Man with swords

Hi Torrilin,

I'm curious why you are working with such a large brush? For me, it makes it hard to make out the lines. I think you need to be working with a much smaller brush and be more precise with your lines. Even if you are more interested in values, I would have prefered to have the forms more well defined.

There are some parts that look like they are well done, such as the torso and the shoulders. I get a good sense of the form and the lines do a good job of defining the form.

But the arms look too short and it's hard for me to see if they are just foreshortened or if they are the wrong size. The thick lines tend to flatten the image so I see the short arms as just short even though I can tell they are probably just foreshortened. It's also hard to define any shape. The forearms, for example, are reduced to two parallel straight lines but they really should be much more curved to define what they are doing.

I think the drawing shows some good understanding of the pose and I can see some evidence of your understanding of how to construct the figure. Keep going with it. Experiment with other brushes to see if you can find a better brush to express what it is you are trying to achieve.

Best of luck,

Mark

This is actually a pressure sensitive digital brush. No size adjustments made during the drawing, so the thin highlights and the areas you’re perceiving as fat are all the same brush. A big part of the session was just working out what range of marks I could get reliably with the brush. (Lots but I’m inconsistent)

I’m not sure which forearm you mean with the curved comment? The left one is pretty accurate tho the elbow structure isn’t entirely working right. The right one is simultaneously too long for shape and not remotely saying the right stuff because the shadow shapes got weird.

It’s a classic broke-back pose structurally, and I’ve never actually done one of them. And since it’s a fairly common pose for illustration, I wanted to focus on the twist involved in the head/torso/leg structure. The arms matter for the torso structure, but they weren’t the priority. Exploring the reality of what an actual human can do when trying the pose was.