Hi Emi! I wouldnt call my opinion professional, but I will say a few things anyway.
-Firsr and foremost, your crosshatching is fine. Its good that your focusing on the shape and trends of the shadow. Of anything, I'd like it to be more agressive to really highlight those places of deep shadow, but that could just be a style list if choice on my part.
-Secondly Copy practice is a great method in experience, but one method I do a lot myself you may find useful for learning to draw from memory is trace-reference-draw. You take a pose, trace it and it's major lines and shapes, then try to draw the same pose using your trace and photo as references, and then get rid of both of those and try to draw a similar but not exactly the same pose from memory. This excersize really pushes you to study a pose and internalize what you can learn from it, and you might find it really helpful if your goal is to figure out how to draw without references.
-Another thing that might help you with anatomy is taking advantage of the 360 figure tool. Seeing the same pose from different angles really helps you get a sense of how a body moves in space. Optimally we would all attend IRL figure drawing classes for that purpose, but without those being practical. The 360 poses are possibly the next best thing. Just going through one pose slowly and drawing all of its angles may be really helpful to you
-in general your art is really expressive! It feels very geometric, and it's clear your studying the geometry of everything and how the overall shapes pláy out! I think your next step is really going to be pushing yourself to draw from imagination, which is honestly the hardest part, I have every faith you are capable of it however!
Well I can say this, despite not feeling it yourself your figures from recent practices do look more fluid and dynamic than the ones months ago. They feel animated almost. Its also important to remeber (and this is something I struggle with a lot) that progress isnt going to be linear. The trend will be upwards but there will be day to day differences, and thats ok.
One thing I might suggest for you to do though, if you want to break the stagnancy, is do some figure practice but narrow your focus in from the entire body. Im noticing your anatomy, especially arms and legs is very extreme and often looks warped. This gives a fluid look to your drawings which i love, but perhaps it would be prudent for you really focus in on the anatomy of different parts of the body to better refine and control this, allowing you more precise expression
Another possible way for you to break your rut is take a completely different subject matter for a while. Im noticing that in your sketchbook (or at least what youve shared) that your work is almost exclusively figure studies, making taking some time to work on faces, or hands or animals or even looking beyond this website and doing still lives, environments, style studies. Or even simply approaching poses in a different way like trying to get it down using painting features in your digital program instead of drawing lines. If you keep doing the same thing over and over again, your going to feel stuck in a rut. Going to something else for a bit, and then coming back to figure studies later after its had time to marinate might help a lot in seeing what your doing with new eyes.
I hope any piece of this is helpful. Your stuff is really striking a fluid, and Im excited to see what you can do as you continue to refine your work!
Some advice Ive been working on lately for my own faces has been the advice of getting a real feel for the skull. Ive been reading the "artists complete guide to facial expressions" by Gary Faigin and he advises that before drawing any face to break down the skull into its component parts--a rounded box and a wedge. On these two components the rest of the skull is sculpted and the face is overlaid. Maybe instead of focusing on expressions with just thirty seconds, you should focus on the overall shape of the head. Try to especially mark the chin and center of the head, and either the thirds you want to divide the head into, or the eyeline you want to mark, as well as where the neck connects relative to the chin and ears. Trying to draw some just plain skulls may also help you get a sense for the overal geometry of the face and skull.
Hi Voelpes, first id like to say your style looks very geometric and energetic. Its clear youve spent a long time developing it. I specifically really like the way you exagerate faces and capture expressions!
Im your junior in terms of art, but one thing i tend to do to force myself to innovate with my art is style studies. I'll find an artist I like and pick a piece of their art, first tracing over it and then trying to mimic it with just a reference, and finally trying to do an original piece mimicking the chosen artists style. Its an excersize that takes a long time, and is frustrating at times, but i always come away from it with new tricks and ways of thinking of things. I find it forces me not only to think of how I would do the shapes at hand, but also forces me to try and dissect how the other artist was approaching it, as well as forces me to give up my usual muscle memory in the tracing phase. Maybe finding an artist that you think thrives in your weak spots(angles and perspective) and dissecting how they do, or even a few and analyzing different approaches to the same problem.
I hope it ends up being a useful exersize! good luck out there!
