Forum posts by Cave Paint

Your understanding of core shadows is nice. And the lines and style look very intentional. Learning to interpret into a cartoon style is not a problem in my opinion. You can potentially learn more by interpreting rather then copying pixel by pixel. But the people still have a few rules that need to abide by or the drawing will look “off” or “wrong”. That is proportion, anatomy, light and shadow. The biggest issue that stands out is the anatomy of the eyes. The size is not a problem for me but the irises need to be looking in the same direction.

That video is excellent!

Drawabox.com would do wonders for you on the part of the outline. Love life drawing.com has a 10 day fresh eyes challenge that is great for improving the movement of the figure although that is clearly not your problem. I just signed up for new masters academy. That is amazing and worth the cost. The other suggestions are free. The Vilppu drawing manual would be a very helpful book.

The hardest part is the initial drawing, rendering it out is easy. So you have achieved the bulk of the difficult work already

Line quality! These proportions are killer. And the movement is great, these are not stiff figures.

I am not trying to be meen but it looks like you are scratching the page with a finger nail. I don’t get any sense of core shadow, the lines do not describe the form, and the outline looks like it was scribbled in with a fat sharpie.

I am opting to be upfront with you because I feel like the figures themselves are good and they could be amazing. There is a couple of directions you could go with these. You could go the drawabox.com route and try to draw it clean lines and fill in the shadows with pure black. Or you could do guesture drawing and prioritize complete lines over accurate ones. Or you could go a constructive route and break the figure into cylinders and and boxes.

Anything you do is fine. You don’t want figure drawing to feel like a coloring book outline that you are filling it. It should feel like you are carving the surface bouncing between adding and subtracting.

you are going to improve so fast, keep it up

I might be missing the mark here. Are you struggling with the shortening of distance or overlapping shapes?

Forshorting is very simple. It effects everything we see unless you are standing back with a telephoto lense and it happen when an object moves back in space.if you have 2 parallel lines moving back in space, if you draw an X between the front and back of the shape you will find the center of it. This displays forshortening. There are more complicated ways to explore it. You can learn more about this from drawabox.com.

Perspective can even effect cross countour lines around a figure. If you can learn to identify them. You can add clothing or add things to the envirment that match the perspective.

You can teach yourself to see forshortening intuitively with drills, I will make a post in my sketchbook just give me a minute.

These are simple and clean. You hit overall proportion pretty well, with very little information.

the weakest part of your drawing is your feet, I recemend hitting some boney landmarks where the tibia and fibula meet the ankle and then build the form of the foot around it. You can maintain the simplicity you have if that is the route you want to go, but the feet litterally ground the figure to the environment around it.

You are welcome!

i just rewatched that first video, I don’t know why I picked that one but the rest of his teaching is good

• Cave Paint edited this post on November 13, 2022 2:38am.

discussion on distortion and sight size

Drawing faces from any side

the YouTube channel “thekirkshop” is also geat

Great! Your fast gesture drawings are excellent. You should be proud of those. These feel like they are sitting in space even though they are basically stick figures. And your lines are confident, they do not look like a beginner. Did you start with those gestures? because your proportion looks better then your long format drawing. It shows you will improve in no time, and you will love both. I don’t know what your history is but if this is your second time drawing live. You might be struggling to draw larger then “sight size”. There is a skill I call the proportion skill, where you step back and compare the whole of the object to the whole of another object. This does not come automatically, you have to practice. And if you have only ever drawn small it’s a bit of a shook.

the biggest issue that is jumping out at me, is the way you are shading. Some lines attempt to follow the form and others cut across and break the plane. You have to chose one or the other and be consistent.

At the top are some links.

Yes you could call these a little stiff. It is natural to want to align the head chest and pelvis making it feel stiff. You have to learn to fight that. One way is to establish a good line of action before you draw. Another way is to cut each segment into solid shapes so you have the ability to rotate each independently from each other.

The biggest thing that is killing these figures is the lack of perspective. You need some cross countour lines to give me that information. It looks like you are working on that with your last image.

A game called painting vr is about to release multiplayer, it requires a vr headset, and if it’s a quest you don’t need a gameing pc. I recommend it

The shading is great. You can distinguish the core shadow from the bounce light. The eyes are set a little wide but this could easily be passed off as a stylistic choice. I allways recemend more time with a sternographic break down. It would help you sit your forms in space. This is a good job.

In my opinion these are wonderful 30 second drawings. You are valuing structure over gesture. These short drawings are pretty much your under drawings to a longer piece. the more acurate your under drawing are, the better the end product is going be. And the less time you need to spend erasing mistakes. Your lines are great! They are not choppy.

If you need to learn basics I recemend “draw a box.com” it’s completely free. The only draw back to it is that it can lead to Immediate burn out but with the amount of time you have been drawing it can only help. It’s the equivalent to lifting weight for a sport.

As far as addressing proportions, I like to do drills that will directly isolate that single skill. There is a page in Roberto osti book “ basic human anatomy” that shows how to draw box’s based on the length of the head. I recemend doing that process but in reverse for the sake of developing that one skill. So draw the figure attempting to hit the measurements and then check to see how close you can get. I will see if I can post some of my old practice pages to my sketchbook but I might have run out of space this month.