Messages du forum par Joshua

I drew these figures today.
The last figure was facing the camera, with an arm stretched towards it. In my drawing, it looks like the shoulders are on backwards and the viewer is looking at the back of the head and shoulders. I tried fixing it by changing how the arms connect to the body, but that didn't change anything.

Today's hand-drawing exercises.

These are the portraits I drew today.

I drew these ones today, doing the 30-second, 1-minute, and 2-minute exercises.

After drawing the shape of the head, I found it hard to exactly locate the features on the face. I found if I started by drawing the hair (both the hairline on the head, as well the shape around the head), it was much easier to visualise where to draw the crosshairs.

I also just noticed that the link at the beginning of my original post links to the wrong place on this site, and apparently I can't edit it anymore. I meant to link to this thread.

Thanks Kim, although I think I just got easier hand positions yesterday.

I drew these ones today.

I drew these figures today.

Here are the hands I drew today.

Thanks Swen. I practised trying to draw straight lines that way here. "Trying" is the key word here!

Here are the figures I drew today.

I didn't do a portrait drawing exercise on this site tonight, but I did draw a portrait based on a photo in a drawing textbook: Link
I spent 48 minutes on that - I really need to practise doing them quickly!

Thanks!

Here's what I did today.

Here's today's attempt.

Thanks Kim. I did make a conscious decision to draw and take the full skull into account and draw the eye crossline lower today, and when I was doing the exercises I thought I was succeeding. When I finished the exercises and looked back at what I drew, the eye crossbar looked just as high as in yesterdays drawings...

Anyway, here's today's attempt.

Here's today's attempt.

Thanks Kim!

Here's today's attempt.

I started doing portrait exercises today, trying to follow the advice Kim gave me.

My ultimate goal is to be able to draw portraits that actually can be easily recognised as who I'm trying to draw.

I have very limited experience drawing portraits. I've followed a few online tutorials on portrait drawing throughout the year, although I haven't actively been practising it. Looking back through all the drawings I've done since I started learning in January, before today I had done exactly nine pages of portraits (which, for the most part, was one face per page). I don't believe I've ever attempted to draw a portrait quickly.

Before starting doing the face drawing exercises on this site, I decided to do a self-portrait as a reference (if I do a self-portrait once every few weeks, I can use that to track my progress). I also wanted to see how much I've improved since my early attempts at self-portraits at the beginning of the year. Since those were in pen, and I'll be doing the future exercises on this site in pencil, I decided to do both a pen and a pencil self-portrait today as a fair reference to both.

This (link) is the first portrait (self or otherwise) I ever did, 319 days ago. This is another self-portrait I did two weeks later, after looking at a few online tutorials.

Here are the two self-portraits I did today, before starting the timed exercises:
Pen
Pencil
These don't look like the same person. The pen drawing looks like an angry 40 year-old man, whereas I looked like a woman in the pencil drawing before adding facial hair. I haven't improved at all in the last 300 days (except that now the face is a little more symmetric), which makes sense because I've been drawing things other than portraits in that time. Hopefully I'll see a bigger improvement in the next few weeks.

After those two pages, I immediately did timed exercises on this site, producing this page. Each section corresponds to 30-second, 1-minute, and 2-minute drawings respectively. I intend to do these exercises alongside the hand and figure exercises in the future, and I'll use this thread to request critique on my exercises.