The 100 project

Hello Sylvester~! and hello everyone else~!

Im Nijna, and first i just want to say that this side is awesome~!

Ive been wanting to improve and have been trying to find everything i can to start, and then i found this site and was like OMG YES~! I mostly do character design and commission art, and a friend of mine wants me to do instillation for his book so i need to get working.

OK!

Step 1: I really want to get better at figure drawing, im alright at faces but my bodies need work.

Step 2: My goals are:

1. to practice torsos

2. to practice from the hips down

3. get better at gestures

Step 4: I will commit to drawing one drawing for 100 days to improve!

 

Love to everyone,

Nijna

 

Welcome Nijna, join the club. Just updating this list -

Adding a bunch of new art that I had drawn over the last few days.
13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18

Hi everyone!  I'm Aye and I just discovered this site today.  I really want to say that I love it and it has inspired me a lot to draw more.  I'm going to do the 100 drawings homework too but I really need some advice please!

My goal is to improve my gesture drawings.  I've started doing 1-minute gesture drawings but I'm really struggling with them.

Currently, when I do gesture drawings, they range from ok-ish to something a cat could have scratched out.  I usually start by drawing the head but then sometimes I get lost as to what to look for or what to draw next.  I don't really understand what it means to look/draw for 'fluid' lines.  Should I draw a stick figure first and then quickly add muscle around it, or should I trace the muscle (do something like a silhouette), when gesture drawing?  Sometimes the shapes I draw out are painfully awkward and out of proportion.

I've tried reading several websites and watching youtube videos but I'm still pretty lost.

Sorry for my long post!

Thanks very much!  :)

Hi there A_A

I think it's great that you are trying to improve your style and you have certainly come to the right place.
Firstly, in the beginning you are going to suck. That is just a fact and it can be very discouraging, especially when you keep on trying and nothing seems to be happening.
Now, I can't say I know the direct way to become awesome, I don't believe that I am awesome myself, but I can say that I have been practicing for a couple of years and tell you what worked for me.
I started by finding people who inspire me. People who I think are awesome and who I want to draw like. For me those people were: David Kawena (http://davidkawena.deviantart.com/) and Chris Sanders (http://alohalilo.deviantart.com/).
I spend allot of time trying to reach this level of skill, mostly by copying their drawings. This did not do much to further my personal style, but it did do allot to further my technique.
Once I started to tire of these, I started to find the joys of the wacom tablet (yes, before this I drew 100% analogue). I started to lean heavily on my tablet and started working hard on my figure drawing. At the time I had a dream of working as an animator for Disney and I realized that I would have to apply to the California Institute of arts (calarts). So I created a daily blog dedicated to this called “get me to calarts” (http://getmetocalarts.wordpress.com/).
If you look at that website you see just how much I improved during the course of one year, just by being vigilant daily.
After I abandoned my plans to become an animator, it's simply to much work, I started to work toward a new goal of becoming a concept artist. This however required me to up my skill level heavily. That is why I started a new blog in my own name (sylvesterhansen.wordpress.com) that I pledged to upload weekly.
What works for me currently, when it comes to drawing, is to keep it simple. I find an adiobook that I like (if you want some free ones, you can find them here: http://www.booksshouldbefree.com/), and listen to it while I draw a 30 minute class from this website.
The good thing about this little ritual is that I get better daily while I remain entertained.
I hope this helped you, even if I got a little bit into my own story for a while.

Sincerely
Sylvester Hansen
 

Hello all.

I have been lurking here for a while and decided to make an account to encourage me to draw more. I tried making a Deviant Art to encourage me but that failed (it is still there I just don't upload to it). So, I come here hoping to better myself.

Step 1: Improve upon drawing the human figure, expressing emotion through gestures, and melding man and machine.

Step 2: Practice gestures, human anatomy, and proportions

Practice facial placement and construction

(How would I practice the machine part?)

Thanks and good luck all, I will be around.

Hi again

This is a 11 minute drawing I did from this site. I just wanted to share the stuff that I do daily.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/87335956@N04/8043343107/

Wow, that's awesome Sylvester!  And thank you for the advice!  :)

I've always loved drawing characters (comic/manga style) but I completely suck at doing so, especially when drawing from mind. When I try, the characters appear stiff, unnatural and are just painful to look at.

I'm going to try and copy the work of others as you suggested, to get a better feel for drawing and improving technique.  David Kawena's art looks amazing.  I also really love the art on your site, your drawings are gorgeous!  Thanks to the encouragement, I'm also going to push myself to continue the gesture drawings too, so and not be too discouraged by my initial scribbles!  So:

Step 1 - I want to improve upon gesture drawing and technique to be able to draw more natural and dynamic looking characters

Step 2 - My goals include:

1) Improve upon my understanding anatomy and proportions

2) Develop a more fluid drawing style as I progress

3) Learn to understand the dynamic elements of a pose

Step 4 - I will do 100 1-minute gesture drawings within 10 days, starting today!  :)

Hello everybody!

I've been using the reference tools for the past few days, but I thought posting on here might encourage me to actually crack on with the 100 sketches. My aim is learn to draw humans more accurately and to familiarise myself with general proportions and anatomy.

 

Aim 1: Become comfortable drawing men and women in a variety of poses

Aim 2: Actually learn how to draw gesture drawings

Aim 3: Learn to draw hands and feet

Aim 4: Learn how to draw faces with a variety of expressions

 

Aims 3 and 4 may be grounds for further '100 sketches' projects rather than acting as the focus for this one. Currently I'm trying to get in the habit of drawing every single day. Will post up some pictures as soon as I figure out how to do that!

Please forgive the double post. I was trying to link to photobucket images, but I can't post any.

Having taken a look through the other sketches in this thread, I'm really impressed with the amount of talent on display here. Can't wait to see how all of us improve over the course of this project :)

Welcome Finn. Linking is easy. Just mark some of the text you're writing, then click on the chain icon of the editor and paste the URL you want to link to into the URL textfield.

image can be posted directly when you click "HTML" in the top right corner of the editor and use the img tag… Or not… Why does the tag get removed after posting?? Oh well, I guess you'll have to make do with

Because tags can contain harmful scripts, very little HTML is allowed on the forums. The img tag gets removed because the forum is trying to protect itself from potential security problems. To make up for it, we've got an alternative method of posting images :)

Thanks for the help, Kim and Vyse! Photobucket kept claiming that it couldn't find the image files, despite letting me browse them in my album. So, tumblr links it is.

If anyone has any thoughts, suggestions or critiques, please share them :)

 

1-3,   ~2-5 mins each

4-6,   ~2 mins each

7-8,   ~8 mins each

9-10,  ~10 mins (#9) and ~5 mins (#10)

11,      ~8 mins

12,      no idea, I got a bit lost in the drawing.

Hi again

I realized that I have been neglecting what I actually set out to draw on this forum. with that in mind I saw the most recent Wess Anderson movie (which I cannot remember the name of). This resulted in allot of time spend on this drawing:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/87335956@N04/8054621112/

being severely underwhelmed by that I drew this, which was just for fun:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/87335956@N04/8054619809/

@Finn- love the render work on #12

@sylvester_hansen good point. I had to keep checking my first post to see if I'm straying away from what I intended to learn through this exercise.
Adding goals to my signature. Should help.

Here're some updates

For my warmups, I decided to sway a bit from learning and document the approach I follow. http://elbowgreasedraw.tumblr.com/tagged/tutorial  (please ignore the grammar in the posts)

 

Hi there El Bow

I hope this is not presumptuous of me, but I would like to offer a bit of advice.

I can see that you are very fond of line art and that is the style you are going for. I would like to see you try and add more depth to you shadows and completely avoid the line art all together. I think your drawings are great, but if you add that extra bit of depth it could really enhance them.

The way that I like to add depth to my figure drawing pieces, is to start with a black transparent brush and then use the pressure sensor to add different shades of grey to the drawing.  This was your whites become almost luminescent and you black very deep.

But that is just what I like to do.

With that out of the way, I would like to introduce you to the frozen tundra that I have drawn today:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sylvesterhansen/8056308851/