Critique for 5 and 10 minute drawings

So I decided to pick up my drawing again something I haven't done since community college, which was about 3 years ago, and I wanna start easing into it with figure drawing.

I made a compilation of sketches I liked the most, along with the date I drew them to see my progress. Each of them were either 5 or 10 minute drawings

Any comments or critique on these would be much appreciated :-)

• Kim edited this post on September 11, 2018 3:56am. Reason: Fixing image link

You can clearly see progress in this collection of poses! Good job.

One thing I'm not seeing is any under-construction, which can help dramatically with improving. I know it's very tempting to skip doing the line of action and drawing the underlying shapes because they don't feel like part of the finished drawing, but they will inform both your understanding and an improved finished piece.

I'm also seeing a lot of furry lines, where you've used lots of little short lines to make up what is essentially one line. This makes the piece look less confident. Try to draw with longer, smoother storess. Less is more! With fewer limes, it's also harder to hide mistakes, so this might feel very jarring at first.

Great job committing to your practice! I look forward to seeing more from you :-)

Please excuse any typos, I'm writing from my phone

thanks for the critique!

I do draw the underlines, but afterwards I usually erase them because I get worried my sketches will get too messy

I always have noticed my way of drawing lines has been jarring to look at, I'll give your suggestion a try and share the results :-)

okay so I tried your suggestion Kim and used straighter lines, and you were totally right, it felt really jaring and off, like I was giving myself a total handicap lol

but on the longer poses, one thing I liked about them was how I noticed I could actually spot anatomy errors more easily than with my old method, and this time they were more easier to correct since I didn't have a bunch of chicken scratch obscructing my view

here's the result with the 5 and 10 minute drawings

what do you think?

• Steliater edited this post on September 12, 2018 2:14am.
• Steliater edited this post on September 12, 2018 2:15am.

Oh wow that's a noticeable difference!! I was recently suggested to trust myself more, and to try and draw more single lines rather than a bunch of small ones. You're definitely on the right track to more confident gestures. :)

One thing you might want to focus on is to try and figure out which lines you could have drawn with a single stroke. For example, the front of the torso and the back of the figure on the bottom could have been created with only two pen strokes. One for the front arch of the torso, and one for the curve of the back. It's been helping me a lot to capture the gesture doing this, because on my next session I'm seeing instant improvement.

This won't happen overnight, but I think it'll be a helpful goal to work towards!

• Sanne edited this post on September 12, 2018 3:06am. Reason: Accidental early post from mobile

I like the fluidity and detail in these drawings! One thing I would say you could improve on is that your lines feel a bit rough, like you go over them many times with several short strokes. Something that might help the fluidity of your drawings even more is to use longer, faster, more confident strokes, especially in gesture drawing. It’s something my animation professor recommended to me that vastly improved my drawings after a little practice! I hope to see more work from you and that you grow in the direction you are hoping :)

My critique would be to try to work on getting the body proportions accurate. Rather than trying to draw the body with loads and loads of sketchy lines you should draw out ovals of body parts (upper arm, elbow, lower arm, hand, fingers etc) really rough and then once you have more accurate proportion you can start adding in harder lines and use fewer lines to outline the figure. This is especially important for extremely quick sketches like in 30sec-5min drawings. Try and see if you can do these quick drawings with as few lines as possible. I do really like this selection of sketches though