Forum posts by Torrilin

Do a 30m class, preferably with the tutorial on. It will walk you through from 30s figures to 10m. It will be very challenging and you might feel very distressed afterwards. Make a point of going through your pictures, especially the very short poses and finding at least one thing you did well or picking one where you feel you did the best job.

Now put those drawings away and do your best to forget about them. Go draw, have fun. Your fun drawings will probably feel subtly easier. Do your best to make sure you're spending at least 30 minutes on fun drawing for every class you do, and more is better.

The next 30m class you do will probably feel pretty bad too. Make a point of picking out the drawings you like and then forgetting about it to go have fun.

When you hit 6 classes, you will have drawn over 100 people. You should feel like you are getting a lot better tho you may not understand how. You probably will have new and different questions about drawing people than you do right now. It might even be worth going through the tutorial again for class 7 to help you think more clearly about what you understand and what you think the problems are.

A lot of people want to rush into 1h, or even 4h classes. DO NOT DO THIS. Figure drawing is exhausting. Even most working artists do not do a figures class of 4h and they draw all the damn time it can seem like. Class is different from drawing for fun or drawing for a work brief. It works your brain differently.

If you're tempted by longer classes because a regular figures class is feeling easy, instead try one of the other class modes like hands or landscapes or faces. You'll immediately feel like you don't know anything again and like you have a million questions.

If what you want is to draw people, draw people. Drawing people is what life drawing is. Life drawing is often considered the most basic of basic art skills, and a foundation for everything else. It can be used to study every single other aspect of art, and it has the side benefit of you can always use yourself as a model even if you can't get other models.

Ok, my advice would be the exact opposite.

It might feel like faces with a strong expression are “more advanced”. But strong expressions mean that there’s visible muscles and movements, and gesture drawing like we focus on here is made for drawing movement. So strong emotion often winds up easier because you don’t have to think so hard about what muscles are moving.

The main thing you use for initial proportions is a circle with a cross on it in basically all systems for faces. It doesn’t have to be a good circle, just a scribble. Same for the cross. The horizontal line is the eye line, the vertical one shows you where the nose should go. Get that in as a guide, then start working on what muscles seem most important for the expression. You won’t finish in 30s, but you aren’t ever supposed to. You do a bunch of bad drawings in a class. Then at the end you mark up each time slot with which one was best.

One 30m class gets you a lot of bad drawings.

6 gets you over 100 bad drawings. In a mere 3 hours of practice. It’d be really shocking if you were not better at faces and proportion after 100 drawings.

Spending the same 3 hours trying to get proportions right on one drawing will not have as big an effect because most of your time is spent on tiny details rather than the big picture of how do noses and eyes fit together.

There’s not really a right time for critique or a wrong one. It’s got a lot more to do with how your brain works than how advanced you are.

See, I don’t put up a lot of stuff for critique. I have a thing called ADHD, it makes my attention span weird, and my memory is funny, and it means I’m super sensitive to criticism. I can take a 100% positive comment and turn it into something hateful and cruel, and it can affect me for weeks at a time. So for me, critique is a good way to be self destructive. Even with self critique I have to be very careful or I’ll destroy my urge to practice. And you can’t get better if you don’t practice.

Someone else who always sees the best in their work and they have a hard time seeing flaws, they’re going to need outside criticism to learn. For them critique can actually motivate them to practice.

Most people are a mix of the two, sometimes one, sometimes the other and sometimes in between.

If you don’t know for sure that you’re always at an extreme for how you approach criticism, try it and see what happens. If you find it’s helpful, keep going. If it’s harmful, don’t.

Even if you’re the sort where it’s harmful, learning to give criticism is good. It’s easier to forgive flaws in other people. And it’s a good way to practice being kind. Not nice, kind and gentle. You can say true things in a hurtful way or a kind one.

There’s a bunch of tutorial material here, both in the tutorial you can do in class mode and under the learn tab in the header.

I’d usually start here: https://line-of-action.com/article/gesture-basics-1-line-of-action

To go with it, https://vimeo.com/348036268 is one of a series of Croquis Cafe videos on methods to try for a skeleton. The rest of the series was lost to Youtube’s Porn purge for now (because clearly drawing videos are very very porny), but it should be up on Vimeo eventually.

Class mode is great if you’re new. Use it. Yes it’s hard. Yes it will be exhausting. But it’s based on something like 200-500 years of experimenting with how to teach good drawing skills fastest, and it really does work.

If you mark up your work after, mark which drawings are the best you did that session. Class mode will produce lots of bad drawings. You will make so many bad drawings so fast. If you focus on the bad drawings tho, it makes it hard to get better. You want to make a note of the stuff that works so you can try to repeat it.

Probably the biggest thing you can do to improve is start marking which ones you think are the best.

See, the observation you do during the 30s and 2m and 1m poses sets you up to do better during the longer poses. And if you don’t pay attention to what works, it’s a bit hard to repeat it.

I can definitely recognize the pose for your 10m picture, so you’re doing some things right. But I don’t think that’s the best you can possibly do in 10 minutes either, it’s very stiff feeling compared to your shorter poses, and very spare and outline focused.

The easiest thing you can do to improve is mark up your work yourself. At the end of the session, make a note of which is the best drawing in each time slot that has multiple drawings. You don’t care about the bad ones, only the good ones.

Beyond that, you’re getting pretty filled in figures in 30s, with the only obvious missing bits being hands and feet. So the obvious question is are you happy with the quality of your hands and feet in your art right now? Or should you be pushing to improve them?

Another thing you might consider is try a class where you spend the time period looking at the reference, then you spend the same time drawing it without looking at the reference. This is an exercise to build up your visual memory and allow you to practice making things up to look plausible.

You might also look at Swen’s practice thread to see what kinds of exercises he’s doing. You might be at a stage where class mode is not the most efficient tool for you to improve.

Continuous line is what it sounds like. You draw as much as you can without lifting your pen (or stylus). https://citizensketcher.com/2015/04/17/direct-to-ink-exercises-part-one-single-line-sketching/ is an overview of the idea that I particularly like. Marc tends to do landscape/environment stuff, not figures but it’s something you can easily do with figures and he’s got example pieces elsewhere on his blog with figures. I usually link this series tho because it’s set up and formatted with actual drawing exercises and explanations.

A blind contour is you go a step farther and you don’t look at your paper/tablet while you draw. If you’re more comfortable with contour than gesture it’s an excellent thing to do for short poses. Pushing a blind contour in past 2 minutes is a real challenge. A good one, but a challenge.

And as far as gesture, you don’t have to know much anatomy. That’s kind of why we do this? Instead of learning the anatomy as some separate thing, you’re looking at someone and asking yourself “what moves?” And then you draw it. It looks like the porn purge on YouTube nuked most of the Croquis Cafe vids, so https://vimeo.com/348036268 is the best I’ve got right now for expanding past the first line of action. The one I would usually link is still AWOL, so I guess we wait until they get the rest of that series re-uploaded. The tutorial here and then the blog series here on gesture drawing is still really good mind. But for pushing harder on gesture I really like the Croquis Cafe vids. https://youtu.be/NvjB0rj6yAc from Alphonso Dunn is on the long side (I uh, have the attention span of a gnat) but is covering the right kind of stuff.

If you’re new at drawing (or new at trying to get better), a 10-30m drawing done continuous line vs one done with gesture might look pretty similar to you. You can get to the same kind of place with both approaches. One isn’t better than the other. There’s other approaches you can use too, tho most are hard to use for 30s or 15s drawings.

Basically, think of class time as a warm up or rehearsal time. It’s not meant to make you great in any one session. It’s a space to play. A place to experiment. A place to try out every stupid idea you come across.

You‘re getting in quite a lot of detail in your 25m sketches, and the 5 and 10 minute sketches are nowhere close to that, instead they‘re closer to a 1 minute sketch. 10 minutes is a really long time. Promise. You can do more than you‘ve been doing.

What I suspect you‘re doing is getting a 30s to 1m gesture and then kind of adding contour lines over top of it. This isn‘t wrong. But having that big jump in detail says that your method is not efficient.

So there‘s a couple things you can try.

One is to double down on contour if that‘s more comfortable for you. Do 30s and 1m poses as true blind contours, and push yourself for detail (so one line, no looking while you draw). For longer poses, keep going with continuous line but don‘t necessarily go for blind contour. And *keep* going with continuous line, even for 5 and 10 minutes, even if it feels hard. And it probably will given the style of how you shade. But that‘s ok, hard is part of how we learn.

Another option is to rethink how you‘re tackling gesture. In a gesture drawing we draw what moves. It‘s possible to do gesture drawings of a still life, because the *light* moves. Same thing for drawing a human in a reclining/sleeping pose, with the bonus of you move when you breathe. Those little muscle movements for breathing count. So gesture starts with the biggest movement and gradually works down to the smallest movements. So after the big gestures, you start to break a person down into smaller muscle gestures and the contour shapes grow out of the muscle shapes.

A third option is switch it up, use a big fat brush for as much of the drawing as you can, and only go to a thin brush when you need to. Pressure sensitive helps but isn‘t required. It will feel deeply weird, because you probably think of drawing as being different. But I promise you can draw with a big fat thing too and it lets you make different kinds of marks.

A fourth option is pick a background color and a drawing color that are different. Maybe draw in blue on a sort of kraft paper color. Or purple on yellow. Green is fun. Switch it up, see what happens and how your class goes differently in color.

Also, just cut those 25m drawings out. Do a 30m class instead of an hour class. Take away that 25m cookie and see how your approach changes.

For all of these, it‘s important to go through after a class and mark up your work for the best drawings in each time slot. Seriously. The parts of the class where you‘re doing a bunch of drawings in a set time interval are the parts where you‘ve got the most chance to learn. But you can‘t learn if you don‘t look at what you‘ve done and say “yes this is good”. Positive reinforcement is crucial to the learning process.

Ha ha ha no, I‘m a lefty. Both hands are almost equal in how they‘re affected. Gripping with either hand hurts like hell if I‘m not having numb fingers, and if I am... Until I see a specialist, no way no how, not feeling major body parts is a sign of something seriously wrong.

I *want* to draw, but I don‘t always want good or healthy things.

Fast dark shadows is uh... exactly that. And it’s not really something that has a set answer either. https://www.deviantart.com/funkymonkey1945/art/Shape-handout-2-516407178 Is kind of talking about what I mean, or maybe https://www.deviantart.com/funkymonkey1945/art/Notes-for-User-Lightsandlighting-524284838 will make more sense? The shadow shapes have gestures, and getting that gesture and defining a shadow shape quickly and efficiently is important. For that particular one in the Jun 17 set, getting the shadow that’s probably on the model’s chest and belly will define a whole lot of the torso and arms and maybe legs depending on the lighting. Not getting the shadow means you have to draw a whole lot of different lines and carefully measure out bits in a complicated shape so it’s harder drawing, and you have to be super careful with line weight to not lose the sense of space. It’s a lot to do in 5 minutes and probably isn’t possible without leveling up a lot.

The other way to push would I guess be lean into line weight more, and figure out a solution you like for those complicated spots? Maybe a toned canvas so instead of drawing a shadow shape you can draw in lights to define a shadow? Dunno. This kind of thing gets really philosophical really rapidly, and for me it’s usually best to brainstorm a bunch of ideas and then try a one class per idea I come up with instead of trying to find the right one by thinking. Draw first, think after you know what your hands can do.

The getting better thing is always a mixed bag :-/. Part of getting better is you see more mistakes. That’s part of why I always ask people what parts of the drawing they think work or are good. Because the “mistakes” you see aren’t usually objectively wrong as you get better, they’re an idea that works fine in another context but it wasn’t what you had in mind for this context. The good parts tho tell you what it is you’re really after.

What I’m seeing with today’s 30s and 1m poses is you do a good job getting gestures on fairly straightforward standing or sitting poses. Crawling or contorted/foreshortened poses don’t seem to go so well. And poses where there’s props like fabric or a seat can get iffy.

If it were me, I’d do a class where I set it up to be all contorted poses, a class where I try to set it up for lots of props, an all hands class and an all feet class to kinda evaluate what it is I know and where I want to go.

(ok to be really realistic, I’d set up a class for all dogs and draw cute puppies because sometimes you just need to do fun drawings)

For your 5 min poses, I think the major difference between the two in quality is you don’t have a method in mind for getting fast dark shadows, so you had to waste a lot of time on the second figure trying to convey a sense of space/volume and the proportions suffered. The foreshortening in the pose might also have been an issue? Your strongest poses are ones where you can mostly convey shadows with line weight and that second pose it would have been a nightmare to do with just line weight.

It looks like you’re getting pretty consistent about getting hands and feet in already. Do you still feel like those need work?

And I think the way you’re approaching gesture right now is working, you’re getting a lot of good drawings out of a session.

You‘re doing it on femurs and humerus bones too, not just tibia. And you sometimes have it show up along spines, which can definitely look concave in some poses... but I‘ve found for myself it tends to make it easy to get the pelvis anatomy wrong when I try it. Much easier to anchor the S curve if I find the straight part of the S first and get the lower curve from the hip joints and the upper curve from the shoulder joints.

And I don‘t think it‘s a question of exaggerating too much? Gesture drawings, we draw what moves. If the exaggeration describes the movement, it’s probably fine. Just the number of times where concave is helpful is uh... not as many as my love of S curves would have me believe. Damnit. Curse those 30s poses and their ruthless ability to show me the flaws in my skeleton model!

You have a lot of drawings where you’re using a concave (bent in towards bone) line rather than a straight line or a convex (bent outward from bone). If you think you have a concave line, it’s probably a combination of straight lines, tho it’s possible shadow shapes are a little weird in that spot. But mostly muscles don’t bend towards bone, it’s not how they’re structured. Some art teachers will say it’s flat out impossible to have concave, I am always inclined to ask if they’ve ever seen a broken bone ;). But the vast majority of the time, concave will have a subtle or not so subtle wrong feeling.

I think if you pay closer attention to straight lines, finding straight lines and finding ways to make sense of straight vs (convex) curves you’ll be a lot happier with your results. Bodies have a lot more straightness than you might expect.

For the neck, consider that the overall line of action often is closely related to the line of the spine. Not the same as. Just there‘s a relationship between the two. And the spine goes through your neck, and is a LOT less bendy than people might assume. I mean, yes spines are flexible, really flexible. But they‘re not pipe cleaner flexible.

If you‘re not used to watching ballet or figure skating, definitely hit up youtube for some video. Or contortionist stuff like Cirque du Soleil. Yes, there‘s male contortionists. Yes, there‘s male figure skaters and danseurs.

Figure skating and the like will also help with static poses because they have a lot of static poses where you can learn to see the muscle movements it takes to hold still. Yes, holding still takes muscle. Lots of muscle. And there can be a lot of movement involved, and in a gesture drawing we draw what moves. There‘s even movement involved in a relaxed pose like for sleep, but in my opinion those are more advanced.

In the LOA photo set we more usually have ballet poses than figure skating, but the two sports are really similar on the fundamentals, and it‘s easier to learn the figure skating names for moves usually. If you can name it you can search for it ;)