Forum posts by Vermiform

Hi, Quiet Katt, thank you for the feedback

1. I have decided to try to stop trying to do the whole figure in the shorter drawings and just try and get the torso as a bean in 30s and bean + gesture for the rest of the body if i still have time in 1 min, hoping it'll make moving on to more detailed approaches to structure easier.

I have to ask, which drawings do you think are good and what in your opinion is good about them?

2. I'll try to keep that in mind, thank you, though I honestly can't see it. Which ones did you mean?

3. Yeah, I get now that in 5-10 minutes drawings measurement shouldn't be a priority. I'll try doing some longer studies where I have a clear goal in mind. I feel that I'm not getting that much out of simply doing 30 minute classes the same way over and over at this point.

4. Drapery is just way too confusing for me. I tried not thinking about it and just draw what I see a couple of times but got lost in the details very quickly, and since I wasn't able to tell what I was looking at exactly, I couldn't even begin to simplify it. The video above does a pretty good job at breaking it down into identifiable patterns and explaining what produces them, I think.

Again, thank you, both of you are being very patient and helpful.

• Vermiform edited this post on July 29, 2024 1:13pm.

Hi, thank you, you don't sound condescending, no worries. Again I'm just looking for ways to not quit, and I think for that I need to at least occasionally be able to produce work that goes beyond stick figures (yeah, yeah, gesture is not stick figures etc), so that's why I want to at least get the basics of things that are supposed to go on top of the fundamentals.

By the way, I watched both of the videos you linked in your first reply and did a study in my spare time at work today. For a first attempt I think it could have gone a lot worse. And there's actually gesture and the bean and all that stuff under all the other stuff, so that's something at least. https://imgur.com/a/d8wcN7C

Yeah, well, "get ready to produce hundreds of bad drawings and understand that this is a process" is what just about every piece of introductory material I have seen opens with. I get that, I don't think that you get good at this by magic or "naturally" or by thinking about drawing reeeally hard. It's just that over a decade since the thought "I wish I could draw" first occured to me, and then for years not knowing how one would even go about that sort of thing, and a number of abortive attempts to actually begin learning over the past say 5 or 6 years later, it's becoming increasingly hard to tell what I even supposedly want this for anyway.

For now I might still be able to make some progress and have new things to try, and for now this is still fun for its own sake, but I know that pretty soon I'll need to Actually Know Things before I can get any further, and getting to Actually Know Things takes Time, and quite a lot of it too. So chances are I'll keep churning out misshapen humanoids for a couple more months and then go "ok, this is not going to happen, what was I thinking, why am I even doing this" once again. As I said I'm hoping that goals that are shorter term than "anatomy" or "250 boxes and then 250 cylinders and then 250 boxes combined with cylinders and so on, good luck" could keep me engaged but I'm not certain what they could/should be at my level.

Hi. Thank you for taking the time to respond. Seems like there's no way to reply to a post directly on here, or I just can't find it.

Mahatmabolika,

Thank you for linking that curriculum, good to see some kind of concrete path I could follow. I'm already watching Proko's youtube channel regularly and doing the drawabox exercises (just drawing my ellipses for now). What I had in mind with 2 was more along the lines of: are there specific practices I should be adopting apart from drawing regularly? are there common beginner mistakes that are relatively easy to catch and weed out?

As an example, switching to drawing from the shoulder outside of drawabox and changing my pencil grip has been very frustrating and I've sacrificed a lot in terms of precision for now. But I also felt the benefits of being able to make those longer marks I keep hearing about pretty much right away. Things I was seeing in Proko's gesture drawing videos suddenly started making a whole lot more sense. Looking back at my earlier drawings now, the difference is maybe not as night and day as I've been imagining, but some things feel a lot more natural now, and some of the poses I've been drawing I would have considered too hard to even attempt a couple of weeks ago with the approaches I had.

Aunt Herbert,

Yeah, I know that in a way I am kind of getting ahead of myself with the things I am asking about. The thing is, I'm already watching whatever stuff Proko has on youtube and I expect that robobean/mannequinization is actually exactly where I am going to hit a wall, because that's where I'll have to stop just scribbling around in hopes of hitting something, and actually define the forms I am drawing. While I hope that sticking with drawabox will eventually get me there, that's going to take a while.

So, since I already see a plateau ahead, I'm looking for ways to get more out of what I'm already capable of. Which is not much. I know e.g. that shading follows form, but right now just copying the shading from the photograph I'm working with helps me define the form in the first place, when my lines alone can't do the job. And, well, if by the end of a class here I am more or less happy with the longer pose I did, I usually want to develop it a bit more, and shading is one way of doing that, I guess. With clothes, I was just hoping to expand the range of subjects I can attempt somewhat.

I don't know, to be completely honest, I am just on the lookout for things that could help me not give up on drawing all over again once I inevitably hit a wall somewhere, that's it.

Hi, I started using this website a little under a month ago. I'm linking quite a lot of drawings, all are from the last 7-10 days, very grateful in advance to anyone who would take their time to look through them for whatever advice you could give.

note: I've only recently switched to drawing from my shoulder and using the overhand grip for the pencil, so that's an additional source of messiness for me right now

https://imgur.com/a/4JbQeVG

The questions I personally have:

1) what should my goals be for the 30 second poses?

2) i've been watching/reading a lot and feel like i need direction. Any one specific aspect I should be focusing on at this point? What i mean is, i see that a decent understanding of anatomy and perspective or just being able to make cleaner lines are going to be extremely long-term goals, so is there something I would see the most improvement from in the shortest amount of time or something in the meantime?

3) how do i include measuring into my drawing process? with 5-10 minute poses i already often overfocus on some one part, correcting it over and over, ending up with no time for the rest of the pose, and i feel like if i start trying to check proportions on top of that i will not be able to draw anything at all. sometimes i'll try to at least find the midpoint but most often i don't bother to do even that. how are my proportions in general?

4) any resources you would recommend for learning about: 1. tone/shading, 2. drawing clothes?

• Vermiform edited this post on July 27, 2024 1:19am.
• Vermiform edited this post on July 27, 2024 2:57am.