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I’m not sure what you mean by construction here?

If I’m inventing a pose while doodling, it’s often very difficult. A 100% invented pose with no reference is just hard. A pose where I have some reference but I need to invent or fill in details is still hard, but less so. A pose where I have multiple reference shots is easier. A pose where I have reference shots I took myself and i added reference as needed is easiest.

It often happens when I’m drawing from my own photos that I find a conventional set of reference shots don’t work for what I want.

And if you look at what comics artists and animators say, they rely on having reference. Loads of it. They’re usually not making up a pose or scene out of whole cloth. Plus they usually put in a lot of time in on drawing from life, both in class format and in a more urban sketching format.

Construction is more usually about finding ideal forms in a real thing. Definitely it applies to drawing people but if you’re relying on it for whole poses rather than teasing out how muscles work it’s probably gonna feel clunky and slow and repetitive.

On the one hand, yeah hands take more thinking. On the other hand for some of us beards take even more thinking :D

Basically you’ve got some really nice hands in the set, where the lines have a similar fun feeling to your faces. The holding hands pose, the extended pointer finger and curled fingers pose, the hand holding a plant stem... those all have good lines. I really like them.

I don’t know what will best help you keep that feeling and get it more often. I can think of tons of ideas, but in my experience it’s very hard to tell what effects come from a brush and what effects come from a good night’s sleep between practice sessions.

Some drawing tools have a pretty consistent line. Think pencils with a sharp point, fineliners, fountain pen with a ball nib, sharp wax crayon and so forth. There’s also a lot of digital brushes in that consistent style.

A reed pen, an edged fountain pen, those “calligraphy” felt tip pens, these tools have line variations from the shape. There’s digital tools that work similarly too.

Then there’s stuff like a physical brush where the shape can change. Maybe it’s got stiff hairs, maybe it’s soft but the physical shape changes on you and can get really wonky. There’s digital brushes that try for these effects but you probably can’t get them all in one digital brush.

The brush you used for beards is doing the middle style of line variation I think, and it’s very expressive. I think you’re using that same brush for most “ink” lines, and for small scale stuff the variations get lost.

I can recognize a couple source images, so you’re definitely getting some likeness.

For the faces maybe think a bit about your grey fill and the white spaces. It doesn’t look like you’re doing a flood fill which is good. There’s usually spots on faces where a bit of white will describe things better than a black line. Play around with it, because you’re already leaving interesting white spots. Maybe try filling the canvas with the grey so you can draw on it in both your dark and light color.

For the hands, think about line weights. The brush you’re using can do thin lines, but for finger details it’s coming out much heavier or blobbier and I don’t think that’s what you are aiming for. You’re getting really expressive lines in beards, and somehow losing that with fingers, and I don’t know what the right answer is.

Try looking at Aaron Blaise’s YouTube channel, or Griz and Norm’s Tumblr as far as free resources go. (There’s undoubtedly a lot more out there)

You’re specifically looking for stuff talking about expressions or “push and pull” as a starting point. This stuff will usually focus on faces, not overall poses because almost no emotions have characteristic poses in real life.

Pair the tutorial material with going through a favorite movie or tv episode. If you have an animated favorite, bonus. Basically you want to practice picking out expressions the live action actors make, and try drawing them. Animated is a bonus because you can compare with live action and see how the artists used reference to develop a range of emotions.

That in real life bit... there’s multiple acting and dance school techniques for conveying emotions in live theatre performance. So many. Every culture that has theatre has at least one. And since that’s almost every culture... that’s a lot. It’s a thing you can study, and it definitely can influence visual art. But it’s not necessarily a good thing to use blindly. It’s super culturally dependent and it only works if the audience knows that particular theatrical language. For an audience that’s unfamiliar, it can look stupid, rehearsed, unfeeling, ugly... it’s a really tricky thing to use. Older animation resources will sometimes bring it up but they’ll make like specific Western European versions are the way it works.

Anatomy comes from gesture. They’re not really things you can separate in drawing. A gesture drawing is a way of describing what moves. You can do a gesture drawing of an inanimate object and then you show how the light moves and how your eyes move. And with a living thing at rest, they still breathe, there’s still small twitches, not all the muscles will be perfectly relaxed. Plus, light never stops.



My rec right now is for your next practice session, try a 30m class or a Croquis Cafe video class. See what happens when you push beyond your short poses and start adding detail. Find out what you know. Figure classes have existed in the kind of class we’re set up for here since around 1800 for sure. A lot of the founding artists in the Italian renaissance did figure studies, tho maybe not in an orderly class format, more like urban sketching. Basically class mode is a tool artists have used for a very long time, and it works for a wide variety of brains. And even a very short class of 30m will let you practice a variety of skills that you don’t get from steady short poses.

Yay! Then you already are thinking about how to use reference for creative stuff. Good job.

The main thing with regular gesture drawing is it gives you practice so when your dog does something cute you can draw it very fast. You don’t have to rely on having the camera out to get a picture. You’ve practiced how to break her down into simple shapes, and you know which ones are the key shapes for you to work with. And the more you practice animal gestures, the more you can do stuff like give your dog’s cute pose to a different dog.

With human figure drawings, same deal. And as a bonus, I find that animal classes make me better at humans and vice versa.

Ugh that really sucks. I’m sorry to hear that.

The little dog? Cat? character looks like you have access to a dog or cat to provide reference and act as a model. I don’t speak very good cat, tho it’s good enough for the neighborhood cats to sometimes yell at me to behave like a proper human. My dog is better. But on average our small predator friends are more alike than they are different. And it can definitely be fun to study animal behavior by drawing your pet. It can be super hard to draw your pet when they are awake, especially if you are a favorite human. Hands that are drawing are not providing pets, food or play so your pet is likely to yell at you about it.

Trying to take reference photos of your pet is also likely to get you yelled at.

So if you are having fun drawing animals, definitely look at using class mode for animals. It can help you get faster and express more ideas. And then maybe you can draw live animals who won’t yell at you because they don’t care about you :D

There’s a little gesture basics tutorial. It’s aimed at drawing humans but it applies to most animals too. If you haven’t tried it start there.

Yeah it’s really not easy to go from one hand to the other.

Don’t stress out about exact likeness. Yeah, it’s a way to judge observation skills. But it’s just a way, and there’s many other ways to judge observation. If you like the hands and feet idea, I wasn’t joking about literally counting them. Or just look through each time category and pick one drawing that you like best. The “grading” part of your practice should be a happy thing right afterwards. You want to find a reason to keep going and do the next practice session.

You can be more critical when you are going back and looking at a finished sketchbook or something where you have more time in. There’s a lot of changes you might choose to make when you have finished this sketchbook. But they’ll come from looking at a lot of drawings and from finding bigger patterns.

Also, since you’re switching hands, the main concern is building the fine and gross motor control skills you need. That physically takes time, you are actually growing new nerves and new nerve linkages. If I’m remembering right that’s a 1 to 3 month project. A second big concern is to build habits so you take good care of this hand. It can take a year to grow tendons to support new muscles. And in most rsi tendons are the issue.

What do you like about them? Anything?

It’s easy to find all kinds of flaws in timed figure drawings. They’re intended as a way to make a lot of mistakes very quickly. Mistakes are part of the point.

But you also hopefully have found stuff you like. Maybe you thought you couldn’t draw a person in 2 minutes. Maybe you drew a pose you thought was impossible. Maybe you got one really nice line that says exactly what you wanted. Maybe you realized you can do more than you thought with stick figures.

Anyway, these look like they’re doing what they’re supposed to... you’re drawing and you’re making mistakes. But if you don’t have a goal or things you like in what you have done it’s hard to move forward.

If you are just doing steady timed sets and you haven’t tried class mode that is the first thing I’d try. A 30 minute class is a good way to warm up and hopefully still leave you with energy for fun drawing. Shifting from drawings that feel impossibly short to gradually longer drawings will give you a consistent feeling of improving, which is important to learning. And for me at least, the very short poses are the spot where it’s easiest to see improvement from day to day.

If I were to push for more details in 1m and these were my results, I’d push for getting in hands and feet. They don’t need to be good, just try to get them in. I was literally judging warm ups by counting did I hit all visible hands and feet for a while. Still do often!

Right now you are trailing legs off to a point, and often including a round paw for hands. This is very abstract, but it’s not the best abstraction because feet aren’t pointy needles and hands usually aren’t round. Both body parts tend to be bony with a lot of small muscles, and many poses in the figures set include complicated hand and foot gestures. Figuring out how to convey that idea in more than simple shape will eventually pay off.

Several artists I admire use a curve or two to show the gesture of the fingers or toes, then maybe a couple lines to form a “block” for the body of the hand/foot. I usually wind up with a scribbled rectangle in 1 minute gestures. Scribbled because the goal isn’t a perfect rectangle or square but to get the gist of the gesture lines so if i go back and push a drawing from memory there’s a reminder of what i meant. It doesn’t have to look good to anyone, just cue you in to where you go next.

There’s probably other good ways to push yourself to find the gesture lines of smaller muscles, I just don’t know them.

And I specifically went for hands and feet myself because it’s an easy way to make a sketch look more finished. Things that have hidden hands and feet, or where they’re abstracted in a weird way get very strong reactions from people who don’t do art, and the reaction isn’t a positive one. And so much human interaction needs hands and feet... it’s really hard to draw a sword fight or a dance or a kiss with no hands and no feet.

The lines on the left hand set of gestures are very lively. Yeah they’re rough, but you have good observation going on. You’re willing to restate lines and you’re trying out abstraction that isn’t just circles and roundness. So you’re doing a bunch of right things even though it’s very hard and it might even feel unpleasant to be drawing with your other hand.

You’re also hitting about the same level of detail in both sets. So your left hand and right hand are at about the same skill level for short gestures. That’s actually a good thing, because with even a bit of consistency in your left hand practice you will see big improvement.

I got nothing when it comes to RSI. I’m a lefty naturally, but like most lefties I’ve got some ambi ability and I’ve been pretty proactive about preventing rsi. Because as you are seeing, we only get one of most body parts and they’re really not user replaceable or serviceable. Which sucks.

If you’re not using class mode to practice definitely try it. I find it’s a lot easier to find motivation for practice when I can see that the warm up 30s and 1m poses are doing their job.

Looks good, I can match up at least a couple with a stock image for the pose, so you’re definitely getting some likeness. And the lines aren’t feathery, instead you have a good mix of straights and curves. And you’re getting pretty deep into observing anatomical structure.

The main thing I see as missing is a sense of light and dark. There’s a bit from your use of line weight, but you’re definitely avoiding adding any kind of shadow shapes or highlighted areas. That might be right depending on your goals? But if you’re out of ideas for where to go then definitely think about lighting.

You can actually use watercolor for figure drawings. It’s not easy, and it can take a bit of set up to be able to make it happen. But it’s possible. It works best if you have a bunch of art boards prepared with stretched paper.

The portraits you like are ones I’d describe as very “tight”. They’re using not very much water, very controlled washes, and there’s very little use of any of the weird stuff watercolor can do or the ways pigment gets strange. And as a new watercolor artist, i can promise you that there’s one thing you can depend on... watercolor likes to get weird. There’s nothing wrong with trying for a tight and controlled look, and many great watercolorists have worked that way. But as a newbie it can be really frustrating when things get weird.

The third image feels like a particular kind of greeting card art in the US. (This is not an insult, Hallmark employs a lot of very hard working artists) It’s got a kind of formula to how it was built, and it’s very painstakingly constructed for effect. While the image relies on tightly controlled water and it might use a ton of masking fluid, it’s fairly easy to take it apart. https://doodlewash.com/watercolor-projects-for-kids/ Is using many of the same tricks and might be a good place to start exploring. The heart card might feel a bit cheesy but making a shape and filling it with water and then a wet in wet wash is exactly how the landscape got started. Then the rest got filled in in a similar way to the circle pictures in the tutorial.