Asking for feedback for my first human figure poses.

https://imgur.com/YqwyRpF

If you have problems seeing the image tell me in the comments. I also hope if the images where i took the references from are valid or part of the rules in this community.

• Idon'tknow edited this post on December 18, 2023 1:11am.
• Idon'tknow edited this post on December 18, 2023 1:12am.

Hello, Idon'tknow, and welcome to Line of Action, my name is Polyvios, Polyvios Animations, and how are you doing today?

What errand brings you here? You know, generally, I think your figures look or seem pretty solid to me, but I really feel that these poses all seem too stiff to me, but they could use some loosening up with just a little bit of practice. How would you like to please try out our interactive drawing tutorial here?

The reason behind this little interactive drawing tutorial of ours is because of something that can't be done without any self-aware practice through time: The basics of drawing and gesture drawing in general. For instance, you could and should need to focus your attention on drawing movements through the looseness of your lines.

And if you're still completely stuck, please be sure to pick up a copy of Daniel Coyle’s The Little Book of Talent, available on book and Kindle.

Let's hope you'll find these things practical and concrete to your journeys.

Practice makes progress, but progress makes perfect.

Daniel Coyle

Oh, i did not expect for someone to respond to me. Anyways, thanks for giving me your feedback. Regarding the tutorials... i am having some problems with them :'(. I already posted my problems on the "practice & advice" thread. i put it here as a quote so it is easyer for you to read.

Hi, as I mentioned in the title, I don't understand the instructions on how to begin drawing human poses. It first instructs me to draw a line that is not an 'S' in about 10 seconds. Then it presents the most awkward, stiff, and perspective-defying poses known to man, and I really don't know how to apply this method. Honestly, I'm unsure of what kind of line of force I should use if the person is standing perfectly still or hanging from something. Should its line of action be a stick, not a 'C' shape?

Another thing, why are there so many photos of people in wheelchairs when the tutorial doesn't teach me anything about these mechanical contraptions? I really hope someone can help me understand how to navigate this situation because learning this skill is already difficult for me, despite my best efforts when I was younger. I can't comprehend those artists on YouTube who share their life experiences and somehow reach a professional level in just three years.

I might sound exhausted, but that's because I am, and I really hate failing despite following the instructions.

I also bought the 'dynamic life drawing' book and I still do not understand it. I have this sort of 'relationship' with art books; without knowing the right way to read them, they sound like mumbo jumbo to me. I feel sorry to express this frustration, but I have no other way to convey this particular feeling at the moment. Actually, I lied. Before creating my account, I tried practicing figure drawing on the same site for an entire month. However, I never saw any improvements whatsoever. I got really frustrated and eventually abandoned the studies.

I see myself as someone who can't just learn by practicing more. I think I was born different from my peers. However, what I know makes me improve is having someone else tell me what I am doing wrong. I apologize if I come across as pretentious or a bit of a deadweight.

Thank you, anyway, for welcoming me to this community.

• Idon'tknow edited this post on December 18, 2023 7:36pm.
• Idon'tknow edited this post on December 18, 2023 7:38pm.

Hi, Idon't know. I also think your models look great.

The tutorial here is decent, but quite short and toned down. I personally found great instructive videos on proko.com. The Human Figure Foundation course more or less follows the same basic principles as the tutorials here, but way more in depth, and explaining every step in short videos. There is a free version, and a paid version, but basically all the essential concepts are included in the free version. The paid version for me is more like a way to show your appreciation and getting a bit of bonus content for it. I highly recommend it.

About the images in wheelchairs: if you aren't interested in drawing an image, just click on the fast forward button. If you feel an image comes up annoyingly often, you can also block it either temporarily or constantly.

About the practicing or not practicing: what other options exist to get better? I could only think of praying for divine inspiration, but then I am unfortunately atheist. So the question can't be whether to practice or not, but only how to find the best way for yourself to practice. And yes, that is also a skill, that improves with practice.

My advice on testing out which way of practicing works for you:

a) ask around what other people do, get a feeling of what methods are on the market.

b) chose one that looks promising, set yourself a few conditions, Like, OK, I'll spend an hour per day for 6 weeks on doing this, or, OK, I will follow this course through to the end.

c) absolutely important: keep your first botched results for record, then after you are done with what you wanted to do, compare them with your final results, so you get a feeling of what changed in your style. It is a natural tendency for people to have their ambitions grow at the same or even a faster pace then their skills, which can give yourself the false impression, that you did not improve at all. Keeping your older stuff for comparison can somewhat help to counter that tendency.

d) once you are done with a few tutorials or courses and get the hang of how practice impacts your skill, start exploring your taste. What is it that you specifically would like to be able to do differently? Can you come up with ways to break it down into simpler parts, that you can practice individually? That is basically exactly what those tutorials do for you, and the natural growth path for an artist is to eventually be able to design their own practices.

I came for example for myself up with a game of drawing one detail in my sight in a recognizable way, but with as few lines as possible. That is so far a game to play by myself, I did it repeatedly for quite a time, and it became a practice, that improved my eye for interesting shapes.

My current practice plan is to go through the different head abstractions of Loomis, Reilly, Huston, Hampton and Brigman, repeat the basic construction until I can do them without looking up the intermediate steps from a script, then try to apply them to drawing from a template instead of from imagination. I don't know yet, what it will eventually teach me, but it whets my appetite.

You can get inspiration for what to practice by watching people debate and explain the different concepts involved in art, but beware of the consumer trap: It only counts as inspiration, if it leads to you actually drawing more. You wont get better at drawing from spending all day listening to people, or reading learned pamphlets.

e) make a habit of keeping some basic drawing tools in reach. So if you see something or hear something, that gives you an idea about what you could draw, your threshold to follow that urge is as low as possible. And the more often you follow that urge to draw, the more natural it will feel to just start drawing.

f) don't think of your drawings as master pieces. 99% of what you draw won't be exceptional at all. Those are just wood shavings, that fall in an endless stream from your workbench. The one piece you are really working at, is to hone your skills. Sometimes you will produce something, that really surprises yourself. Certainly keep those around, but don't beat yourself up if you can't immediately reproduce them. Nobody can be constantly exceptional, but if you keep honing your skills, at some level of practice the stuff you consider to be flawed and trashy will look exceptional to other people.

g) a final warning, to myself as much as to anyone reading this: honing skills is rewarding, once you get the hang out of it, but don't try to reduce art to one specific set of skills. One example for me is PeterDraws on youtube. I couldn't rate his skills in figure drawing or perspective, but watching him do what he does, he certainly is one heck of an artist, and watching him draw makes my pen hand itch to try something similar.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on December 18, 2023 11:14pm.

https://imgur.com/a/tbEfw5o
I think your simplification of the body is excellent. How much mileage would you say you have in figure drawing? How long were these poses? I assumed they were 3-5 minute poses. Good job overall.
I dont have that many critiques overall for the figures you submitted but I will say you should be more aware of how line weight affects the gesture.

https://imgur.com/a/yzYcBQd

For example, On the gesture I provided above I feel like there is alot of confusion on where the poses weight is shifting which leads to it looking stiff. The way I found a way to exaggerate and find how to push the weight more was through intersecting points throughout the figure. Most of the figure is leaning down and the rest of the body follows along in reception. ( EX) shoulders, pevlis, and left leg. ) The torso and shoulders usually dictates much of where the weight of the pose will go. Before tackling a gesture, try to imagine what way the body would fall if you removed one of the legs. Would it fall to th right? the left? would is stay stationary? Deciphering these small details early on can lead to you having a succesful drawing that is able to envelop that sense of movement, which is the main goal with figure drawing.

https://imgur.com/a/Sv2WxY9

In the next drawing, I find the major issue to be a lack of line confidence, I can see alot of chicken scratch lines and lines that dont connect. It is really interesting because you were able to get it down perfectly with this drawing. ( https://imgur.com/a/6nJHWMX ) This drawing is objectively more appealing than the other because of your use of lines is vastly different. You used too many curves in one compared to the other which is why the body ends up looking balloony. ( EX : https://imgur.com/a/vEWehRe )

It is kinda hard to explain this over text but there are some great books that go over the issue with using too many straight lines and too many curves respectively.
One book I can recommend is FORCE : Mattesi and Micheal Hampton. They go over in depth alot of subjects regarding adding life to your figures. FORCE is more focused on gesture while Mattesi focuses on construction and building a critical eye for simplifiying the body.
- https://www.amazon.com/Force-Dynamic-Drawing-Animators-Second/dp/0240808452
- https://www.amazon.com/Figure-Drawing-Invention-Michael-Hampton/dp/0615272819

https://imgur.com/a/635gUPs

Many of the same issues are present in this drawing as the other one I mentioned with you using too many curves in the drawing. Drawing muscles and adding fat is hard. What I used to try to understand the pose better was through negative space. ( https://imgur.com/a/tj3VAEA ) I blocked in the areas around the figure instead to try to understand and decipher if I was getting closer to my goal. By adding in these blocks I can quickly tell if the size of the arms and body is proportionate without wasting time. For example, I used this method repeatedly on all the figures to tell if the spacing between the legs was too wide or not. Aswell as on the arm to tell the distane from the leg to the arm holding the stick.

Trying to learn how to draw the human body is extremely hard, we are all learning together at our own paces. I think you are going in the right direction. I would definitely reccomend getting those books or trying to ask for more critiques.

sorry if i am answering you this late... I couldn't find time to read your in depth critique.

I know it's my fault for telling you this, I do not understand what you were telling me, so... should i understand the negative space in the image in order to represent the pose? How much should I consider or is it every inch of space around the subject in the image? Why in certain cases your correction has completely different negative space (in the case of this example the space between the legs is a trapezoid while the image was a triangle)? What should I do when the pose is completely stationary, because, of all the examples I didn't find any of the ones where the model is in a perfectly balanced or stable position, i only have one weird simble of the shape of a check near them and i do not know what do they mean (same example as before), and why is it that I should not draw the body with baloony segments because it is "too detailed" as shown here but in one of your examples you devided the segments of the arms and legs but with curved lines that intersect (https://imgur.com/a/yzYcBQd)... isn't that the same thing?

About the book recommendations, I do have only the Mattesi book but not the Hampton one, if what you said was true than it would explain why i can't understand this book as its approach to figure drawing is really cryptic and sentimental for me to understand what is trying to explain... it kinda looks like gibberish to me and I feel bad to not be good enough to understand it :(

I do have other books like the Force drawing book about anatomy, i have the same difficulties and also the one about animation from the late Richard Williams... they either are too personally specific for me to understand or they seem to be too artistically presentable rather than instructive to me. It might also be that I never had art books before and so no one ever taught me how I should read them or they need to be read differently to begin with.

Thanks a lot for going the extra mile and showing me better done examples... even tho I am still understanding the new advice i might learn from the illustrations you sent me in order to cure my technique.

• Idon'tknow edited this post on January 29, 2024 6:33pm.
• Idon'tknow edited this post on January 29, 2024 6:36pm.