Aunt Herbert的论坛贴

Sites doing art critique? Not really so far. There are some set up to encourage community critique, like this one, and I am here and a few others to try to develop it into a lively community. But I am not an arts teacher, I only play one on the interwebs :)

The problem with getting free critique is, that a lot of beginners are too shy to post their opinions, the intermediarys feel like they are doing something wrong, when they post basically the same tipps over and over again to different beginners, and the pros are somewhat too posh to give critique for free. Unless they are doing a promotion for their stuff, they want munies for their attention.

Buuut, as I said, I think this here site has the potential to develop into an actual community, if people just encourage each other to post their drawings, but also to critique them and debate general ideas about art and technique.

To the works you have posted:

Pro: Your stuff looks beautiful and expressive. My guess is, that you started copying one or two artists you enjoyed, and then you clearly kept at it, experimented how to expand on it, and found great solutions for yourself. Your lines are clean and decisive, you understand how important it is to effectively simplify forms, your shapes and outlines are extremely effective at communicating ideas.

Worries/suggestion/tipps:

a) You post a whole arts gallery to critique all at once. If this site had better emojis, I would post a line of tokens of me breaking out in tears. If I tried to do every entry in your gallery its due service, I would have to spend days, and produce walls of text, that I don't want to write, and nobody wants to read. Please find a solution to point out clearly which specific image or small series of images you want critique for. Maybe there is a good tool for that on the sites you already use, if all fails, just upload something to imgur.com and post the link here

b) From my guess about your arts background follows a potential future hurdle for you. These artists you admire, they very likely have way more of an academic background, than their stylized end products let easily show. Art fundamentals like perspective, human figure, posing, line economy, stylization techniques, shadowing, color theory, etc... They just effortlessly apply it and have developed it into their very own, very personal style. Backward engineering these fundamentals solely from analyzing their styles is close to impossible, which will make it very hard for you to expand on your experience from copying them.

This here site, line-of-action.com is mostly centered around one specific tool that is rooted into that academic approach to a degree, the timed gesture studies, and so a lot of people here follow that academic approach. I highly advise giving it a try, and just start a 30 minute class and see what happens. First attempt will most likely feel frustrating and strange, so post your results and ask around, what that was all about. You will hear a lot of tipps, that sound similar, so I will right away point you to a source, that explains and demonstrates a lot of the thoughts behind studying poses very well: the "Human Figure Fundamentals" course on proko.com There is a premium version, that asks for a lot of money, but you don't need that, just do the free version for now. The style Stan Prokopensky is aiming for is vastly different from your current style, but don't shy away immediately. I think you have enough artistic experience by now to extradite the basic informations you will be getting, and incorporate them into your own style.

c) Please, please, please, stick around, and share your experience with others by doing critiques. With your different style and approach you might not be too certain how to critique a beginner or intermediary, that is certainly trying something, that you yourself haven't tried yourself by now, and so you don't know what to tell them. Here is my two step approach to critique: First, look at whatever they have done, and try to find out what you like about it, and tell them. Second, try to understand, what you personally would have tried differently and why, or what they should focus more on practising in their next attempts, and tell them that, too.

There is also a forum here, where you can tell others about your current art project, what you are trying to accomplish, what you are struggling with.

To repeat my answer to your initial question: Anyone know any sites that do art critique? Not now, but hopefully this site here in the near future, and hopefully with your help and experience, too!

Well, don't be shy about critiqueing others. I am also not an art teacher, I only play one on the interwebs :)

But I think you got a lot of experience to share, and some to gain by sharing it.

I also dream a bit of turning this site into a lively place, where people actually dare to share their experiences, and debate them, and my life experience tells me, that such things only happen if you nudge people into what you hope them to do for you.

Hi Swampat. Looking at your sketches, my impressions:

a) you clearly understand the basics, and know what you are doing. Clean lines, beautiful shapes, systematic approach.

b) you are quite self-critical and systematically analyse your own drawings after the lesson. I should take quite a big bite from that myself.

c) my first kinda disagreement is the note to one of your figures: "Too slow", "Still too slow".

I think there are two different opinions about what the timed class feature should accomplish for an artist, the public one, which you obviously share, that it should teach an artist to draw gosh darn quicker, because speed will solve some qualities with lines? And mine, that this is a trap.

The timed feature helps to make sure you put more practice time into designing the first lines properly, and waste less time polishing turds by adding more detail to bad initial lines forever. It isn't supposed to make you draw quicker, but to focus more on practising first lines.

Like, the figure you critiqued as "too slow". I guess it took you somewhat above 3 minutes? Imagine you want to take that as basis for a full hour grande artwork. Will the final result look better, if you spent a few seconds less on the foundation?

d) I see way more people posting their artworks than people writing critiques. You are definitely at a level of accomplishment and understanding, that you could help some of the beginners way better than Polyvios or I can, and your systematic approach and analytical eye would also be interesting for more advanced students.

It also has a benefit for you, when the site mentions, that giving critiques to others offers you a new perspective and new approaches to advance your own art, that is absolutely true!

e) Your foundations are really good, I couldn't meaningfully tell you how to improve them.

But I know a way for you to find out! Break them! On purpose!

After you are done with a class, pick the foundation you like best, load up the image again, and then just keep working on that very image, add details, add shades, add background, whatever, until you either end up with a photorealistic masterwork ready for the art gallery, or more likely get to the point, where you clearly feel: "I don't know what the f I am doing. This drawing clearly looked better several minutes ago, and if I keep drawing, it will only become worse and worse."

Coming from that crisis point, you can come to conclusions, that no one else can give you by looking at your shorties. Either, you need to recherche some new theoretical backgrounds for the later steps (shadows are an entire science for themselves, and some crazy people even use colors!), or, you understand the steps going forward, but can't apply them to your foundation, because it doesn't properly indicate what you need for those advanced techniques. THEN you have found empirical data, what you need to improve with your foundations.

Yes, there are still some poses you occassionally struggle with, but I wouldn't wait until you mastered each and every possible pose, before taking a peek ahead into what you could develop your art into.

If you aren't looking for perfect high detail rendering as your ultimate goal, but rather want to be able to design your own poses from imagination, this would also be an opportune time to venture into that path, so you can learn, which exact aspirations your quick sketches have to satisfy to help you out in this area.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on December 22, 2023 2:28pm.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on December 22, 2023 2:50pm.

Idon'tknow, I guess it depends a bit on how flawed the line is. If it immediately bugs you out, draw another one. I mean, ofc you should try to make every line the best possible one, but I think while drawing, the focus should be mostly on finding and designing the next line to draw, not on correcting and repeating the same line over and over. Especially in the shorties at the start, you'll have your next attempt within a few seconds anyways.

If you plan to spend 10 or more minutes on a draft, it makes more sense to be self-critical during the first lines, but for me during drawing it is more important to keep your eye on the overall composition and designing the next line. Erasing and correcting what has already been drawn, for me has about even chance of making the drawing worse, by overcorrecting, by diagnosing the error wrong, by just leaving more noise and dirt on the paper, so I generally only do it, when I am 100% absolutely certain it will improve the drawing.

I think what I would most often correct is, when I twitch while drawing a long line. Like, I plan to draw a straight line connecting two specific points, but I fail to coordinate my arm muscles correctly, and end up with a crooked something, that misses the end point by an inch. That's an obvious mistake, and I would redraw a straight line instead. But if that happens more than once during a session, it is a sign, that my drawing motions got flawed, and I might interrupt the session to practice drawing long straight parallel lines into that specific direction to find a better motion.

Basically, if you get the head, shoulder line, ribcage and hip positioned and indicated properly within 30 seconds, that's a lot.

If you mean on the class I did, it's the upper row. Maybe I should have increased the contrast when scanning, they are a bit bad to see as I accidently used a quite hard pencil, that doesn't leave strong marks.

Oops, I think I answered your question about the topic in the Support & Suggestion forum, because I thought its the Practice & Advice forum. But the answer would be generally the same.

Aaahm, I am otherly convinced, that for expressions/portraits the timed class mode with the 30 sec and 1 mins shorties doesn't work well. I personally always change to the "All the same time" mode for that, select 3600 secs as time limit, and change images manually.

The most commonly cited basic head construction is from Mr. Andrew Loomis, first developed in "Fun with a pencil". You can still find the original pdf for free on the interwebs, and tons and tons of people expanding on it. Caution: Loomis invented a quick method to draw relatively impressive looking faces with little prior practice, but they are all "from imagination", in other words, a bit random.

If you want to learn how to match Loomis' heads with a specific reference, I advise to start with repeating his basic construction without reference a lot. That is exactly, why I think a quick gesture timed class makes no sense for it. You do your "shorties" basically offline, from "imagination", without reference. And drawing the Loomis construction properly will take you way more than a minute anyways, so if you tried a quick gesture mode, you would only ever end up with a few initial circles.

Also search for images of Loomis head, and you will find some highly stylized, robot head like looking derivations of Loomis method, that is what a lot of professional use for solving head placement, lighting etcetera.

After you repeated those offline practices often enough to feel confident with Mr Loomis construction, and want a reality check, try applying the method to drawing from reference. When you are confronted with a real person's face, with all its specifics and flaws, you will start the process to learn how to match Loomis idealized rhythms to reality. And if you try to do it on a timer, you will just revert to what you practised so far, and produce idealized, non-distinct features, which you could have done offline as well.

BUT: Setting the timer to infinity doesn't mean that you should ignore the basic benefits of quick sketching, you just have to do it yourself. For example, if you spent 5 to 7 minutes to do a head construction, and then 50 more minutes on embellishing it with a lot of details, to only then realize, that it just looks crappy and always will, then you wasted basically an entire hour to effectively practice head construction for 5 to 7 minutes, and 50 minutes practising to polish a turd, which is utterly useless. If you had stopped yourself in time, you could have done 10 simple head constructions and thus used 10 times more of your time on effective training.

As for good beginner practice for still objects and landscapes alike, one essential link: drawabox.com. Go there, try it out, do it, even if it feels strange at first, it absolutely makes sense, and is explained much better, than this site or me or anyone else could explain to you in a shorter time.

Ok, I did one session and scanned in all the shorties too, to give you an idea with what I mean with: you are drawing way way way too much in that first minute. (I probably should have increased the contrast while scanning, the shorties are a bit hard to see)

https://line-of-action.com/art/view/9071

You aren't supposed to finish the entire drawing in under one minute, the idea is to find a few lines to build a long form drawing upon. If you finish the draft in one minute, what do you plan to do with the rest of the time, once you go to 5 min, 10 min, 25 mins, or longer? Keep embellishing a flawed and hasty foundation? That way only lie tears and frustration.

There are 3 elements and 2 relations you need to get right, the head in relation to shoulderline/ribcage, and the ribcage in relation to the hip. Don't fixate on finishing the outline, don't mess around with drawing entire limbs. If head and/or torso are partially hidden behind limbs, you sometimes need to indicate that, but stick conceptually to drawing head and torso, not the limbs. If the limbs are stretched out in an epressive manner, that clearly informs the curve of the spine, use at most 1 line to indicate 1 limb. The foundational core of each pose are head and torso, and the short poses are all about focusing on only sketching out head and torso.

It also needs to be said, that for all my preaching, I myself still suffer from sloppy and hasty lines and constructions a lot. There are a lot of people, who do these first lines way more beautifully designed and executed with more intent, than I do.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on December 21, 2023 11:34am.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on December 21, 2023 11:52am.

Actually, you are drawing way way way too much in that minute. I'll do another class tomorrow and upload my shorties, too, so you see what I mean.

OK, one thing popped up for me on both images, and that is the way you indicated the... middle mass? I know the tutorial isn't very explicit about why that has to be there, and what it's good for. Here is the secret solved: It's meant to indicate the ribcage. (plus shoulders)

a) I recommend proko.com figure-drawing-fundamentals course, which has a similar concept like this site's tutorial, but way better explained. There is a premium version for money, but the free version contains all the important informations.

b) the ribcage is actually a pretty simple form, it is basically an upright standing egg, just flattened a bit, and the lower curve cut off along the lower ribs. I do recommend to use this as a shortcut for that upper torso mass. The peek of the egg isn't easy to see, because on top of it to the sides sit the shoulders and clavicula, (directly on top of it is where the neck starts, ofc) but if you know what this "mass" is supposed to indicate, you will have better luck deciding the size and placement it needs, to inform your drawing.

To let you immediately in on the secret of the lower body mass, it is the hip. A good shortcut for it is basically drawing a slipper underwear, and then indicate where the hip joints are, which are (other than the shoulder joints to the ribcage) always in a fixed position towards the hip, and can be easily spotted, as those are the joints, where the upper legs start from. Really indicating the hips correctly is often a bit more complicated, so for a starter I do agree with the tutorial, that indicating them with a circle will do for now, just try to make that circle big enough to fit the buttox into it.

The line of action, namesake of this page: I find it a remarkably complex concept, and I don't always use it consciously. The idea to find it is to think about the longest simple curve, that you could fit into the silhouette of the pose you are about to draw. I find it complex, as it combines the idea of indicating the dynamics of the overall pose, but often also helps indicating the placement of ribcage, spine and hip, properly. Which is a lot of information to pack into a single line, and I am personally meh about the pedagogical value of placing it so front and centre.

The idea with the timed practice is, in the shorter warm-up lessons, don't get hasty, but focus mostly on placing the torso correctly. You won't finish your drawing in time, and that is OK so. Getting the first lines that indicate the torso right is most important for the final result, so the short timing only allows you to draw those lines, and thererfor get more repetitions in for the basic construction, than for limbs or even fancy details at the end. So, don't get hasty, just draw a few lines before the timer runs out, then repeat finding and drawing those very lines with the next pose.

-Pencil control, I think there is one site that everyone agrees teaches that best, and that would be drawabox. If you go there and read the description of what you are supposed to do, and you feel your eyes glaze over, shake that feeling, actually doing it isn't as boring as it sounds. On the other hand, you won't be able to avoid a bit of repetitive grind. You are basically training your hand-eye coordination and your fine muscle skills the way a bodybuilder trains their abbs. Try to experience it in a meditative mood, keep your initial attempts as control samples, and cherish how fast you will see actual improvements in contrast to those meager beginnings.

If you can express your idea with fewer lines, you can put more attention towards placing and designing each individual line, thus increasing your line quality.

For example, imagine the outline of a limb, say, an upper arm. If you use four or five short lines to indicate its outline, it will look ragged. If you instead find one smooth curve, that incorporates three of the shorter lines, and another line, that summarizes the two remaining lines, the lines themselves will look smoother and less often interrupted, because they are, and the viewer's eye will have to process less individual informations to pick up the form, so they will perceive your drawing as looking more elegantly.

As everything in art, line economy is a rule, not a law. If you draw an old man's face, or the muscles of a trained bodybuilder with very little bodyfat, well, the reference themselves are a bit ragged and show a lot of details and texture, so you can get away with more lines and still look decent.

Worst case is a young and pretty girl. Female anatomy has a higher body fat percentage then males, which smoothes out all the lines. If you draw a young girl with too many individual lines, she will always look like she is either severly dehydrated or suffers from connective tissue weakness. Ever heard someone wax lyrically about "female curves"? I am quite certain, this is were the trope originated.

Polyvios, I hate to rain on your parade, but that is not a drawing tool, that is just Stan Prokopenko's sales page. The reason is is called Timer may have to do something with time limited offers. And yes, proko does a good job on most of his stuff, but I don't feel he deserves THAT level of advertisement. My suggestion for viewers of this page would be rather this course from him: https://www.proko.com/course/figure-drawing-fundamentals/overview

... and the comment that the free version is enough for most purposes. You can upgrade to the full version after you think you learned so much, that it is worth it.

EDIT: !!!

Ooooh, my bad. I missed the "Add To Session" buttons instead of the "Buy Pack" buttons under the first 6 entries. It is indeed a drawing tool. Mea maxima culpa, Polyvios!

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on December 20, 2023 10:10am. Reason: me being blind

Hmm, I think I see, why it took you so long. There is pretty much no difference in the amount of detail from the first sketches to the last, which probably means you paused a lot on the warm-up sketches. I mean, fair enough, you used the site to provide templates for drawing for you, and put in 90 minutes of work, which is good. But I advise you to test out the timed practice experience as intended. For the 30 second and 1 minute sketches at the start, try to not pause them, but rather really try to find a few essential lines that define the figure for you. Don't fret if you aren't done, you aren't working at museum pieces, but at improving your skills.

Line of action isn't the only way to find initial lines, but it's a good and tested starting point, and I would recommend to sticking to it for now, as good as you can understand it. A long curve vaguely along the spine, indicate masses, then joints, but when the image flips, you are done and start with the next image. Try not to hurry and start drawing hastier, so you get in more lines, instead draw fewer, but more meaningful lines.

This helps you to really get an eye for the pose quickly, learn a bit about analyzing your drawing process, and to prioritize what you are drawing. The first lines you draw often decide the quality of the end result, so separate them out, practise them more often than you practise finishing a piece, learn to keep stuff simple and to organise your sketch from the first lines. That is the idea behind the timing of these classes, and although it will feel strange at first, it does have its definite benefits, which you are currently missing out on.

From the figures you drew, it is a mixed bag. Some of them clearly show, that you already know quite a bit about the proportions of the human figure, on some of them the proportions are off, but in a way that emphasizes their expression. Which is good if you can do it with intent, but can become a road bump, if you can't control when it happens. Some of them, well...

You have quite a high ratio of searching lines, where you attempted one thing, then corrected it, and again. If you ever want to get to a clean looking finish, the goal should be to reduce those, so you don't have to constantly break your flow by erasing stuff. Part of it to learning to integrate the moments for planning and pre-shadowing your lines into your workflow. (pre-shadowing means, you move your pen over the paper without drawing first, to get a visual clue, if your hand movement succeeds in doing the line you want it to do, only then you draw the line. takes discipline to get used to it, better start early. The method is explained well on drawabox, I can provide links if you want)

Part 2: I actually hadn't done poses for a while, as I was more interested in portraits, so what I wrote above was mostly from memory. And the topic was: This is how I think the tutorial is supposed to be followed.

I just went and did a 30 minute class, to fresh up my memory about how I actually do it usually. First: Ouch, drawing isn't like cycling, I get rusty quick in solving specific drawing problems, when I don't keep up practicing them.

But, what I feel is most important about the "action line" part, and how I do practice it, isn't so much about actually studying the human figure, but about finding the balance between composition and details.

The old beginner's mistake of wanting to focus on all the details first is still in my blood, and the quick poses force me to find big lines first, to get an idea of the overall image sketched out, before touching any details with a 9 foot pole. So the problem I am focused on isn't so much: "Where does the tutorial exactly want me to put down those lines?" or even "Where would Stan Prokopenko put those lines?" but "How can I identify this pose with as few lines as possible?"

The quick poses are about finding shortcuts for the overall design. LoA, Proko, they offer general solutions for this shortcuts, but in the end, it is me, who has to work from these shortcuts, so I put them, where they help me to understand the pose. Following the advice of smarter people is generally a good idea, but when applying it to a concrete model, I often skip those advices, and just draw the most prominent lines, that I do see.

Having followed proko and LoA changed what lines my eyes are drawn to, but leaving the ladder you climbed behind you is also a valid move, as long as you don't forget where you are going to.

Now, when the site switches from quick poses to increasingly longer poses, the problems of the thesis are revealed. Quick lines can be thrown down without much measuring, and give a good impression, but when the time frame increases, all that is left to be done is adding more details.

And what details allow is to measure with a lot more precision, and suddenly the imprecisions in proportions are revealed. So the skill I am practicing is balancing details and composition.

If I plop down the base lines for a 10 minute or longer drawing within 30 seconds, the measurements are so far off, that the result starts to look crappy when I start adding in details. So for those longer poses, the initial lines have to be more precise, and measured, and without details finding marks to measure from is hard. Which for me means that during a timed course with increasing time, I actually switch my overall strategy several times, and the learning experience a lot comes from being aware of that juggling act between following a grande design, and using details tactically as a tool to successfully measure, instead of zooming in on a single detail from the start and losing all sense of proportions as a result.

Frankly, I don't focus on the action line myself very much, unless I spot one clearly. It is a bit of a part of theory, related also to Matessi's force drawing method, where if I watch someone do it repeatedly on a video, I start to get what it is all about, but I don't get why they have to describe it in these exact terms. To me it is quite metaphorical language, just not plain english. It kind of makes sense in theory, and it sounds like a very simple concept, but if you try to apply it to a random template, it can turn out to be way more complex then advertised.

My main reason for having the tutorial on is for getting a warning before the timing for the next image changes. But on the days when I want to focus on being a good student, the idea, as I understood it and practice it, is to find the longest simple curve, that you could fit into the silhouette of the template.

This is an extremely condensed shortcut of the form, something that would stick in your memory even if you saw a shadow of the template for a blink of an eye and only out of the corners of your vision. One line to describe a pose, I think the concept was originally developed by dance choreographers, who invented a way to note down choreographies in a simplified way.

To your practical example:

Your image shows two poses, and you use the word "sedentary" to describe them. I would agree for the girl in the wheelchair, and the action line for her to me would be almost curled up.

The standing girl I would rather rate as "static", and the action line would be almost a vertical from her head to the foot which supports most of her weight. It wouldn't be completely straight, as she isn't standing completely straight. Her hip is tilted to the side to shift her weight a bit, and I would try to tilt the action line to cross her hip bone orthogonally. If she would be standing in a more dynamic, off-centre way, i might decide to draw the action line from her head towards the extended foot.

If you don't find any convincing action line, in a pinch, you can still try to just guess where the spine should be, that is usually good enough for most purposes.

I find the action line a bit easier to understand, once you get better at the second step, allocating the masses: head, ribcage and hip. I mentioned proko.com before, and in comparison this site has an overly simple description (basically you are instructed to just draw two circles), that makes it harder to build on. Proko spends quite some time showing how to develop effective shortcuts for the ribcage and hip, and how they define the torso.

A typical, typical beginner mistake is to draw the torso too straight, with not enough angling between hip and ribcage, and if you train your eye on finding the action line, you often find more convincing solutions for the placement of the masses. But then, to get a feeling for what that darn action line is supposed to accomplish in the first place, you need some experience of having struggled with placing those masses.

The problem with the tutorial on this site, it abbreviates very complex concepts into just enough sentences to fit onto a one page description and a few pop up messages between poses. When I showed up here, I knew those (or very similar) concepts, explained to me in way more detail from Stan Prokopenski, and I understood, what they are talking about.

And it probably makes sense for the concept of this website to keep those descriptions so extremely short, but it feels like an ambitious kids cartoon explaining how the drive shift of a car is assembled. It is all technically correct, but a bit sparse for practical application.

About the photos on this page: Well, the wild west crazy times of the interwebs are past us, copyrights exist and are stringently enforced, so LoA can only work with photographers and models they can afford. And those are basically fellow artists, who do their best of providing us with useful templates for drawing. And with about as much of a mixed success as our own attempts at drawing. Being a bit heretical, quickposes.com has a very similar set-up to LoA, and frankly a lot of their poses seem to be just easier to draw from. LoA's templates indeed have a tendency to be rather challenging.

I think the #1 potential LoA has, is that it combines the timed poses mechanic with a forum. But it takes us as a community to learn how to successfully exchange our thoughts about our practice and art in general to grow this forum into a vibrant space.