Messages du forum par Aunt Herbert

Partially you are already there, partially you have to start a whole new chapter.

The part, where you are already there: you already extremely simplified your bodies, and you are already indicating parts of the body as voluminous objects in space. For example those circles around legs you already use. Draw an outline around that thing and call it a tube, voila, simple 3-D object.

The part with the reason, why you would consider calling your beautiful leg a silly tube, and the part with the new chapter: geometric objects are assumed to be easy to rotate around any axis. I am saying "assumed", because in reality it makes a lot of sense to actually practice that quite a bit. If you need ideas how to practice rotating geometric objects, I suggest a bit of a dive into drawabox.com, it's really good. The trick is for you to develop a set of useful building blocks, that a) you can substitute the body parts of your gesture drawings with, and b) you have practiced how to rotate.

The exact geometric forms actually vary from artist to artist. Some people only use cuboids, because they are easiest to rotate, with just right angles and straight lines to think about. Rotating a tube is already a bit more challenging, as you have to get a good grip on drawing ellipses in all sizes and with rotating axises, and getting an idea how to manipulate your ellipse to indicate that you are looking at a circular disk from a specific angle, but being able to use objects with round sides to indicate a human body let's you get so much closer to the original organic form, that the extra hazzle is worth it.

In the end, how simple or complicated you make those building blocks is up to you, the decisive quality is, whether you can rotate them around all axis. If you need inspiration, you can buy an artist's mascot of a human body, they are already made from quite simplified forms.

So, now you can substitute each part of the human body on your gesture drawings with an object, that you can easily rotate around any axis. Great. You can either rotate the whole body to switch your point of view, or you can just rotate a single limb around a joint to change the pose. Complete freedom at last. All that stands between you and that freedom is a **** load of torn hairs, sweat and tears when trying this nice theory out in practice.

My first experience with rotating a gesture: It took me about 5 minutes to draw a simplified gesture, with building blocks of my choice. 7 hours and half a drawing block filled with wild scribbles later, I managed to recreate approximately the same gesture, but viewed from a point of view, that had vertically shifted by 90 degrees. I congratulated myself on the success and swore to include rotating gestures as a fixture into my daily training, but so far resident trauma from that experience somehow always makes me skip to a more comfortable drawing practice, when gesture rotating is up. But it's totally a great idea, and I would immediately do it, if I wouldn't feel so tired right now. I'll do it tomorrow. Or at least the day after tomorrow, I promise....

I mean, your idea of images flowing from your head definitely has a lot going for it: You have fun drawing those images, and it translates well, and makes it fun to look at your results.

With the tools: You are already using digital tools, which are basically just other people's ideas, just interpreted by a machine. And you are obviously having fun using them, like they were NOT intended. It's the same with most of the art theory stuff you learn in courses. Doing the course isn't someone telling you how to draw, it is just introducing you to some additional ideas, downloading some code for a new and exciting toy. And then it is up to you to either stick with it, be all boring and prissy and try to channel the person, who introduced you to it, or to run amock with it and figure out a bunch of interesting ways to break it.

I think I have a hunch to what will be your priorities.

There is a bit of a gap between 30 second sketches and rendering... 30 seconds at most gives you a faint idea of a pose, a concept to develop. The next step would be to start building a foundation on that concept. I would propose to first start to develop a more complex, anatomical form for your torso, as it defines the body in space, and determines where the major joints need to be.

My most recommended course on the topic of how to develop a foundation of a figure would be https://www.proko.com/course/figure-drawing-fundamentals/overview, basic course has all you need. I can't guarantee that it is the best course evaaaaa, because I only took that one, and so I have no comparison, but I can guarantee that it taught me a lot of what I use today.

You got such a strange style. 90% of each drawing is really, really good, but then 10% is somehow off, and because the other parts are so good it sticks out like a sore thumb and pulls down the overall impression.

I think you would really do yourself a favor getting used to some underlying construction for the human figure, And I don't mean "anatomy", like in getting to know each bone and muscle in the human body by latin name, postcode and tax number, but more "landmarks", like in which proportions you absolutely have to measure correctly to make the end result look good, and which ones you can (and occassionally even should) play around with to your delight without anybody noticing.

Like your Freddy Mercury, so much of it looks really good, but that just aint how a human shoulder works.

Also on Freddy, I love the way you scaled down the digital blending enough to leave some structure to the shadows, and then accentuated it with a few drawn lines over it, that is a really cool style to render an image. It has a bit of an old school early digitalisation MTV vibe, but it looks very deliberate, and perfectly fits the timeline of Queen at their heydays, which makes it even better. But then the placement of the features of the face show your struggle with the underlying foundation, which makes it look like you slightly changed your point of view on different areas of the face.

Great job. To an equally productive May!

OK, here is a change, that I would appreciate, and it has to do with the review page after finishing a class.

So, while doing a class, I get presented a series of references, do some initial sketches, and switch to the next reference, once the timer is up, all working as intended. But it occassionally happens, that one of the references had a special spark with me, I really chimed with the lines and shapes, my sketch was ace, and I would love to try to finish that drawing.

Good thing, after the class is done, I can (unless there is a legal issue) look on the review page for that reference.

Bad thing, it's only sized as a bit bigger thumbnail now, and I can't click on it to get it back to full page size to continue the drawing.

If you could add an option here, that by clicking on one of those thumbnails, I can basically starts a new class session, beginning with that specific reference, timing option set to "all the same time", with timer either set to 3600 seconds or even somehow to infinity, that would be perfect.

A second thing, completely different topic: All the photographers on this page basically come with their own models, and their personal style in presenting and lighting them. If you could somehow squeeze in an option into the selection menu for the session, that let's me pick out all references from a specific photographer, that would also be very interesting.

In practical terms, I could imagine it as an extension of the review page. Make the name of the studio on the review page into a button, that allows me to mark them as "favorite" and save them to "My studio". Then, if I start a session while having one or more studios marked as "favorite" the option to start a session only from references from that studio is included?

I think this could very reasonably be advertised as a perk for paying users only. It's certainly not crippling if you don't have it (we don't have it now), and there is the thematic rhyme between paying for the services from a good photographer and being able to exclusively select them.

I like your graphite better. If you go ink, you should get markers at different diameters. Your drawing looks, like it is all drawn with smallest diameter, like an 0.1 or 0.2. I would at least get a variety up to 0.5 or even 0.8, so you can give different aspects of your drawing different emphasis. Ooooor, go brush? (which is admittedly a b**** to get used to)

A suggestion, also it is a bit hard to put in words: First, your rendering already looks very good.

You defined two values of darkness. On the legs you used the darker value as an actual shape, while on the upper torso you have been a bit shy, and only used it as a line. I think if you used a dark shape along the frontal terminus of the entire figure, to emphasize the edge of the figure, it would have looked even cooler. I would try to get about a third of the shaded area in that darker shade, and try to make it consistent over the whole figure.

About sketching longer then 10 minutes: The end goal of drawing is a complete rendering, so every now and then it makes sense to push it as far as you can go, to see when and what problems come up.

Edit: One trick that helps me to plan out where to put the dark values: I look at the reference and almost completely close my eyes, until the edges lose all sharpness, then I focus on where the darkest areas are. That way I can see the values on the whole figure, and get less distracted by local contrast. Putting about one third of the figure in darkness (or two thirds if it is in counterlight) is usually a good ratio. Then, once I decided where the dark areas are, and I open my eyes again, I try to design the outlines and shapes of those dark areas, as to define volume and some additional detail.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on May 7, 2024 11:38am.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on May 7, 2024 11:41am.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on May 7, 2024 11:43am.

1st link basically shows 404 - page not found, second link asks me to register a twitter account.

Your link is broken. Can you use imgur, please?

There have been a few gentlepersons lately showing interest into how to draw better portraits. I tried to help out by explaining typical face abstractions, like Loomis, Reilly, Steve Huston, Asaro,.... and well, the response wasn't too enthusiastic. I still stand with my proposition, that learning at least one abstraction by heart helps to improve the skill in measuring proportions of a face, and avoiding typical beginner errors. But, to be frank, I can understand, why grinding abstractions is considered to be rather boring, and frankly, I don't do them constantly either. And if I skim thru my stacks of sketches, the best portraits I drew never really started with actively drawing an abstraction.

Now I just stumbled upon this here video:

and I feel like it highlights another side of portait drawing, that my practical experience had been organically drifting towards, without me ever being able to verbalize it well.

So, I think putting this video link here is a good idea, first of all, as bit of an exposure to whom it may concern immediately right now, but also so I can link to it easily in response to beginner portraits and related questions, without having to scour youtube for hours each time to find it again.

And I repeat, I stand with my opinion that naturalizing yourself with at least one abstraction of the face, most likely the one from Mr. Loomis is a good idea, that will help everybody avoid a lot of mistakes and frustrations over their art career. Eat your vegetables, kids, because they are good for you!

But I think shadow shapes and shadow pattern is really where the tasty meat for the broth comes from! (with an apology to all vegX)

I wouldn't force it either. It's occassionally interesting to check where your borders currently are, as they can move quite a bit over time, but if something straight out feels like wasted time, then it probably is, at least for now. To produce satisfying art you need to find a satisfying production rhythm. From your dedication to art that I have seen so far, I can almost guarantee you, once it is time to move on, your own curiosity will come knocking at your door.

My inner mad scientist proposes a bit of an experiment though: Have you considered trying out a second drawing session at the same day (if you can make that fit your schedule off course)? Just to get some data about, once you knocked yourself out by focusing hard on drawing over a set period of time, how long it takes you to mentally recover, and what external conditions might influence your recovery time.

I repeat, as I said before, don't worry about the limbs until you figured out what ribcage and hips do. Focus on drawing head, ribcage and hips.

OK, several things:

a) Yes, starting with simplified gestures to get a working muscle memory for drawing the pose is definitely a way better idea than jumping right into complicated anatomical details. If you get accustomed to the pose, you will find big landmarks to measure your proportions from. If you try to add up itsy bitsy details instead, you will become crazy, as every bit of mismeasured relation bitween two details will multiply, and at the end, your drawing will just consist of a bunch of little shapes at vastly different scale.

b) ...and when you start getting into some more details, the limbs aren't the best place to start from. Keep the arms and legs as simple lines for quite a while, until you are confident how to draw "the torso". And I put "the torso" in quotation marks, because ideally you should stop thinking of it as one thing. It's the ribcage plus collar bones on the upper side, and the hip on the lower side you are interested in, and they aren't solidly fixed to each other, but connected by the spine, which has its own typical range of mobility.

Ribcage is a standing egg, with the bottom cut off in an inverted v-shape, on top of the egg sit the collar bones. For the hip either draw a pair of undies, or draw a big box, that contains the buttox, and think of the legs as cut out of that box. Collar bones and hips indicate where the major joints have to end up, and until you are confident enough to pinpoint them, any attempts to go into detail with limbs will end up as a lottery: If you get the position of the joints randomly correct, you might end up with a decent drawing, if the joints are positioned off, you can spend hours working hard, and then realize that you won't get away from that uncanny feeling, that something is off with the drawing.

c) That said, your curiosity about legs being drawn strangely s-shaped has an answer. It has even two answers, as there isn't just one, but two possible s-shapes, depending whether you look at the legs from the front or the side.

s.shaped legs by Aunt Herbert

The s-shape from the front is mostly visible in athletic persons with really shredded legs. On the front of the thigh, you got the quadriceps, and its most prominent line goes from the outside of the hip to the inside of the knee, which lines up with the calf muscle which arcs from the inside of the knee to the outside of the foot.

Seen from the side, the bone structure is almost linear, but it starts near the front of the hip and goes to the back of the foot. Above the knee, the anterior quadriceps extends into a curve ahead of the bone, below the knee, the calf muscle extends into a curve almost completely behind the shin.

Big caveat to my explanations and sketches: My own anatomical knowledge is at most half-baked. If someone wants to show up to beat me with some real facts, I'll instantly and happily yield.

Edit, That side pose is drawn badly, it only works if the person is holding themselves with the hands to prevent falling on their back, as I drew the bone structure too vertical. Should have positioned the foot a good bit further to the rear to show the leg in a stable position. The hip joint in a relaxed and stable position should be pretty much exactly above the start of the toes.

side view by Aunt Herbert

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on April 30, 2024 11:08am.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on April 30, 2024 11:27am.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on April 30, 2024 11:55am.

Very focused on construction and on big and clear lines to show the pose. I especially like the big figure second from the right, the pose shows a lot of swagger.