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Simplifying arms and legs from Croquis Cafe.

I find this video is very helpful to think over if I feel like I’m getting messed up on legs or arms. The overall advice to consider the large muscles first in the gesture is important. But he’s also adding a rough gesture for the knee and feet to the large muscles. And he’s showing an efficient way to convey shadow even if you’re using a very fine drawing tool. Lots of subtle bits in a 2.5m video.

There’s a second video on complex or convoluted figures that is also relevant. It’s basically using the envelope method to block in features.

I don’t think you’re actually going far wrong. It looks to me like you’re doing about the same or maybe a touch better than you had been at the start and you’re noticing bits where the default gestures you have been using aren’t quite conveying the info you want them to have.

The brush pen set seems to have given you a big jump in flow. So I’m guessing your brain is noticing small errors in curve accuracy. For me, if I feel like curves are off it’s often helpful to try the envelope method to get a better idea of what has gone all funny. The other thing you might be responding to is you might be seeing the gesture in smaller muscles that you’d been leaving out and feeling like it’s a mistake to leave it out.

Angry faces timelapse by me.

I do a lot of my life drawing sessions in the Procreate app, which automatically records a timelapse of what exactly I did in terms of strokes. I wasn’t particularly shooting for looking like the model in that session, just in getting across the gesture of the facial expression. Faces with strong emotions are (for me at least) a lot easier than more neutral faces. There’s more shadows and the shadows are often stronger than on a neutral face.

Gesture is something everything has. If it’s an inanimate object, the gesture describes how light moves over the object. If it’s animate, it also describes the way it moves. So with a face, there’s the overall gesture of the expression, there’s the light movement, and there’s all the tiny face muscles that are each making a gesture for the overall expression.

A lot of what we see as a “pretty” face is the expression is not too strong, the features are symmetrical, and all the shadows are very soft. Humans are really really good at spotting less symmetry in faces and in seeing when shadows on a face are subtly off. Our brain software is really good at this. So pretty can be really really hard. And we aren’t always great at verbalizing why it looks off.

Focusing on strong expressions and gesture means even if I don’t get an exact likeness the picture is less likely to be an inhuman monster with impossible eyes and strange nostrils.

Toning it down... that I haven’t figured out yet.

I don’t have any timelapses of faces where I’m tackling gesture using continuous line drawing. It’s a different approach, but it’s one I’ve found can work really well with video.

Good job on trying to get hands and feet into your 30s poses. Your instinct that it’s important is a good one. And there’s a lot of improvement visible in your 30s figures in that regard. You’re also doing a good job of aiming for flowing, strong lines. Not always perfect but it’s visible that you’re trying.

It looks like you’re drawing pretty small. Definitely think about pushing yourself to use more paper. These feel like they’re averaging 2+ figures per pocket notebook page, and that’s REALLY small. Don’t be afraid to draw big. And the habit of always drawing small can actually cause hand injuries long term so mix it up. If you can grab a ream of copy paper that’s a good size for doing class mode with a sheet for every pose. If you can make yourself go bigger than that try to.

It looks like you’re using ballpoint pen. There’s definitely good points to a thin drawing tool. It lets you be precise. But for gesture it can be good to try something that feels too big. Especially with bigger paper! Don’t be afraid of big strong lines. If they’re wrong you will do another one in 30s.

I actually really enjoy doing figures with a brush pen working with the tutorial method. It takes a fair bit of practice, but if you want a strong gestural figure fast there’s very little that can beat it. As you practice you get better at linking shadows together with your gesture lines so the whole thing flows. And with a lot of practice you can get finer details out of the brush so longer poses are possible.

Maybe try reframing it? This kind of fetishy stuff shows up in stories a lot. Maybe flip the gender. Maybe use it to try and push the storytelling in the pose so it’s less about sexy and more about why? Maybe imagine the model in one of the bird costumes?

(yeah there’s definitely stuff in the library that I’m not keen on either, but I also run into enough stuff where it’s really obvious the artist doesn’t have their own boobs to use as reference that I’m kinda glad the fetish stuff is in there)

Squares. Well, scribbled squares. Also scribbled rectangles.

If you scribble a square, odds are it’s not at all square. Fortunately you don’t care because your palm isn’t a square with dead on 90 degree angles. But in a lot of poses a scribbled square will get across the action the palm is doing so a line or three can get across some of the finger and thumb gesture.

Feet, same deal. Your foot definitely isn’t a rectangle. But a scribbled rectangle can get some of the idea across. And the toes or heel will take a line or two.

For both scribbles, the goal isn’t an accurate square or rectangle, it’s to scribble in something that conveys the gesture and allows you to add other gestures to make the idea clearer.

I actually find it’s easier to work on in full length figures classes. Just making it a goal to include the hands and feet in a full length figure helps a lot with making classes focused on hands and feet feel easy.

Drawing with a pressure sensitive big fat digital brush can actually do some neat stuff. The less you press hard, the easier it is on your hands. So if you’re able to keep squeezing out thinner lines of the big brush that’s good for your hands long term.

Something I like to do is tone the canvas so I’m not drawing on flat white. For me a soft orange or brown works well with blue to the point where if I’m using an actual physical pencil I tend to grab a Prussian blue one and a toned paper sketchbook. Toned canvas drove me nuts at first, I hated it. But the more I’ve worked with it, the more I like it.

If you have a toned canvas, instead of erasing to give form, you can draw on highlights instead. For me, the eraser can mess with my head and drawing on lights can work better. They’re not better or worse, just different approaches. Try them both.

Physical pencils can have a pretty hard edge, or they can be really soft. Digital brushes often aren’t great at that shift, or it can be hard to get it to come out. And a lot of digital advice will say “well you can do anything with a hard round brush” which is technically true but maybe doesn’t help right then if you’re so uncomfortable you can’t think. So taking the time to think about your physical stuff and what feels wrong can really help.

If you’re working with the slate style tablet instead of the draw on a screen kind, it’s a very rigorous course in blind contour drawing. It really really really pushes accuracy. Kinda. If you’re used to physical paper, it can get super weird if the cursor isn’t tracking the stylus. And that can happen a lot when you lift up. Basically it’s a very specific art tool and a lot of paper related habits don’t carry over. The draw on a screen kinds have a lower learning curve. Not no curve just lower. For me a mix of digital and physical is good stuff, trying to do only one never quite works.

A lot of art software has some kind of straight line tool. Whether you use it or not in real drawings is up to you, but it makes for glorious fun if you’re playing with the envelope method or any other straight line focused study.

Keeping a figure sketch to a single layer is a good idea. You can actually go farther and treat each layer as a page in a sketchbook. Make a sketch, turn that layer off, do the next one. Then you can easily do stuff like copy the sketch and paste it into a bigger composition.

You’re not marking these with how long you spend within the set. That’s something I find very helpful in evaluating my own work. It doesn’t have to be super rigorous just something so we have a clue if the poses are a consistent length or variable. Often I’ll go through a class session and mark the best out of each time segment. With how my brain works, I don’t do well freely choosing the drawing time. It’s much better to have a teacher or the computer or a timer to help me set limits.

These feel like you’re drawing fairly small. The lines can be choppy or have restatement that isn’t helping the image, and is working against your goal of smooth curves. Maybe not as small as it shows on screen, but definitely more towards pocket notebook size than full sheet or half sheet. Mix it up some. It’s very easy to get stuck in a rut dictated by a particular paper size. The kind of sweeping curves you are shooting for take space. Lots of it. Also those big sweeping curves can do a lot to suggest lighting. Lighting is a big issue in drawing imagined figures. The lighting in these feels very flat and glaring, like pop up flash. And unless you’re doing specific kinds of product photos that’s basically always the wrong light.

The way you are sometimes silhouetting the hair is interesting. Those figures tend to feel more lively. The set on Oct 1 are particularly noteworthy because overall you showed a lot more thought about line weight, lighting and silhouette interacting.

Use class mode. Seriously. It exists for a reason. Well, a giant pile of reasons.

When I picked up figure drawing class again in about 2015 or 2016, my 30s poses were basically sperm or stick figures. A circle for the head, a squiggle for the gesture, possibly with other bits tacked on. It was ugly and it didn’t look like much, but I knew from prior art instruction that it was ok. Fast practice where you focus on the whole pose pays off. And the fast poses are primarily to warm you up and get your observation working for the long pose anyway.

A big reason to use class mode is it’s possible to practice mistakes. A 30 minute class doesn’t give you time to settle into any one style of drawing. Especially if you’re new, it will push your skills hard. And you won’t have time to settle in to any one thing or think. Then you review your work after, make a note of the good bits, and go on to whatever drawing you want to do. It’s a warm up, not the whole of your drawing.

Another reason to use it is those impossible feeling 30s poses let you make a lot of bad drawings very quickly. In order to learn a skill, you need space to screw up. Thousands upon thousands of bad drawings.

Last biggie is most people have a finite attention span. A 10 minute stretch of focus is a long time. Really long. And in art terms, 10 minutes is nothing. A large piece can take 20 or 40 hours or more. So you need to build the ability to break a piece of art into chunks and tackle small parts. Trying to spend 40h on a piece as a new artist will not be productive. But class mode teaches you that you can do a great deal of work in small bits, and it has you practice exactly what you need to build a large piece.

There’s loads of rules of thumb for proposition, but I don’t think they’re very helpful when you are new. If you have a sketch that you want to color and turn into a full on painting, definitely look it over with an eye towards proportion rules. Try mirroring it. Look at it upside down. But in the thick of getting an idea down, rules get in the way.

It seems like you’re really drawn to the more pin up style poses. That’s not a positive or negative thing, it just is, y’know? So you are faster at getting details into them, and just more interested. And for most kinds of comics, heck most kind of stories, those are the least useful sorts of poses. So you have two paths here, either figure out a way that a pin up pose can fit in a story from the character doing the pose’s viewpoint, or figure out a way to incorporate that interest into a wider range of poses. Fitting the pin up pose into a story is probably harder.

I think you’re aware you like the pin up poses too, it’s not super common to get an all female class with no late long male poses if you’re doing random classes. So you’re setting up your classes to favor what you like. And if you’re aiming for comics, that’s self defeating.

Pushing for more random and more story, this gives you a sort of bigger set of puzzles. A lot of poses can suggest a small story, or a bit of a character. So you can push into that. The gesture now has story weight, it’s not just for the sake of an accurate image.

An exercise I found helpful is to try drawing around the subject. Faces without faces is what got me trying this. It’s written around a particular iPad app but it works with physical media just fine. If you’re familiar with digital art, the “watercolor” and “pencil” brushes mentioned are fairly soft. The “ink” is a standard hard round brush. The main point of focus on the negative space around your subject still holds. Most art advice talking about negative drawing or painting is focused on more botanical stuff, but it works on people too. This one doesn’t work great with a more art focused reference photo with a very plain background, but it works great with complex references.

Blind contour line drawing, continuous line drawing and cinq á sept drawing can all work too. There you’re focusing on the physical feeling and getting it to match up with what you see. Blind contour is pretty frustrating in many ways, but it’s a great alternate to gesture drawing for fast poses. Continuous line you’re allowed to look at what you’re doing, but it takes a lot of thought to not lift the pen or pencil and a fair bit of planning to get the most you can out of that one line. Going up to 5 or 7 lines feels very free after sticking with just one. The link is with ink, but I first learned blind contour with a pencil. Very few exercises really require a specific tool.

Drawing upside down definitely works, but can feel a bit frustrating if you’re trying to work right side up. It doesn’t always carry over for me, and it’s not great for composing an original idea. It’s more a kick in the pants reminder that of course I can observe.

Another thing to try is grab a tool for figure drawing that feels “wrong”. A big fat brush pen. Watercolor. Marker. Something way out of your comfort zone. The first practice session or two with the different tool will feel really upsetting. But when you get a bit farther in, you’ll start finding marks you like with the new tool and things you couldn’t do easily with your regular tool. You have to make a point to look for the good parts with this. Every art tool has strengths and weaknesses. Focus on the strong part, don’t beat yourself up over stuff where it’s easy with your favorite tool.

When I don’t know what to work on, that means I’m done. Seriously.

The antidote for this done feeling is to look at art that isn’t mine, take photos, or look over my personal projects until I find a goal so that I can see where to go from the old point of feeling done. For most artists, figure study isn’t the end goal, it’s a discipline so they have the skill needed to do the real thing.

Maybe you want to get faster so you can crank out panels for a story in comic form. Maybe you want to draw fan art for a favorite TV show where you’re drawing stuff that never happened. Maybe you want to do urban sketching where you’re not skipping out on drawing people. The goal doesn’t have to be high brow or something suitable for an art gallery, it just has to make you happy.

I’m focusing on the late September sketches...

My art teacher in high school was super mean. We had to carry a huge half sheet size sketchbook and work on figures at full size. I hated it. Absolutely hated it. It was hard, and it felt weird. But I learned a lot by drilling big movements. It also drove me batshit as a kid because my art supplies came out of my own money, which was... not much. If you can swing $5-$10 for a ream (500 sheets) of copy paper that should help with the feeling of not having enough paper so you can face doing one figure to a sheet. If you need something sturdier than copy paper but still cheap, Canson XL mixed media tends to be the cheapest stuff I know that can handle being hit with watercolor. It’s not great watercolor paper, but it’s sturdy enough to handle stuff like a Pentel Pocket Brush, and you can get up to around half sheet sizes.

The other option to fight the tinies is to work digital. Give yourself a big canvas, and treat each layer as a fresh sheet of paper.

I think a lot of the stiffness you’re feeling is that you’re trying to fit your ideas in a small space. Your ideas are not small ok? They deserve space.

Some of these have a good strong gesture to the limbs and hands. I particularly like the bottom right corner and the facepalm one. A visible drawn line of action is not always necessary for a strong gesture. And gesture happens even in very small or simple objects.

I’m not sure if you’re working on construction lines in the sense of drawing through the form, or in the sense of using the envelope method to focus on finding straight lines. And I’m not sure how well the envelope method can work in 2m. But it’s definitely worth thinking about ways to use straight lines even when you draw through a form. Both techniques really push line in a very dimensional way. Don’t be afraid to make strong marks and just run with them. There’s not much time to erase in 2m.

The bent over figure has a really nice blocked in foot. Linear, uses mostly cubic or rectangular forms, and very well observed in a few lines. You did good there. Trying to find that kind of simplification for hands and feet is hard, and where you have it you’re getting a lot more likeness to show through.