critique figure drawing climbing

Hi

I tried to incorporate the great advice and suggestions I got from you in the past in the last couple of weeks and would love to have your feedback about a figure study/series about climbing.

I made all of them in around 45 minutes in one go before I entered the climbinghall myself. I tried to capture the poses and energy of my hobby…

What do you think?

https://imgur.com/a/VPncGor

Thx a lot for your thoughts and impressions

I think you've really gotten the general forms well, the only improvements would really come with time and practice. I'd just say maybe not FILL the drawings? As in, if I'm assuming correctly, the sketches are for capturing form, so for that, you don't really need to fill/color the sketches in any way. Focus on quantity and timed works rather than a full work of art. That yields results the quickest.

you seem to have a really good idea of the form of the human body, but one thing I noticed is that it all seems to fit together kind of... loosely, for lack of a better term. Maybe it would be helpful to study the exact musculature on the body so that the form can fit together more tightly.

Hello again, Pastabrother. Greatest job on your climbing forces and line qualities on your poses, as you have done. However, I'm still not getting enough of the most organic qualities in terms of your organic lines, shapes, spaces, and of course, forms. Why don't you please just go ahead with 6 more minutes of 30 second sketches, all drawn out from your underhanded postion with both hands?

The reason is as a result, your poses and line control can and will become the most loosest and mostly attractive. And for really most sketching tips and hints, kindly look into the Cartooning book by Ivan B.

Good luck to you.

You are often 90% there, but you would benefit bigly from finding especially a foundation for how the hips work, and for how ribcage, neck and shoulders go together.

Topmost drawing is top notch. One could debate whether a different drawing style could bring out the figure more dramatically, but any criticisms would be purely in the range of choice and taste. Then the lowest drawing, your shoulders and hips just lose symmetry in a way a human body can't and wouldn't work.

To get an idea for the torso, I would start drawing a bunch of figures from a regular upright front, side or 3/4, standing approx up right.

As foundation for the head, you can use basically a circle with a jawline.

The ribcage is an upright standing egg, with the top at the neck, and the lower curve of the egg cut off at the lowest rib bone (in an inverted v-line towards the sternum from the front, joining the spine almost horizontally in the back).

The shoulder apparatus sits on top of the ribcage. Most important is the bone that is the clavicula in the front and forms the shoulder blades in the back. It starts from the center top of the ribcage, has a bit of mobility of its own, and is usually well visible on nude or scantily clad torsos, as this bone has generally little muscle or fat tissues covering it. At it's other end is the joint where the arm bones start, with a few very compact muscles around it.

For the hips your main concern is to make sure, that the joints where the thigh bones start are in a rather fixed position symmetrically to each side of the spine. As a shortcut for the foundation you could either just draw a piece of underwear, a slip, which has a relatively simple form, that is easily reproducable and shows most important infos about the hip, or you could use a box around the entire buttox, and think about the thighs as cut-outs from this box. Looking for the crotch is the usual method to determine the center of the hips.

The throughline through head, shoulder, hips is the spine, and its range of mobility dictates prettty much which poses a body can take. A common beginner's mistake with the spine is to overestimate the distance between hip and ribcage and thus lengthening the torso, or to "straighten" the spine by underestimating the angle the masses have to each other.

If you get used to arranging these bony masses consistently to form the foundation for your poses, your random inconsistent mistakes will pretty much disappear. The mental trick is to stop observing the body purely from the shape of its surface features, but getting used to imagining where and in which position the underlying bone structures would be, and how they produce those shapes you see on the surface. This foundation provides you with a hierarchy of proportions, and thus reduces the amount of observations and measurings you can do wrong.

If you take artistic liberty with other features of the body most casual viewers won't even notice, but if you get the proportions of these basic torso structures wrong, you are headed straight into uncanny valley.