Forumberichten van Drunkenelf

I mean, there is no shame in pressing the skip button. Its not a perfect solution, but as beginners or just rusty enthusiasts, its okay to bail on a pose if its just too hard at the moment

Heya! We all start somewhere! It takes a lot of guts to post online and ask for help, especially with art.



Now, I think a slight problem here is that you lack direction. You are doing the same basic figure everytime, using a very similar technique and its not very well developed. You joked about drawing glorified stick figures, but those would actually be a very useful way to practice figures.





For example, this first picture on the left is a classic example of a gesture drawing, a quick easy drawing that captures the "mood" of the figure. You draw these quickly, in less than a minute, and you practice poses and your observation skills. This type of gesture drawing provides a very basic skeleton on which you can draw the rest of the figure.

The figure on the right is another example of a gesture drawing, one where the original stick figure was added too and refined, but notice that its only the big shapes of the body drawn. FOr short drawings, you don't have time for little details, you only have time for the large ones.



I could ramble on for a long time, but I reccomend looking up any youtube video on Gesture Drawing, one that you think you would like to learn from, since there are many different types of gesture to learn from. I also reccomend the Bean Exercise.



Learning with other people makes art so much easier to learn! Im excited to see your art journey!

First of all, you did a lovely job following the prompt. You did a good job of using simple figures that we can easily identify as a father and a child's feet.



Now I feel a little embarassed, because Im the kind of person who constantly reccomends doing cleaner lines, but this is one of the situations that I reccomend the opposite. Its clear you are a bit of a beginner and you took a long time making sure every mark was correct, but that left very little time to add details. I actually have no idea what the two columns in the upper right are for. Your lines are very straight, and that reduces the energy in the figures.

Typically, with big pieces like this, artist's will sketch out the whole scene quickly and roughly, then afterwards, refine the image with darker lines, using darker lead, a pen, ink, and/or liberal use of an eraser.

That process involves a lot more learning than I can give an a critique. What I can do though is reccomend the use of thumbnails the next time you make a piece. A thumbnail is a mini practice doodle of what your final piece is going to be. It can be as big as a postage stamp or a playing card. With it you practice a very rough draft what you plan on drawing and practice the proportions, the shading, the placement of figures of your piece. You draw a thumbnail quickly, and you draw several of them, then you pick the one that you feel works the best.



In those thumbnails, you could have quickly tested if you wanted the slide bigger and covering more of the image, or made the father stand like a giant in front of the kid, or practice how much of the kids' body you wanted to see. If you had drawn a thumbnail of your piece before you drew it, you would have noticed how much white space you had in the image and might have had more time to think of something to put inside of them.

None of the images are loading in your google drive, so its hard to give a good critique at the moment.



I can tell you that shouldn't try to master gesture before you practice contruction with shapes. Gesture may be one of the first things we are taught for figure drawing, but its REALLY REALLY HARD to get good at it. Its a good idea to work on the later steps of constructing a figure, that way you can check your work and find out parts of the gesture drawing help with your construction and what doesn't.

Its a vague thing to ask! But we try our best!

First off, I can tell that you draw allready. Your lines are very deliberate and I can sense you are clearly already following some artistic advice from other tutorials. But I see your greatest weakness are the really short gesture drawings.



These are the most difficult to get right of course. Its why we do a lot of them. I reccoment doing those short sessions longer until you consistantly get a good quick gesture of the whole body and not just the chest and spine and pelvis.



One think that I think you are getting wrong is how you implement the two circles for the torso. Im usually a little hesitant to say "wrong", because if its a technique that works than who am I to correct it? But I think it helps to understand what you are using those circles for. Typically, the upper circle is supposed to represent the ribcage, be roughly an egg shape and stand upright in the body. You tend to use it to depict the upper chest and sometimes the shoulders. Now that "sometimes" is the very reason I want to call it out because that inconsistency is going to confuse your eyes and slow you down, because you change your own rules every time you go back to draw more of the upper chest.

Your shoulders move, your ribcage doesn't, its why you should consider a different shorthand for the upper body. I highly reccomend practicing the BEAN technique.



I always eventually reccomend it to begginners. Just practicing it helped me understand the torso so much. Its not the perfect way to depict a torso every time, but for a beginner, its a perfect first step in understanding how to interpret the ribcage and pelvis bone. I reccomend a few sessions of just drawing the bean for several figures, just to really understand how it works.

Great job with your practice! Gesture drawing is tough and there is nothing wrong with longer timed poses. But I do have some advice on how to build up that speed.

When you decide to do shorter sessions, I reccomend drawing the figures with a different, easier to implement technique. As of right now, your figures follow a lot of rules for form. Boxes and tubes and often specific body parts. These are all good things to know and use but short gesture drawings are all about getting the simpler forms of the body on the paper, for you to practice seeing the whole body instead of just focusing on just the "important" parts. For example, you took your time drawing those glutes on that one figure, but you didn't plan ahead enough to make room for the entire body and had to cut the person off at the legs.



So when you do try to do shorter time lengths, there is no shame in fancy stick figures to represent the body. Heck, I enjoy using the scribble technique to really get my brain out of a rut, where I just scribble the body down with erratic panicked movements. I reccomend searching "Gesture Drawing" on youtube and picking a gesture drawing style that you think you can implement and try. There are ton of them out there, none of them are the wrong or right way, just the one that is wrong or right for YOU.

Great stuff so far!You are really early in your journey, but that graphic design background will come in handy later when coloring is involved. One of the most important things to do when first starting out is to draw often and to try to get over that fear of getting it right the first time. I almost don't want to give you more advice, because the more you think you have to try to remember when you draw, the stressful and difficult it becomes. You are so early in your journey that I just want you to keep going and practicing.



The one piece of advice I have for you is to learn to look at your own art and study it. Really look at your figure and analyze what works and what doesn't. Whats bothering you MOST about this piece of art? This will help you notice and remember what parts of the body you rush through, what mistakes you tend to make and really help develope your eye, one of your most important tools as an artist.

You may not have the exact vocabulary to describe what you don't like about a piece and thats when asking for critique is the most helpful. As of right now there are a billion directions and pieces of advice we could give you and it will be very hard to implement every idea all at once effectively. If you have an exact problem, we can give you a solution that you will be more excited to implement and learn.

Its looking great! You really know how to use only a few lines to capture the general shape of the figure, not focusing that much on anatomy, which is the correct thing to do.

The next time you do this, try to push shapes a little more, but remembering to keep feeling of the original pose. Keep an eye on the positioning of the body. For example, the one where the model is bent over. You exaggerated how the body curved up with the head pointed upwards, but doing so lessened how much her hips looked like they were sticking up in the air. For me, her hips dictated the flow of the entire body, so I feel it would have been more important to capture and emphasize then her turnt head, which is relatively small im comparison.

You really got a solid technique going! Keep up the great work!

Thanks for posting! Its always a little scary but it always helps.

A little over exuberent with the shading. Remember with shading in black and white, there should be a clear difference between the lightest parts and the darkest parts. Now maybe there are a few shading details that are hidden by the poor image quality, but this is actually a good learning moment for you, because the human eye works very similarly to that. If the large shadows and light areas aren't obvious at a glance, then the little details aren't going to matter.

You also seem to be having a little bit of trouble when both eyes are visible, one always ends up a little more lopsided than the other. Before adding those little details to making your eyes more accurate, make sure you draw the general outline of both eyes first. It helps catch obvious placement issues before you've developed the face too much.



You work great on profile shots! Keep up the good work.

Listen, we all gotta start somewhere! Opening yourself up for critiques like this is especially brave for a beginner artist, but it can only help you focus and improve faster, so you are doing a lot of things right.

I think your 30 second warm ups are too short and a little too small on the page. The point of the thrity seconds is to practice getting the WHOLE figure down in a short amount of time. One of the founding principles of contructing the figure of a human or anything else complicated, is to get the large general shape of the figure before you start adding smaller details

I think you are getting a little distracted with the torso and forgetting to draw your limbs long enough. This might be a result of working too small on the page and not allowing yourself to take to much space in your sketch book, which is a MISTAKE. Drawing the figures larger means more room for details and flexibility with proportions. Don't be afraid to buy a large cheap sketchbook that you can fill up with these quick disposable drawings. Paper is cheap! Your time is worth more than paper!

Using more space is especially important when you reach the ten minute long drawing. This figure will get more details and attention, so why not try to make it at least half the size of your page?



One last art tip is that you should never be afraid of a good old fashioned youtube tutorial for gesture and figure drawing. The one on this webiste is extremely basic and I don't think the techniques are pushing you forward very well, so it doesn't hurt to switch it up. You'd be suprised how often you can find a video for the exact problem you are having.



Keep up the good work! I see the anime head outline in your sketch book so I already know we have something in common!

Love the gestures you got going. They look pretty clean and well thought out, your process at this point is pretty well refined, there are a lot of little things I want to copy lol.



Now I think you could work on some of your proportions. Some of the legs feel too short, shoulders feel to broad. Technically they could actually be accurate, but they are really messing with the feel and flow of the gesture. Its what's giving it them a slightly bloopy feeling.

Your using the line of action pretty well, but sometimes you break them apart and move them a little in order to match the anatomy a little. For example in figure 1, the center line of the chest looks like flows down to his left leg, but you redrew the line on his leg with a curve in order to match the anatomy better. If you had followed the line of action all the way to the bottom of his foot, you may have been able to percieve and adjust his stance a little sooner.

Another example is on figure 2, the lady on the floor leaning on her arms. The line of action could have went from her jaw down her back, or from the top of her shoulder down her back. Its a harder pose, so its completely understandable. Just remember to finish the rest of her limbs next time. Its important to finish the WHOLE figure before going into litle details.



Honestly just great work. You are at the point where its a lot of little adjustments to process, but you're doing great.

Certainly feels more fluid! Im curious, how often do you really study your previous sessions? Its super important and something Im only recently remembering to do.

Its a good way to check your work, spot the things that don't look right and adjust your aproach for the next session. No one knows your process better than you, and if the art isn't working or you are rushing parts to get done, you are probably more aware of the mistakes you made than you think. If you aren't sure about how to fix those mistakes, thats when a critique is REALLY useful, cause its easier to address specific problems and easier for you to correct them.



I think you are underestimating the power of some solid straight lines. Almost every line you used have been curved, which gives the figures a bit of a bloopy feel. Solid lines provide force and structure. Although human bodies don't have a lot of them, in quick gesture drawing, showing off the mood of the piece is more important that the accuracy of the body curves, so knowing where to use a good straight line is super effective.

What really helped me with figure construction was this drawing exercise video







As of right now, I think you need a little more practice drawing cylinders. Drawing cylinders tend to be something artists learn early on, assume they've mastered, and slowly get worse at drawing over time. No shame in just practicing cylinders for a few minutes before a figure session, its a great warm up.

After you do that, practice drawing 3D objects that are a little more complicated, like one where one end of the cylinder is a little thicker than the other. Then you can use those shapes to more accurately represent limbs.



You are skipping parts of the body like the joints and the hands because you don't have a Shape shortcut you can draw for those parts of the body, unlike the cylinder you use for the limbs and the boxes for the torso. Use the exercise to experiment with simple 3D shapes to find what you can use to fill your empty joints and missing hands. Try your best to keep your hand shape simple, don't try to carve out every finger, just a general shape that can indcate its size and position.



You got a got a solid sense of 3D already, you can grasp these next concepts easily.

The first chance you get to buy a cheap sketchbook, I highly reccomend it. As much as I love doodling on lined paper, the lines affect the proportions and stretch out the characters.



Initially I wrote that you gave yourself minicritiques and wrote notes on your studies, but after re examining yours work, Im pretty sure these are critiques from an teacher or professor... unless they are not. Its hard to tell. But honestly, Im going to use that as inspiration for my next studies and write little notes on my figures as if I was a professor, because I have a bad habit of not examining my work after it is done.

Following one artist for advice is GREAT, especially if you are vibing with them and want to develope a similar style. But don't treat their stuff as gospel. Every artist learns in their own way so if you aren't quite getting a lesson, don't hesitate for similar advice somewhere else. Usually there are Youtube vids covering the same topic several different ways.

You're doing great!

The PDF that Poly linked is very useful, it has a great little explainer on a good basic approach of gesture, which is what you want to focus on if you want to make your poses more expressive.



Gesture drawing is so frustrating to me, since its one of the first things we learn, but its one of the most difficult to understand and master. When we learn techniques to depict form, its easy to assume that these are the "rules" for drawing a figure and if the gesture doesn't exactly fit these "rules" then we should ignore it. But if your gesture is good, then EVERYTHING else works in service to keep the gesture. You bend and twist those proportions and forms to keep that energy you first established. BUT (again) understanding form really really helps you more easily find your gesture!



Im seeing a lot of the "bean" in your torsos. I love the bean, it helped me understand the torso and twists and turns, its an invaluable technique, but its not a "rule". A lot of your gestures, you seem to be concentrating on capturing the torso, using the bean. I think you should concentrate more of that time on capturing the mood and gesture of the piece.

Mood and gesture are not exactly a clear direction to go in, so let me try to explain. Exxaggerate bends and poses, when you add details later on things tend to get way more stiff, so go a little more wacky than you expect. Remember the line of action; its a great way to dictate the whole length of the figure. SOmetimes a secondairy line of action is useful if the subject doing something horizontal with their arms.

And if you are having difficulty capturing the whole figure, try simplifying your approach (well drawn stick figures are more usefull than mediocrie developed ones) or making the rounds a little longer. Learning a new approach to this stuff always slows you down the first time you try it, so don't feel ashamed if the pieces don't come out as fast as before.

Good luck dude!