10 Minute poses

Hello everyone. It's been a while since I last posted here and I want to make it a habit to clock in my progress monthly.

Recently I transitioned from digital to traditional (charcoal). I've been warming up to traditional and have been having an absolute blast with it. Gotta admit, the organic friction between paper and pencil is irreplaceable.

One set of poses is a draw-along from Proko's mannequinization series, and the other two are a set of ten minutes poses done on my own.

All critiques ranging from markmaking to anatomy are very very welcome. Thank you all again. Happy drawing! Here's to a new year.

https://imgur.com/a/pFgafl5

• heliganreigns edited this post on January 16, 2023 7:20pm.
• heliganreigns edited this post on January 16, 2023 7:29pm.

Good evening, WEREWOKE, and welcome to Line of Action. How are you doing tonight? I think that you're doing a far greater job on mostly your mark-making, but your anatomy is spot-on, yet of course, your silhouettes. Keep going at all of those things!

But however, those baby fat areas in the torso, where the bones and muscles lie, I'm not completely getting enough of that squash-and-stretch look and feel to them, in what you can and how you can exaggerate in that contrapposto pose. How would you like to free up your hands, elbows, and shoulders with 15 minutes of 5 minutes of poses and attitudes? (all flipped vertical) If you do this drawing exercise, you'll take away two things: First of all, is that you can see the organic shapes, lines, spaces, or forms using your right side of the brain. And second, you can make your mark-making and silhouettes a lot less rigid and a lot most dynamic, appealing, and lively in your knowledge of drawing gestures and anatomy.(Even if you'd just scribble them all out)

Please kindly take all these things with a really smallest grain of salt, and let's hope they've helped and benefited you.

Hai Heliganreigns, I'm a beginner, so take everything I say with a grain of salt.

The cool thing about mannequinization is that it allows you to represent a complex shape that you do not understand with a set of simple shapes that you do understand. There are a plethora of different mannequins that people use, and you can, or course, create your own to suit your own personal needs. Proko is an extremely advanced artist, and many of his classes are geared toward more advanced students (even ones tagged 'beginner friendly'). That's not to say you can't learn from them, but you may want to try some simpler mannequins before you dive right into what Proko is doing. For example, many of the wrapping lines Proko uses to demonstrate the form are actually anchored on very subtle muscle features. If you know they're there, you can place those wrapping lines strategically, and they make sense. If you don't know where those changes are, then you tend to just kind of place them randomly, and... they don't really do much for you.

I would recommend you try some simpler mannequins, maybe even deconstruct / break them apart and draw individual forms for a while. Once you're a bit more comfortable, you can come back to Proko's mannequins.

Alternatively, you can reallllly deep dive into Proko's video(s). For every single mark he makes, pause the video and ask yourself, 'why did he make that mark that way? Why is it there? Why does it have that weight? why does it have that curve? What is it doing?' And then when you go to draw your own figures, (hopefully) you'll remember what proko did, and why he did it, and you'll look for the things he saw in your reference image. Try looking at proko's reference, drawing it, and then watching proko draw it, and compare the reults. What did he do differently? What did he do the same?

To make a long story short: your drawalong with the proko videos looks awesome, as do your own poses. I'm not convinced you completely understand all of the forms you are drawing. Solution: simplify them until you do understand them, and then gradually add in details/complexity, or spend a LOT more time thinking about them, or even isolating them until you understand the individual parts.

Stay creative, --Siv

Hey Siv,

Beginner or not, your input matters a ton to me. I would consider myself a beginner also, and funny enough a lot of what you mentioned was put into practice as I was drawing too! But I absolutely agree with you. No matter the level of art we produce, it certainly helps to stop and reconsider masses at its simplest form. I'll give it a go.

Thanks again- good luck on your own endeavors!

Very dynamic and your joy with the new material gives your drawing a vivid expression! You perspective view is very talented, can you tell me, why you spit legs from joint to joint in three parts? It' s fun and inspires to look at your drawings!

Thank you Naima! Very kind words!

I hope I interpreted what you asked about correctly, but I split between two cynindrical shapes (one representing the femur and the other as the tibia/fibula) bridged together by a boxy shape (patella).

Looking back at my drawing about a week later, I noticed that the knee wasn't aligned with the femur. The patella should be accounted with the total length of the upper leg as the pivot point is just below. So in terms of gesture, it should sequentially flow in accordance with the shape before it.

Your question gave more clarity to my process and for that I also thank you! Glad to have curious people such as yourself around!

Your perception of flow is what first can be seeing from the sketches.

It can also be seeing that you're practicing foreshortening which it levels up the drawing to a more complex level. Keep practicing more of this.

The advice i'd give is to start practicing human anatomy and its isolated elements (arms, legs, ears, mouth, eyes, hair, etc), for a whole month or 2. You can either just focus or sketch both the basic and anatomy.

And finally, if you don't feel like having an own style, i'd say you're prepared to begin this. Start grabbing examples from artstyles and artist you love (and feel envious :3), make notes such as "why i love this artstyle" and "which first details grab my attention from this" and try to understand how can you aggregate to yourself.

You said you transitioned from digital to traditional. Were you kinda "lost" or confused on how to start with the digital format? If you are not feeling comfortable, I'd recommend using and training with both, but just because both of them has their advantages and disadvantages. Either way, you could just grab a few brushsets from famous digital artists and practice the basic sketches.

Kudos, friend! :3

Werewoke, I am very impressed with your mannequinization. The fact that you captured such dynamic gesturing is really nice to look at. These are great fundamental images for animation-type drawings because they actually capture motion beautifully, however, it does seem that following along a tutorial had some great advantages for the finished look.

I would suggest creating Écorchés to really understand the relations of the muscles in the anatomy. Knowing how the muscles reacts to tilting, pushing, and pulling will help you to maintan the dynamism and motion of your drawings when you practice the mannequinization on your own.

I like the amount of action that these poses bring so I have a suggestion for you if you like to capture dynamic gesturing, Use athletes-in-motion as your references and deconstruct them like so:

Make a gesture drawing with just lines

Make a skeletal drawing

Make a mannequinization

Make an Écorché

Make a final rendering

Resources:

Écorchés https://artstudiolife.com/what-is-ecorche-drawing-and-the-importance-of-anatomy-for-artists/

Écorché Course Preview Number 4

Hope my suggestions help,

Keitrilea