Forum posts by Aunt Herbert

I am not sure, whether you will even believe me, or if you can make something out of it, but I wanted you to know, that my first spontaneous impression of that page was: "This actually looks pleasant!". I am aware, that the aestethique that I saw isn't the aestethique you are looking for, and how infuriating this must be for sure.

I just wished for you to be somewhat more open to the beauty of your own work, and to be more forgiving to its faults.

Sounds very much like you became increasingly tense and insecure during practice, so you started to overcorrect your fine motor control. It would be probably extremely helpful if you found a way to relax, but I have no effing clue what method of relaxation would work for you.

That you aren't perfect at the end of the challenge is normal. Until the end I occassionally started boxes, where the perspective lines converging just led to rather strange forms, that I couldn't "pop" into 3-D cubes in my mind, and the multiple lines necessary to even find all 3 vanishing points and make all lines exactly and perfectly converge in one of them was also quite dependent on my own daily form.

The thing is, if you want to obsessively perfectly see how all the lines meet in a single point, then you kind of need to put all 3 vanishing points on the same paper as the box, and ideally even close to it, which just produces an extremely unnatural perspective, as if you would be looking at the box through a strange lense.

If you go through the world and just observe box-shaped objects like buildings or furniture or packaging and just draw them from the perspective that you see them, you will usually have at least one or even two of the vanishing points quite far away from the object, and the corresponding lines almost parallel, with no easy way to check whether you hit the vanishing point "perfectly". Also, with such long lines it is just a consequence of geometry that even the slightest mismatch in gradient will have a large impact on the distance to the point where it meets another line, so, even if you used a very very huge paper to draw them all, you probably wouldn't achieve all 4 lines intersecting at the exact same point with far away vanishing points, but more often 2 or 3 separate intersections with a small bit of distance between them.

Off course I also chased the endorphine kick to always perfectly hit that mark, and started to try backwards engineering the box out of lines that started from the vanishing points, and then realized, that I had a hard time imagining a regular old box in the intersection of all of the 12 lines I had started such.

To preserve my sanity, upon realizing that, I decided that this just doesn't matter so much. I am practising drawing to achieve a certain visual effect, not to wind myself up over BS. I draw the boxes starting from my visual memory of boxes, that I have actually seen somewhere. If and when a vanishing point happens to be close to the box, then I want the intersection to be quite clean, because otherwise the construction would look sloppy even to a casual observer. If a vanishing point is so far away from the box, that I would need extensive technical gear to exactly check it, then I don't give a darn, and am content if the lines look parallel-ish or somewhat evenly converging on a glance. Because no one looking at my drawings will use a laser pointer to check all my angles and vanishing points.

I had done 5 boxes a day for 50 days, and for me it felt OK, that my results were mostly good enough. I promised myself to keep up a daily habit of this exercise, and then didn't. Occassionally I come back to the practice and realize, that my results still aren't perfect, just good enough for my needs, but that revisiting the practice every now and then is a good idea.

You say the shading practice had good results for you, but now you become twitchy when you try to pinpoint a box. My advice, maybe repeat the shading practice a few times to refresh memory, and resign yourself to only being able to draw boxes that are good enough for casual observers. You drew the 250 boxes, you finished the challenge, you know a lot more about boxes now then you did when you started, including that they are tricky little beasts which look so innocent and easy to draw, but can be demanding if you want to draw them really, really, really perfectly. If you enjoy drawing boxes do it more, but from the sound of it you are currently somewhat done with it, so maybe take a break with them and focus on drawing other things for a while.

In future if you draw a picture which includes one or more box-shaped objects or parts, and you somehow get the feeling like something looks wonky and sloppy and off, you now have a tool and an idea where to start applying corrections to clean up the result. Achievement unlocked: "Basic knowledge of 3 point perspective" Congrats.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on August 19, 2024 6:47pm.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on August 19, 2024 6:57pm.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on August 20, 2024 7:59am.

You are clearly getting a lot of principles. You use clean lines and big shapes, you are focusing on observing the main masses and the limbs.

You should probably continue doing it until you feel more comfortable, but when you feel ready to go on, here is o n e suggestion where you could go next, manniquinization. Here is a very, very short clip that introduces the idea and provides a set of simple 3-D forms that work well as shortcuts for the human figure. (note, i put the blank spaces into the o n e to make clear, that there are other possible ways forward.)

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A bit of a worry: You are using a rather soft graphite, which isn't bad, but, the way your lines are spread out indicates that you scan or zoom in your sketches in very high dpi or resolution. Which still isn't bad, it just makes it very likely, that your original sketches are just very small, and you are likely only using your fingertips and at most your wrist to direct the pencil. This is rather typical for someone starting with drawing, but it will become a problem if you want to develop further, because you simply will not have practiced how to use your elbow and even shoulder to produce bigger lines.

I would suggest putting in a bit of practice into that. Just use a big paper, put two points really far apart, and try to connect them with one clean straight line. Make sure neither your wrist nor your elbow rest on something (otherwise it just won't work anyways), and pay a bit attention on how much your elbow and even shoulder have to add to the control if you want long lines. These are just muscles and motor skills that will never build up if you don't specifically train them. Being able to draw actually big stuff cleanly will provide you far more leeway to add details when you feel like you want and need them.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on August 18, 2024 1:31pm.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on August 18, 2024 1:31pm.

@Mahatma, thank you for the praise. I am a bit afraid that your answer won't help IDK a lot, just because I know their previous entries and questions a bit. They certainly don't suffer from naive haste. Their strength is a super analytical and highly self critical approach to everything they are doing, their flaw is that they constantly raise their bar for being satisfied with themselves, and then struggle to keep their frustration from impacting both their art and communication.

@IDK, sorry for talking third person about you. I often struggle to answer your questions, and that is not because they are bad questions, but because they are actually often quite complex and insightful, but you are looking for simple answers to them.

Most honest and shortest answer to your question: I wish I knew myself.

A bit more elaborate: Suppose, you and me, we were both given the same reference to draw from, and we agreed to both use only a specific numbers of CSI lines to depict it. Probably our results would look quite differently. Then we would somehow hijack Mahatma here and be able to blackmail them into being the referee to decide which of our solutions was just better. They would probably honestly refuse the answer, as no matter how hard they tried, they could probably only tell us things like: OK, I find it easier to understand the pose in this sketch, but I find it easier to read the body type in that other one. This one looks more dynamic, but that one gives me a better idea of the volumn of the body. This one transports the emotional expression stronger, while that allows me to more easily understand the anatomy.

The logical first step to answering your question is what you already did, namely asking it, but I am afraid, the second step will always be somewhat trial and error.

I think, even if we could invite all the famous draftspersons and art teachers into our challenge, Stan Prokopenski, Michael Hamilton, Lovelifedrawing, Karl Kopinski, Kim Jung Gi, Peter Hahn, Eliza Ivanova, Wilhelm Busch, Heinrich Kley, Leonardo da Vinci, whoever... Maybe there would be a cluster of similar lines at the start, but the higher we would raise the number of lines, the more even they would diverge from each other. Even if you asked the same person now, and then a year later again, there would be differences.

So, what is left? We try our best, we repeatedly do it, we compare our own recent results as fairly as possible to each other, and try to hone our own intuition for which lines are truely essential and which ones we can do without. Progress isn't about following the shortest path from point a to point b, but just a lot of wandering aimlessly through unchartered territory, hoping that our grasp of the landscapes improves over time.

I know fully well, that this answer isn't satisfying. It is actually quite frustrating. So why continue with this stupid quest? And, maybe I am misreading you, but from the consistency in your work I don't think so, and I assume the answer for you is the same as for me: You are already hooked to the stuff, and to stop being an artist, you would need a full 12 step recovery program, and even then, those questions would still haunt your dreams.

To end on a lighter note: I always almost find your questions hard to answer, and sometimes I don't even try, because I feel I am mostly looking for an excuse for myself to catch another break before I am back to the drawing board. But whenever I try to answer them, I always find them very worthy to ponder, and attempting to answer them often points me to another path, that I have so far overlooked.

My number one advice would be: Take a breath and slow down.

I remember getting used to timed drawing, and feeling under time pressure and trying to get as much of the figure nailed down in as short a time frame as possible... and I actually got better at it, but I never managed to overcome that all my drawings looked a bit... scrappy? I was mostly content with what I did, until I saw someone post a pic with really nice and confident lines, and being able to draw like that felt like a sci-fi story to me. Something that might happen in a far far future..

I had left the drawing tips enabled, mostly, so I would know in advance when the timer changed. And when I read them, I always felt a bit puzzled or not adressed at all: "Remember, that the assignment is complete even if you just draw that one line of action..." In 30 seconds? That was clearly baby talk, not relevant for me.

The main reason for me to leave the tips on anyways, was to avoid starting a 5 minute drawing, while still believing that I was working at a 60 sec drawing. Because, then I basically had to scrap everything and start fresh after 1 minute in, as developing THAT hasty sketch further just led me to being annoyed about all my bad measurements and my inconsistent line quality.

It took me quite a while to realize my mistake. Nope, the goal of those short warm-up sketches isn't to get used to drawing as much as possible in as short a time span as possible. It's actually OK, if there are only 3 or 4 lines on the paper after 30 seconds. But those lines should be good enough to start a 5 minute or 10 minute or 25 minute or full hour drawing. First lines are quite decisive for the quality of the final piece, so it makes sense to practice them a lot, but the practice isn't helpful if I draw at a completely different pace, just because there is a clock ticking.

So, when I look at your sketches, I am not telling you, that they are bad or something. Yepp, you can be confident about being able to do that, and that general grasp of gesture and proportion you developed so far will actually be helpful for developing further, just, .... If you aim at finishing the figure in 60 seconds, what are you going to do with the rest of the time in a longer piece?

I am currently at a pace, where I start to think about where to add shading, because I fell that the figure is done, after about 4 minutes. I remember when I used to get to that point after about 2 minutes. When I compare the difference in results that makes in a 10 minute or even 25 minute drawing, I know that my personal goal has to be, to step even more on the brake, observe more, think more, measure more, plan my lines better, because I am still way too fast.

You are focused very much on long flowing line, which gives especially your shorties a nice aestethic. In your longer drafts it becomes more apparent, that you don't have much experience with the proportions and relations of the big masses.

Yes, you expressly said, that is not your focus atm. Just in your longer drawings it becomes very visible.

My idea would be to deviate from your path a bit, to get acquainted with the typical blocks that are arranged by gesture, so, to dip a bit more into structure. Typical pathways would be manniquinization (this stuff:

), or focusing on only drawing the masses as boxes, to get more of an idea of their relative size, and how they are oriented toward each other. As the word "deviation" implies, that would probably be quite a break to your current practice, and I don't want to tell you to drop all you are doing and do something different instead. I just think occassionally looking into this aspect of drawing would nicely compliment your approach.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on August 10, 2024 11:05am.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on August 10, 2024 11:08am.

Looking at your lines, I feel like I can't tell you much new. You clearly know the drill, you orient yourself at a functional underlying construction and find clear and deliberate lines to depict the reference.

Also the feeling of not knowing what to focus on, to push past the plateau sounds eerily familiar. You could always go back to some fundamental practices and see, whether you can squeeze a bit extra out of them. About a month ago I returned to depicting all the masses strictly as boxes, and found some extra inspiration into how to perceive the torso, and it gave me a new kick, that lasted almost two weeks, but then the novelty petered out again.

In the end, it's probably about cruising the usual youtube recommendations and look for stuff, that sounds weird on first view and trying it out. At the moment I am more into running music on the headphones and letting my pen go through the motions while the references pass by.

I wish you and me and everybody reading this lines a lot of inspiration.

I often just look for big clean 2-D forms to start with and go from there. I mean, "animals" is quite a wide field anyways, there is a big difference between a bug and a fish, a flying bird and a sitting bird, a snake and all types of mammals, so it is hard to formulate a general method of approaching them all.

At least with vertrebrates having an idea where skull, chest and hip are is still helpful, just as in drawing human figures, and the spine is still the tension, that holds this masses together.

Well, that short clip I showed above about mannequinization is an even shorter term goal then "anatomy". I shy away from using the word "anatomy', cause it brings people to buy books like "anatomy for artists" early on, and then to be overwhelmed.

For me, mannequinization was an important and markable step forward, and it gave me confidence and a feeling of progress for the time being. It also allowed me to better decipher what the purpose of practices more puristicly focused on "gesture" was, as it allowed me to decode those force vectors into actual bodily forms.

The clip above presents a full set of shortcuts, but it is exceedingly brief and short in its explanations. You can definietly find longer clips, with a more complete explanation of how to draw those individual shortcuts, and what they represent. You will also find minor variations between how different artists mannequinize the body. I like this one, because it makes a clear separation between shoulders and chest, which not all such systems do. I remember Love Life Drawing introducing and demonstrating a very similar set, but with way more explanation.

One more word about shading, what I am currently experimenting with. It's about the shadow edge, the terminator. The shadow often appears darkest at the very edge with the light parts. This can just be an effect of our eyes emphasizing local contrast, it is definitely enforced by the typical lighting set with two lighting sources. I found that drawing the shape of this shadow edge often gives the drawing a lot more information than determining the darker value of the shadow itself. It works a bit like a third outline, only one, that runs perpendicular to the normal silhouette of a pose, and thereby adds the third dimension.

About the fear of plateauing and hitting a wall... I wish I had a good solution to that. I am afraid, there isn't really one. Even interviews with really accomplished artists point towards the constant struggle with frustration just being a constant companion on the arts journey. You may convince other people, that you are good at art at some point, but you can't really ever truely convince yourself. And even if you temporarily succeed at that, that is the exact moment where your progress halts. I mean, even Norman Rockwell suffered from imposter syndrom.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on July 28, 2024 5:26am.

I am not the truthinator in regards to drawing, I can just give you the answers, that I found for myself over time.

The 30 seconds (and the 1 minute): My aim is to try to use the 30 seconds exactly the same way, as I would use them, if I tried to start a 25 minutes+ drawing. Same speed, same observations, same questions, same lines. At the moment, I do try to stick to gesture first, generally starting with a simple form for the head, and a line from neck to hips. Next I try to find shortcuts for the hips, ribcage, and shoulder. Which is strictly speaking no longer gesture, but already the start of structure.

I usually don't manage to finish even the first sketch in 30 seconds, finding even the first general idea of the pose takes me about 1 minute. But ending the 30 seconds in an "unfinished" state of mind helps me analyze my procedure during the first minute. The 5 minutes+ poses are then the proof of concept, whether the way I designed the underlying structure during the first minute holds true.

"At the moment" means, that I do experiment over time. I had times when I focused on gesture first, trying to find the vector of forces around which the figure stabilizes, when I focused on maniquinization first, where I applied a fixed set of simplified anatomical forms, on perspective first, when I focused on representing the masses of the body as 3-D boxes, even times, when I broke all the rules and started with beautiful details first. Each of those different approaches taught me to focus on another aspect of drawing.

The important idea for me isn't that I never change the order of lines, it is, that I try to stick to a plan while the class is ongoing, and only revise the order after the class ended, and before the class begins. This way I try to develop a methodical approach, that follows rules, from which I only have to deviate, when there is an obvious and unmistakable reason to deviate. Having such a method allows me to keep developing the same overarching idea from first lines to final rendering, and to still see it expressed confidently in the final result. But being able to stick to a method for one drawing isn't the same as never upgrading your method.

2) Looking at your drawings, you stay relatively close to the tutorial, which is a good starting point. But I think I do understand your need for directions. There is an inherent logic in starting the workflow with gesture first, then structure, then perspective, then anatomy, then shading, and the timed practices should help develop a distinction between those individual steps.

But, from a learning point of view this order has a huge problem: While gesture "only" uses a few "simple" lines, the concept behind those lines is actually quite abstract and hard to understand. Simple as they may be, they are supposed to carry a whole lot of information, and while you have no clue how all of this information is supposed to be processed later on, it's a lot of guess work. I remember my own first attempts, when I just drew a few lines that maybe looked like the ones someone else might have used, but then I just couldn't decode and use my own lines, and just drew something freehand on top of them.

For me, it only started to all come together once I started with manniquinization, i.e. using simplified forms that resembled actual body parts. In followed a Proko course, this one to be specific: https://www.proko.com/course/figure-drawing-fundamentals/overview and the time when it gets into manniquinization is around the lesson about the robo bean. Here is another very short clip, that introduces the whole set of useful forms:

&list=WL&index=99

Note, this isn't strictly spoken gesture drawing, it is structure. You can learn all this nice forms, and still draw figures with them, that look awkward and stiff and unbalanced. But, at least for me, even understanding what those gestural lines are even supposed to represent was impossible, before I had enough experience with the structure, that is supposed to follow from those gestural lines, to even understand what I was doing.

3) "Measuring" in figure drawing is pretty much a part of learning structure. You just get used to how big a head is usually in relation to a chest, and how far a chest is usually away from the hip.

The problem with getting sucked into details and forgetting all about the proportions and then ending up with drawing a visitor from outer space instead of a human form... congrats, that problem will stick with you for quite a while, and a lot of people struggle with it. I have been drawing daily for about 7 years now, and I still occassionally find my hopeful attempts at a masterpiece crumbled on the floor, because that nice pretty face I drew turns out to be two sizes too big for those elegant hips that I drew a few inches further down on the page. The remedy against this is all those "methodical" drawing stuff I mentioned above. The only thing stopping you effectively from, for example, getting lost in all those interesting bumps on that specific knee is developing a habit to always indicate the leg with a set number of simple lines, and to generally ignore all juicy bumps and flourishes until you finished all the simple lines for the entire body. The goal isn't to draw one nice picture, but to develop a habit, that let's you produce consistently good results every time.

4) Here is a very simple source for shading, that introduces basic concepts: https://gvaat.com/blog/learn-to-draw-value-and-form/

I wouldn't point this out as the ultimate art source, it just lists and explains the basic concepts of shading without trying to spam your computer with annoying cookies. Once you are ready to dedicate yourself to shading you could use this site to look up basic terms, or just google "how to shade an egg", which is usually the object everybody uses to explain the first simple rules.

The true problem with shading is the "when you are ready" part. Because you will only ever get good at shading when you have a good grasp of the 3-D forms that you actually want to portray on your page. That would be at least in the third step after gesture and structure, namely perspective, and if you really want to impress, probably even after the fourth step, anatomy, when you start to get familiar with the shape of the individual muscles in a human physiology.

Clothes, I don't have a specific source, because I never felt them to be so much of a problem. There are probably people who said wise and instructive words about how exactly different types of fabric fold, but in my experience so far I always managed to somehow wing it, with the main problem not so much being the fine details of every piece of clothing, but, as mentioned above, making sure, that I don't get lost in detail, before I solved the underlying structure.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on July 27, 2024 12:33pm.

Take this with every piece of salt available. This is what worked for me, and I think it is quite different from what you attempt.

#1 I don't think you should really go into features within only 2 minutes. Instead, focus solely on getting a good grid, that represents the proportions of the skull properly.

The idea isn't from me, the OG can be checked here: https://archive.org/details/andrew-loomis-fun-with-a-pencil/page/n35/mode/2up

Do you see those robot looking skulls in the upper left corner of the page? The trick is to practice drawing these over and over, until you know all their lines and proportions by heart. From every possible angle. You don't even really need a reference to practice them, and if you use reference, then only use it to randomize the point of view of your drawing a bit. Try to draw that robot head in the same angle as the face on the reference is, to get a bit of a challenge, and a reason for the site to record your drawing time. Likeness, expression, whatever, ... forget about it until you no longer struggle with perfectly nailing the proportions of an (idealized) head and the placement of the features every single time.

I know, that sounds horribly boring and mechanistic and like wasted time and all. Trust me, it doesn't take as long as it feels now, and once you are good at it, you will see, that suddenly a thousand taxing problems with capturing the head and face just no longer come up with your drawings.

I could type a full description of every line now, but that would be a lot of typing. You can just follow Andrew Loomis descriptions on the prior pages of that pdf, but that head abstraction is so common, and used by so many people, that there must be at least a dozen tutorials on youtube for it. Stan Prokopenski is known to be able to explain drawing practices quite well, so here is a link to follow his explanations:

So, here my explanation, why I don't think practicing to draw a head in 2 minutes or less is a good idea: Because drawing a Loomis abstraction with clean and controlled lines will in itself easily take you 5 to 10 minutes for a long time, and I think it is best practice to start every portrait drawing that way for a long long time, until your pen finds its way home to the stable without you really having to direct it.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on July 25, 2024 9:31pm.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on July 25, 2024 9:32pm.

Whatever you have done, it worked.

Still stuck

My tip to first steps towards drawing heads and portraits. Start with an abstraction. Usually the Loomis abstraction is regarded as the simplest abstraction of the head.

Here is one video that details the method:

or you could even work from the old OG source: https://archive.org/details/andrew-loomis-fun-with-a-pencil/page/n35/mode/2up

The idea is, that unlike in gesture drawing, the distribution of facial features is pretty much determined by the skull, which is a single bone. Once you internalized the average proportions, you will have much less of a struggle to draw an individual head.

So, your daily practice would be to draw the Loomis head several times every day. First attempts will likely take 10 minutes, when you get more practiced, it will go down to approx 5 minutes. So, if you want to draw 30 minutes daily, do 3 to 6 repetitions.

At first, don't bother much with capturing an individual reference. You can use reference as "randomizer", but only for different perspectives (and to keep the page counting your practice time). You don't really need reference at this stage, though, as your goal isn't to capture a specific face.

Just keep drawing Loomis heads, until you know by heart, which lines you are supposed to draw in which order. That way you develop an internal map for the human head in general, the major proportions, where the features of the face are supposed to be. Circle for the head, cut-offs at the side, brow line, center line, chin line,....

Once you repeated drawing a Loomis head often enough, that you feel really confident doing it, THEN you can start individualizing it and start switching from the idealized form to modifying the features to express emotions, or to start wondering where the proportions of the individual on the reference maybe deviate from the idealized proportions, that you now have practiced.

Bit of a warning with Loomis' OG material. It's really old, and some of his caricatures are quite outdated in regards to sensitivity to stereotyping people.