Forum posts by Torrilin

I think you’re getting some very expressive lines that remind me of Japanese prints and the brush work in classical painting from China and Japan. (Definitely seek this sort of thing out if you haven’t, it’s so much fun and very inspiring)

Draw a stick figure. Ball for the head, a line for the spine, and lines for the arms and legs. It will look terrible, and that’s ok. The stuff in the basic tutorial is to help you improve your stick figures.

Alternately, do a contour line drawing, where you do your best to draw the outline of the figure without picking up your pen. Bonus points for drawing without looking at what you draw. Again it’s gonna look terrible, and that’s ok. This one is aimed at improving your hand/eye coordination.

For both, a good starting goal is to find one thing in a class session where you think you did a good job. An alternate goal is try to get to smaller body parts in your drawings. If you have a hard time getting in both upper and lower legs, you count up how many you do. Or if you’re getting more advanced, hands and feet. But the “default” goals are aimed at someone who is a bit experienced. It’s normal to need smaller goals or easier goals to start.

Learning to see accurately is a process and it’s not easy. And the drawings you have after a class session mostly will look bad to you. The reason you do them is so when you try to draw something just coz, it comes out better than it would without practice. You’re doing a bunch of terrible drawings to make your hands smarter for stuff that’s actually fun to draw.

It’s not the perspective is off exactly. The proportions are off. Probably the easiest way to tackle this is to look for some reference images from a similar camera angle. You won’t be able to find anything with a door in that exact position in relationship to a twin bed, but what you will find if you try to find or take this sort of image in real life is that the foot of the bed will be fairly wide, and the bed will be very foreshortened.

Because the bed is really really long in what you drew, the room and everything else comes out feeling off.

You also have the eye line level with your horizon line. That’s not automatically a problem but you have the horizon set about at the midpoint of the window on the far edge, and if you extend things back the viewer probably has their eyes around 7-8 feet up. Not inherently a problem but it makes the room proportions not come out plausible for a person who is standing in the room because their head is banging on the ceiling or the room is very tall.

I usually find it’s easier to make up an image like this by starting from reference. Probably not photos, go to ikea or just draw your bedroom. Get a feel for how reality works. Then take a favorite tv show or movie with a bedroom set and try to fill in the blanks. A 2D floor plan will be easier to draw, but you can try widening the field of view from stills too. Stills that include people will be easier than stills without, because you have a better sense of how people work and they give you a proportion check.

Basically, making up a shot like this that depends on perspective from whole cloth is a bloody nightmare. And doing it in a very rigid architectural rendering style like this makes it harder.

https://www.lizsteel.com/sketching-street-scenes-without-persepctive/ Might help. Also while the tutorials themselves are very app dependent, sculptingman over at the Procreate app forums has a pretty long sequence of perspective tutorials from an architect POV that are very helpful. https://procreate.art/discussions/10/28/23197 Is one, if you find it helpful the rest are linked here https://procreate.art/discussions/10/28/25367 . The reason I say they’re app dependent is a lot of drawing software doesn’t have a way to lock in proportions while you’re using transform or warp tools, or it might not be easy to find. But the logic part, including using custom brushes to dodge annoying bits, applies in any app.

The last thing I can think of is it’s really enlightening to try setting up a drawing that uses your full field of view. Cameras can’t really do what our eyes do, at all. Try not to get hung up on a rigid perspective in a full field of view drawing. It’ll be a bit wonky because we don’t really look at things flat.

For starters, it’s a really old idea. My notes aren’t good enough but you can find Italian artists breaking human figures down into cube-human in preparatory sketches from the 1400s (courtesy of https://kupferstich-kabinett.skd.museum/en/exhibitions/the-realm-of-possibilities-italian-16th-century-drawings/ this now closed local show that doesn’t seem to have had an exhibition catalog). It’s not the default or common, but it existed.

The only way I know of to figure out how it works for you is to try different stuff and see what sticks. Maybe robo-cube-human is best. Maybe you like spheres. Maybe you have an elaborate thing to get the kneecap into the hinge joint at the knee, or a special thing for the heel bone.

Both. Both is good.

The Pinterest board up thread looks fairly digital, but it’s also quite similar to the kind of art Wizards of the Coast commissions for Magic the Gathering, or that SFF houses like for book covers. And practically speaking, that means even if the exact pieces on the board are all digital, the artists were inspired by artists working with physical art materials. Most magic cards have an actual physical painting for the card art. (Seriously, Magic cards or Pokémon or Yugio or whatever cards are an art education ok?) There’s some book covers that are photos or all digital, but the average still is a physical painting.

Comics and manga usually start out on paper, with pencil. You can (and many webcomic artists do) work digital for the sketch/pencil stage, but stuff that gets published by a big imprint probably started on paper. The covers are usually physical paintings. The color inside is probably digital. The ink might be digital or physical.

The way you mentally take a picture apart to try to imitate it is the same no matter how the artist worked. It works just as well on Dürer ink drawings and Studio Ghibli watercolor concept sketches as on Loish all digital stuff.

I feel like the 30s drawings have a much better sense of gesture and movement. There’s problems with the gestures in the arms and legs some, but it’s very fluid and the drawings have a sense of form which is hard to do in 30s.

The longer drawings lose all of that in favor of details in the hair and face. Hair has gesture, really. So do faces. But it doesn’t look like you’re after the gestures, you’re just going for the fun details. Totally sympathize, details can be fun.

For me what works best to combat this kind of shift is to use class mode. I have the carrot of I can focus on details dangling in front of me for the 10 minute pose. (I have ADD and a 30m class is a challenge, so I don’t ever have longer poses in my classes) Also if you like faces, there’s faces and expression mode classes. If you’re in a faces kind of place you can totally do a faces class. There’s not really an option to do faces in figures mode formally tho there’s a bunch of poses with strong facial expression or hair flying.

But for me, it’s really hard to do a good face AND a good figure in a minute. On a good day I can combine a 30s face and 30s figure. Most days aren’t good days. And the hair is maybe a line or a scribble even on the best days.

The reason I bother to keep doing figure drawings is because I have story ideas and I genuinely can’t write very well without doing some drawing to get through the hard parts. Blocking out fight scenes. Diagrams of a set. Costume ideas that in my head are vague but if I draw them they come to life. None of it is fancy or “finished” but I can’t make the story happen without drawing. And most of the hard parts are peopley so figures help.

It’s not about being inspired. For most stuff I have written it’s closer to a comics script than anything else. I have a giant pile of ideas. Ideas aren’t the problem. Organizing them, executing them, doing all the “boring” stuff that feels like filler...

I will say that for me, feeling like a frame I have planned is boring is a sure sign I don’t know how to draw something that it calls for.

In short, inspiration lies.

I think you entirely misread me.

The app I use, Procreate, has hundreds of stock brushes. Around a dozen covering different kinds of pencils, brushes aimed at most kinds of paints including ones rarely used anymore like fresco or weird things like paint rollers. And a huge host of specialty brushes. So I’m going through and trying them INSTEAD of sticking to a plainer brush. If you don’t sit down with a tool and use it, it’s a bit hard to figure out what it’s good for.

Because honestly the most common kind of custom brushes are things meant to be another pencil, or a stamp brush for eyes or lips or some other “hard to draw” thing.

(or I might have a new goal)

If you do digital, you’re probably familiar with the way people look for the ‘right’ brush to magically make them draw better. To combat this for myself, I’ve been idly working at playing around with stock brushes in the art program I use. I’ve got a set of stock brushes that I like well enough now instead of relying on custom brushes.

For my last few practice classes, I’ve been working on doing a whole class with a single brush where it hasn’t made the regular list. What works? What do I like? Are there good bits? It’s definitely giving me some food for thought. Also a certain degree of amusement. The first couple 30s sketches look funny, but the 5m sketches it’s often hard to tell I used a different brush from normal. And it’s keeping me interested in practicing which is always good.

You’ll see the same thing with physical art materials too, which is actually what got me started on finding brushes I like. I found a physical tool I liked and had a period where I wouldn’t draw if I couldn’t have that exact thing.

I’m gonna second the advice to slow down. 30s drawings ALWAYS feel like a flailing push to get anywhere. Take a deep breath. Really look at it. Let go of a finished drawing, and focus on getting down some good lines. Not lines that other people like, good lines for you to be going on with. It’s ok if it’s messy, jagged, ugly, incomplete. If you know what comes next or have a sense of how to continue, that’s good enough.

The other thing I’d try is really look for straight lines. Yeah humans are mostly rounded, but there’s more straight lines than you probably are thinking, and it’s easier to work with straight lines in a lot of ways.

The most important thing is to keep practicing. No single practice session is gonna do much. It’s the practicing regularly, so you are building a habit of drawing. With lots of sleep. You can’t learn if you don’t sleep.

It feels to me like you see shadows fairly well (based on the last pose), but you’re focused on getting an outline when you start adding detail.

So I’d try two kind of opposite tactics. Try several practice sessions where you focus on continuous line drawing, and you try to push that into the longer poses. And try sessions where you focus on adding tone patches to lay in shadow shapes rather than adding an outline. This may work better if you are drawing through and over a form multiple times and kinda letting the off lines build the shadow.

I know when I was introduced to those ideas, i felt like they were in conflict, and like they conflicted with gestures. The more you just get comfortable with them and keep drawing the easier it is.

Also keep in mind if you’re just getting started with gesture it can be really hard to find the gestures in smaller muscles. So it’s kinda normal to feel very dead or like there’s nothing right to add to longer poses for a while. It’s a part of the learning process.

Yeah Proko is usually too long for me (I have ADD and video is often really hard for me as a learning tool). But his vids work for a lot of people. And they’re very good on fundamentals. I prefer the Croquis Cafe teaching vids on the same ideas because they’re very very short and focused. But different brains learn differently. And that’s a factor in all this too... gotta work with the brain and hands you have.

Both Croquis Cafe and class mode here are great tools. 30m for a short class here is right on the edge of what I can handle, a Croquis Cafe class targets about 20m of drawing time and is a bit less tiring. But if I try to do the same amount of drawing with fixed time poses, I’ll probably tap out in under 15m. If it’s the other way around for you, whatever works to get you drawing more.

However you approach your practice, it’s a good idea to look over what you did at the end and think over whether any of your drawings were particularly good. Did one seem to really match well with your goals? Was there one where it just flew by? I don’t find it helpful to focus on the bad drawings. Mostly they’ll be bad and trying to figure out why is a waste of time. But you need to find the good parts to stay motivated. Good parts mean there’s something you did right, something you want to repeat.

Media where you can’t erase easily like chalk pastels are great for helping build strong lines. Strong lines mean the drawing feels better to people and it feels more finished even if the proportions are fairly off. It’s great for stretching poses and working on exaggeration.

I know the kind of smudged blending you’re using probably feels comfortable from working in pencil. I’d suggest resisting it though while you get comfortable with the way the new tool works. It takes a lot of time to build strong dark areas when you smudge. The more you can trust your lines to be good enough, the more your shading will seem vivid. Work with the tool not against it.

Unlike ink, chalk pastel will let you do very light lines. And for long poses the light lines from ghosting a gesture drawing can help you get the soft shadows laid in without having to go back later.

Chalk and chalk pastel are really old media. They’re favorites of Disney artists and the greats of the Italian Renaissance and everything in between. It can be really bold or very delicate, and it takes a lot of skill.

Are these based off your dog or photos? Both can be good and will teach you a lot.

The reason I ask is because a bunch of the anatomy issues I’m seeing look like the ones i made when I was primarily drawing my Husky from life. Possibly with less focus on dog butt because it’s rather hard to get a front view of your Husky and have your hands free to draw.

What i found is i was very vague on how dog and wolf skulls worked so i got the ear expressions wrong. I also had problems getting the joints correct on front legs despite being very familiar with how they work. You don’t really see your own dog’s front legs move much unless you make a point of working with someone to focus on it. And if you’re the dog’s favorite human then you get yelled at by the dog because you should be walking with your dog not dashing ahead. Dogs have exactly 0 respect for art.

You’re getting that the big first gesture is the spine, and you’ve mostly got the heads anchored on the spine the way they should be. There’s no set formula for the relationship between head, shoulder joint, hip joint and rib cage. Huskies are pretty close to wolves for structure but a lot of breeds vary from that base. And some of what might be errors could be accurate description of a specific breed.

The ribcage anatomy you’re drawing is too squat and too wide. There’s nothing wrong with drawing a simplified ribs and pelvis to help anchor your torso structures. But the simplification you’re drawing doesn’t support correct anatomy. There’s at least half dozen approaches to simplifying the bones of the torso for quick sketches that show movement. If a ball for the ribs doesn’t work for you, consider a block/cube sort of thing, or using roughly 2 head shapes, one for each lung. For the pelvis it looks like you’re abstracting it as a kind of cylinder, and that can definitely work, but I don’t think it’s serving you well. Proko has some videos using this abstraction and they might help you figure out what is going wrong. What I usually do is small balls for the big ball joints. And a cube or block can work. (There’s more options! So many more!) I don’t think Alphonso Dunn has any videos going over gestures where he focuses on particular methods, but he definitely has useful vids too.

Most posters here are focused on gesture drawing. This can be described in bunches of ways but for your purposes it’s probably best understood as a very fast representation of how the model’s muscles are moving or not moving. In a fast pose you might get a single line for the entire body. Then in a longer pose you fill in gestures for various body parts to clarify the pose. In a long pose it can start digging into tiny muscles. While the fast poses can seem very devoid of anatomy, it rapidly gets very intense on anatomy and proportion.

There’s a 3 part basics of gesture drawing series up in the learn tab. It focuses on ways to approach the 30s warm up poses you encounter in class mode. If a video would help, Croquis Cafe has a series of 2-3m videos discussing various aspects of gesture drawing. I’d strongly recommend trying out a couple 30m classes here or a couple Croquis Cafe sessions for each of the methods you can dig up.