Drawing / Sketching / Digital Painting

It's strange. I like how a lot of individual sections of this turned out, but the whole thing just is off. It's irritating.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/0hRgnzH.jpg)

I think you’re making great progress, trichy. It’s cool to see your improvement!

Definitely!

Try periodically checking the reflection of the drawing in a mirror (or taking a photo and flipping it). It'll help catch any weirdness with proportions and other bits and bobs that you'd probably miss otherwise.

it'll also help to sketch the basic frame and proportions first before filling in detail. E..g. Eyes should be the same size, on a straight line with each other and there should be a "third eyes" worth of space between them. They are also at exactly the mid-point in the head, which is roughly "five eyes" wide.

IMAGE(https://www.thedrawingsource.com/images/proportions-of-the-face-loomis.jpg)

One of the things that strikes me right away with your drawing is that if you ran a line at an angle across the way, through the eyes, tip of the nose and mouth, you would have three lines at completely different angles. Try to make sure these are all parallel (at least on a resting, neutral face) . Also watch that you make sure the pupils And iris in the eye are the same size and pointing in the same direction!

Hopefully that's useful constructive criticism

That's really helpful, actually. I drew this from a reference photograph, so I didn't spend as much time plotting out proportions and angles. I'm figuring out that I don't yet have the skill to be able to eyeball proportions, so even if I'm going from a model, I need to make sure everything lines up correctly.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/zdW0PJ5.jpg)

One of my favorite sketching class exercises is where we looked up a master's painting.
Then we drew that painting from the source. When we were finished, we had to draw
the underlying skeleton with a human sized plastic skeleton as reference.

I need to find that drawing and scan it in if I haven't already. I loved that exercise!

It may help you to get a small but accurate plastic skeleton and overlay a partially
transparent paper on top to draw the skull and try and fit it into your drawing. It
should tell you right away the areas that need work. Plus it will help with tough
things like foreshortening.

I'm taking my first figure drawing class tonight, offered by a local gallery. Three hours with a model, while we practice gesture drawings for an hour in short increments, then two one-hour poses. I'm looking forward to it, despite the fact that everyone else attending is fairly experienced.

excellent. and don't worry if it's anything like any drawing class/session I've ever attended there's always a wide range of skill levels in attendance.

Couple of tips that are mentioned a few times in the thread waaaay back...

1) try not to obsess over comparing your drawings with other people's work. EVERY artist struggles with this from what I've seen and all it'll do is push a person deeper into "imposter syndrome" territory.

2) Instead, make sure to keep all of your past work and compare your newer stuff with your old stuff from time to time. I guarantee if you keep at it you'll be amazed at how quickly you'll see an improvement.

That sounds fantastic trichy!
I'll echo what pyxistyx said. It is hard not to compare yourself to others but avoid it as much as you can. And the best teachers will work with you or sit down and try to see what you are seeing to critique as opposed to "Do what I do".

Aside from the already mentioned daily gesture sketch practice, I also found Andrew Loomis's tip on drawing the human skull at different angles a great help in improving my drawing of heads/faces. I cannot stress enough how important it is to have an idea of the structure inside the head to understand how the major features of the face are positioned relative to one another. I use some free mobile apps that have 3D human skull models for reference. Online 3D models like this are pretty handy, too!

Okay. I've gone through the Proko videos on gesture drawing several times, and we did an hour of gesture drawing last night, but I still feel like I'm not getting it. I know it's supposed to be pretty counter-intuitive, and I was told by several people last night that it can take quite a while for it to feel natural, but I feel like I'm way off. If anyone has any suggestions for improving my gesture drawings, I'd love to hear them.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/RuWnq7X.jpg)

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/d75CvyH.jpg)

the second one's pretty good! his left leg is a little wonky but otherwise not too shabby and totally works as a gesture drawing imo. You can clearly get an idea of what's going on with the figure in just a few rough lines (sitting down on something, putting his weight on his left thigh, clutching his hand in his head) whereas in the first one it's not all that clear whats going on (sitting down? dancing? desperate for the loo? )

You could probably develop that second one further into a full drawing easily and end up with something that looks pretty good.

speaking of. i really need to get back into the habit of doing this myself. long stretches of nothing to do are surprisingly bad for my productivity.

oh and try doing them with pen, rather than pencil. i've found that useful to help eliminate the temptation to erase and restart constantly and force yourself to think a bit harder before making a stroke on the page.

I use a pencil, but it doesn't have an eraser, and I don't bust one out for gesture drawing. Also, that second image is a woman. The confusion probably means I need to work on my proportions.

oh woops! I of all people shouldn't have assumed!

gender aside though, the proportions aren't bad. And for all I know those are fairly accurate - all kinds of people have different body shapes. it'd help to see the original model and pose to compare (obviously not really possible if it was a live model) .

That second one is pretty good Trichy. Like anything just keep practicing.

trichy those are awesome! There are many different types of gesture drawing. It isn't about looking right. It is about training your eye to see or capturing things that you don't know that your eyes are seeing.
Blind contour drawings typically look like messy scribbling but illustrate some of the subtlety of the forms you may not pick up consciously. They typically last 5-15 seconds.
Semi blind contour allows you to look at your paper but not while drawing. They have 5, 15 or 30 minute time limits. These you draw a quarter inch at a time while looking at the subject and then looking down on your paper to help keep your place.

trichy - Yeah, your improvement is inspiring! Keep grinding away at it!

pyxistyx wrote:

1) try not to obsess over comparing your drawings with other people's work. EVERY artist struggles with this from what I've seen and all it'll do is push a person deeper into "imposter syndrome" territory.

2) Instead, make sure to keep all of your past work and compare your newer stuff with your old stuff from time to time. I guarantee if you keep at it you'll be amazed at how quickly you'll see an improvement.

This was really helpful to me. It's not related to drawing directly, but I've been learning game design and I got discouraged a couple of weeks ago about little I know. I realized I was fully in the imposter syndrome mindset.

This got my head back on straight, thanks.

Yay!

Got here because this was mentioned in the thread of the week section on the Conference Call!

I'm editing because in my inebriated state, I kind of ran in and dumped a lot of picture links and didn't contribute much to the conversation.

I suffer a bit from impostor syndrome too. I sit down and try to make the lines go together in a way that is "good enough" that gets the message across, and some days it's as difficult as pushing a rope. When I'm really depressed, I can barely coordinate my drawing arm to move right and I'm worried that maybe this time the ability to draw has gone away forever. I think about this every time I sit in front of a blank canvas or page. One of the biggest ways I was able to pull myself out of an art-blockage a couple years back was listening to the GWJ RPG podcasts and feeling inspired to draw the characters.

So, when it comes to advice, mine tends to be more on the mental part than the rote, practiced techniques? I don't know. All I can say is, please please please don't ever give up on drawing. Push past it, eat that elephant one bite at a time. You never stop improving if you just stick with it. If any of you all need a frustration-cry on my shoulder, it's all yours.

Also... incidentally, for one of my old jobs, I needed to take an anatomy course. It's shocking how much that positively effected my ability to draw the human body. I guess taking figure drawing is a much faster and more affordable way to achieve that. I wish I'd thought of it first, and had done taken a class like that a decade sooner.

Also, throw it into a volcano, how unuseable Photoshop becomes whenever old wacom tablets have to update drivers in response to windows' updates.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/codjKfo.jpg)

Latest portrait attempt with charcoal.

Nice! Getting some angles in!

I love how charcoal is the medium that most often people see big breakthroughs with. I think it forces the artist to see the depth/layers of the drawing and out of a sort of flat/projection mindset. The piece becomes malleable and almost lives while working on it

Yeah, it was suggested to me in the last class that charcoal would force me to focus less on contours and more on shadows and value. If nothing else, it really highlighted how many errors in proportion and such come from only trying to sketch the outline of a figure, instead of understanding the forms it's made up of.

trichy wrote:

Yeah, it was suggested to me in the last class that charcoal would force me to focus less on contours and more on shadows and value. If nothing else, it really highlighted how many errors in proportion and such come from only trying to sketch the outline of a figure, instead of understanding the forms it's made up of.

Damn it, I seem to have lost my "+1,000,000 Like" button.
Your transformation is amazing trichy!

I had similar experience. When I started using charcoal more, I essentially rushed to get the basic contour down. Then I would lightly cover the entire sketch with a base layer of charcoal to "push/pull/smudge" from.

It also had the side effect of making me much better at shading/cross-hatching with pencil.

Alas, I loath charcoal with every fibre of my being. I think it's the texture of it and the sound it makes on paper (not to mention the mess). It sets my teeth on edge something rotten!

Oy, that sucks! What about contee (sp?) crayon, does that have the same effect on you pyx?

Anything dry and powdery really.

pyxistyx wrote:

Anything dry and powdery really.

So no pastels?

Eh, Pastels are not great either. I mean I can use all of these things if I feel the need to, it just gives me that "fingers down a blackboard" sensation sometimes when I do.