will keep me drawing the day after that, and I know from experience, that my foul and toxic moods don't last forever, and I will find another wave of enthusiasm for what I do to ride for a while. I am not riding high now, I am just paddling along, but F ALL I won't stop paddling, because I been here already, and I know, that stopping now won't change who I am anyways, and over short or long I will be drawn back to drawing anyways, so I can just as well keep going and keep my eyes on adding +1 to the chain of days of uninterrupted practice.

Something that occassionally works for me, when I am absolutely in the gutter is "meditative drawing". Big name, what I mean is, I feel too wasted to concentrate on anything, so I just hunker down on my bed, put the pencil on paper and watch my hand follow its own routines. I don't even try to draw pretty or achieve anything, to the contrary, I try to draw as ugly as possible, and whenever my head turns on and starts to develop a plan where the drawing is supposed to go, I sabotage myself by turning the page by 90 or 180 degrees. I just don't stop scribbling, because then I would have to come up with another idea of what to do, which feels too strenuous, and I keep at the same page, because standing up and getting a different page would also be strenuous.

Strange thing, I spent a lot of time drawing very focused, and got huge stacks of finished drawings lying around everywhere, but the coolest pieces, those that I decided to put in a frame and hang up on my wall, almost inevitably started with these kind of self-hate scribblings. And it doesn't work for me, when I am in a good mood, because then I will only produce rather tame and boring stuff with that method, and I better do focused work instead.

Someone who's videos kinda help a bit with that approach is Peter Draws. Not because some specifique technique he uses, although he does produce cool stuff, somewhere at the border of thoroughly abstract and amazingly surreal, but more because he comments his drawing in a pleasant voice, and my own inner narrator starts to sound a bit like him after watching his stuff.

The idea is, if your jaw hurts after or during drawing, because you try so hard and feel like you constantly fail, you have to find a way to relax that jaw while drawing, or it will keep messing up your focus.

I would recommed patience, if I wouldn't remember that I used to have none of it myself, and being told to be patient with myself never helped me either.

Just, quitting practice is the wrong decision. Because you are who you are, and you will end up back here anyways. You are accumulating resources by doing it, and you will find them useful to have, when your mood shifts again, even if you don't see a stringent purpose in them right now.

We are currently also at the end of January, which is the sh***est time of the year for depressions on the northern hemisphere, because the days are so short, so it is quite likely, that your mood won't be all that bad in a month or two.

It's just a thing, that I increasingly observe. I don't know, if it has been that way forever, but LoA seems to take ages to load, compared to other sites, and I even regularly end up with "Time Out, Gateway somethingsomething" errors and can load the site only on the second or consecutive tries.

I haven't thought about it for a long time and just accepted it, but maybe you can check whether there is a way to optimize the loading algorithms for the site.

Whatever problem you have, I feel like I am definitely sharing it. I really can't give you "the solution" either, as I haven't found one for myself.

Around march 2023 I got so disappointed with my progress in drawing, that I decided to give up on drawing altogether. It turned out, I had pretty much organized my life so much around having enough time to practice drawing, that I found myself with an awful amount of empty time to fill. I chose to kill the time with gaming instead, but I don't have endless money to spend on new games, and I was looking for some kind of community exchange, so I went into one of those MMO games with a guild system. I ended up doing a lot of repetitive stupid chores to rank up my guild status, became esteemed guild officer after a short time, and then had a fall out with the guild leader and quit in disgust.

Two things I learned: a) If you make something the focus of your life, you will end up doing repetitive chores anyways, because whatever you do, it doesn't have infinite variety, and b) the one time I had a discussion with a girl in the chat, that became a bit flirty, my natural way of flexing in an anonymous medium was to find an excuse to drop a few links to some of my favorite artworks, that I have done over time.

So, if I want to impress someone, I naturally tend to do it by showing off the amount of time I spent on improving my drawings skills, which says something about where I get my self worth from. It seemed only logical to go back to THAT then to fill the god sized void in my life.

What I do, is to try to build up enough enthusiasm for a certain project or idea, and that enthusiasm can last some amount of time, sometimes days, sometimes weeks, even up to several months. And, well, I have a multi-faceted personality, with a lot of diverging interests, that draw me hitherto and fro, but in the end, I don't have an infinite amount of facets either, so the stuff I am drawn to tends to gravitate around certain topics, and even repeats itself. And in the end some clusters of experience formed, that may not be sufficient to compete with the world elite, but that are certainly noticeable enough for people, who just have less experience in that specific skill.

I try to keep up a minimum level of grind, just because the feeling "I have done it so often, I don't want to break the chain and stop doing it now" is a decent motivator in itself. And when I am not drawing, and I get in a situation, where I need something to direct my mind to, like, when I am thinking: "Okay, I am driving from a to b, and the last half hour I only spent getting angrier and angrier at person X, which doesn't help me at all, what can I think about instead", then I can go fishing in my memories for the moments of enthusiasm, that drew me over and over again to drawing, and sometimes something bites, and one of the old enthusiasms fires again and I get more days or weeks of focusing on drawing again.

It probably isn't a time efficient way to start a drawing career, but it helps me balance myself away from getting too entangled in other people's problems, and the fact, that it is still always me, with my specific pile of memory and experience, that has always been fascinated with form and beauty and drawing, that gives the whole conundrum some consistency and some overall shape.

I like this site, because I gives me a tool to keep the grind going, and I can occassionally have sort of conversations with people, who maybe have a similar outlook on the world. I don't know if this helps anyone, this is just the story of how and why I keep doing, what I do.

A practice I try to do, to transition from drawing from reference to drawing from imagination: I start with a session of drawing from reference, but I focus entirely on building the body from basic geometric forms, robot style, no details, no big flowy lines, nothing fancy. Then I chose the best result of the session, and try to draw it again, but with a 90° switch in perspective. It usually takes me quite a number of attempts and about 100 times as long to get it done.

I think drawing from imagination is related to drawing from reference, but it is just a different skill set, and you have to throw yourself into it and just start doing it to become good at it.

One problem I see for myself is, I am not a ballet dancer, a circus performer, gymnast or a martial artist, and I don't have a major in human physiology either, so coming up with entirely new, cool and convincing poses is a bit hard. So in some ways I will always work from reference, either from copying something from film or photography, or from another artist, or from my memory of what I have seen. Being able to correctly "turn" the pose to draw it from another angle gives me the artistic freedom to fit it into my composition as I need it, and working from a modification of a reference prevents me from being lazy and just copy pasting a small set of gestures over and over. I get the challenge of working from the outside world, and I can use the same mechanisms for error detection as I have acquired from working from reference.

I have been trying to walk through town with a clipboard and just make sketches after a single glance at some passerby. It has been an interesting experience, but I feel like the quality of results was shockingly low and it did not seem to improve noticably from practice. After a while I gave up sketching from a glance, and only looked for people who were resting. Which a) obviously lowers the range of poses, and b) is generally only viable when the outside weather is inviting enough to take a rest in the sun.

I am planning to repeat drawing from a glance once the weather gets better, but I feel like learning to capture, and then to consistently modify, gesture and poses from reference will give me some foundations on which to build up consistent quality from.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on January 30, 2024 10:26am.

The drawing is looking good, but if I take a critical look, the placement of the hip and the way the thigh attaches to the body is off on both girls. So, it might be time to brush up your construction of the torso again?

You are doing them well. And, you aren't in for a sprint, this is a lifelong marathon, so you will switch between improving in different skills all over and over. Getting better at one thing will also help you improve in other things, so switching it up from time to time can only be good.

If you are especially interested in perspective and line quality, I think drawabox.com is universally seen as a good source for that. It's another incredible time sink, but absolutely worth it.

You don't HAVE to always use the class feature ;) The option "All the same length" is a real option, and it is not considered cheating to use it, when it fits your practice goals better.

Your animal sketches look cool. At some point you'll discover that drawing (most) animals and drawing human figures isn't so different as it first feels. Find head, chest, hip, and you will have found the gesture. Only that head, chest, hip look a bit differetly and are placed differently.

My only feedback is, that I share the problem, and it might be the same for a lot more artists. There might be occassionally a methodical solution to a specific period of lower quality output: may be you are currently focusing on a different problem than before, and neglect some fundamentals, that you already felt they were sound. Maybe you have been focusing on a single problem for too long, have reached a plateau, and might have more success by introducing some variations to your practices.

But the amount that your general mental disposition can impact your art also can't be underrated. I know for me, it is sometimes rather easy to be fascinated with a specifical type of graphical problems, I am already looking forward to drawing, when I am away from the desk and mentally go through all the options, that I still want to try out, and when I get to the desk, concentrating on drawing for hours just seems to be the natural way to follow my interests, and the results I produce amaze myself.

On other days, it is just a grind to even get through the basic practice to not break the streak, one out of 3 drawings looks halfway acceptable, and when I try drawing anything beyond a few minutes, the time just seems to drag on forever, and everything just feels hard and complicated to do. A lot of that just seems to come from non-drawing related stress factors, beginning with the weather, health. the quality of sleep or nutrition, over family, job, other conflicts and worries, etcetera. Sometimes the batteries are just empty. General life experience shows, that such phases pass. Which is still rather little consolidation, when I am right now immediately in one.

I actually don't have a favourite resource for anatomy, but one observation to your post: If your main problem are models with "curves", then it is not about understanding muscles, (which most anatomy resources will focus on), but about body fat.

I personally find it helpful to treat the paunch and on female models the breasts and occasionally the thighs as additonal "masses" when sketching out "the main masses" (head, chest, hip). They aren't as decisive for the pose itself, as they usually don't influence the position of joints, but they can just hide so much of the construction and influence the outline so much, that sketching them in individually helps me a lot to find the OG main masses quicker, and stick more consistently to uniform shortcuts for them. The forms of paunch, breasts, thighs, aren't spectacularly complex either. Just being aware of them and treating them separately in the main construction has helped me at least a lot when sketching overweight models. So something you might want to try, to see whether it helps you, too.

EDIT: If you don't use "curvy" as euphemism for overweight, I still believe, that the problem might be not with anatomy, but with shading.

Thing is, the models, were you really need anatomy for are those really ripped ones, where you can literally make out every single muscle. With "curvy" females, the issue is still body fat. Namely, that for example females have on average a higher body fat percentage than males, so unless the connective tissue is degraded by age or desiccation, there are a lot fewer details visible on the body, and if you don't draw accordingly, the model may appear somewhat unhealthy.

So you either need to consciously reduce the amount of details, by focusing on long curved lines, or if you actually insist on rendering full detail, you need to be extra extra careful with sorting out the values. Make sure the values are consistent over the whole model, the lights are "clean", i.e. shadows are terminator, core shadow and reflected light, while lights are halftones and highlights, and asl the halftones are part of the light, they MUST be brighter than the shadow w/ reflected light, even if local contrasts want to leave you astray.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on January 20, 2024 10:44am.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on January 20, 2024 3:11pm.

I love how you are developing your figures from really snappy and energetic looking curves, and that you successfully stay away from getting lost on unnecessary detail.

Generally, I try to include in my critics some ideas about what to change or to try different, but I am mostly drawing a blank right now. The result looks great, and it looks like you are having fun doing it, so the best advice for now is probably to just rock on.

Hmm, maybe contrasting your curves with straight lines and hard corners could broaden the dynamic spectrum? Just an idea, though.

An observation for the second portrait: as the browline is generally establshed from the brows to the tip of the ears, the angle of the face indicated by the browline and the angle as it is shown by size of chin, mouth, etcetera are diverging from each other. Probably the problem is simply, that you drew the ears too high.

If the ears were on the reference, where you drew them, then you would have to redesign the lower part of the face a lot, as the woman would basically look down onto the ground, and the lower features would have to modified by an impressive amount of perspective shortening. This would be a mistake, that can happen easily when uncritically applying Loomis or Reilly abstractions to a reference, without checking first, whether the angle of perspective actually matches.

Yes, lots of errors, mostly in measuring proportions and relations. I think the overall drawing process you are following is basically correct, building a foundation from simple forms, but those 10 minute drawings push yourself way beyond your capabilities.

It looks like you try to learn juggling by immediately picking up 10 balls and trying to keep them all in the air at once.

That is certainly courageous, but you will probably progress faster, if you stick to shorter drawings for now, where you only try to solve a few problems at once, until you are comfortable with solving them. Like learning juggling by focusing on 2 or at most 3 balls for the start, before you add more.

Good thing about the 10 minute experiment, you get an initial idea what your shorties will eventually lead to. But for now, probably better focus on getting used to place the head and torso correctly, exactly like you would do at the start of the 10 minute drawing, but stop drawing after 1 or at most 2 minutes, before you start the next pose. That way you train that first initial steps 5 to 10 times more often in the same amount of daily training time.

Also, you probably get a better feedback on your progress that way, for now. You are working at fewer different problems, always the same type of relations and proportions, so you will have the same types of mistakes appear more often, you can identify them sooner, and your next attempt to correct them will follow sooner.

Once you are comfortable with the head and torso, you will have a solid foundation where the major joints need to be. Then you can start worrying about where the limbs need to go. Don't start adding more balls, while you are still struggling with your initial ones, that will only drain your energy for little gain.