Avis Cantrix的論壇貼

Hello! 
I hope you've been enjoying your art journey so far. Your sketches are looking very good so far for someone who's started within a year, great job!

My feedback is I think you're somewhat caught between whether to try and draw the figures accurately or whether to go for pure gestures. Gestures can be a lot looser than how you have drawn your figures so far, and also tend to use long, confident lines vs lots of little ones. The lots of little lines is a classic thing nearly everyone does when they're starting out, so don't worry! There are about a billion exercises online for line confidence, the Draw a Box website covers it within the first few lessons and they are free, so you could give that a go if you want to specifically improve on that. There are also a lot of Youtube videos, lots of people like Proko's. In my case, the best way I found was actually to get a book called 'Watercolor Workbook 2' by Sarah Simon and very patiently line over her illustrations in ink giving every line a single pass where it was physically possible, but I like painting too so I doubt this would be much use to you. Everyone has their method. But honestly, give it enough time and you'll usually just stop doing it by yourself even without really thinking about it, so if the thought of doing Draw a Box makes you want to cry, don't force yourself to do something you really don't enjoy!

However, the question is are you trying to get 'movement' in your drawings, or do you want to capture them accurately? These are often two separate goals at the start, though eventually will combine when you get enough practice. If you want movement, practice your long, confident lines, and also experimenting with what happens when you to capture the figure in as few lines as possible. Try not to worry so much about whether the proportions are accurate, so much as whether the pose is readable and interesting to look at. These kind of drawings suit the very quick 30 second timers, or better 1/2 mins in the class mode of Line of Action, because there really is not time to get an accurate drawing down, but you definitely can get some dynamic figures down in that time. This was one of the best videos I've seen that explains the concept of gesture drawing: https://youtu.be/vWreMdXAn6Q

For accuracy, since you are drawing digitally, one of the best things you can do is draw the pose exactly as you have done in your examples, and then use your drawing tool to layer your sketch on top of the photo (sized roughly to your drawing) that you were referencing. You will see very quickly where things have gone awry. But do not panic if everything has 'gone wrong'! When I first started to do this, I couldn't believe how far off some of my drawings seemed to be from the photo. Do it enough, and firstly you'll get a real sense of how the body is shaped, and then you'll also notice where you always tend to get caught out. In my case, I always put my ribcage guide oval and hips way too far apart, so my figures tend to have very elongated waists! I only do this trick with layering the sketch on top sparingly, because I am not aiming for totally accurate, photo-realistic drawings, I am aiming for 'good enough' for a painterly style. It is incredibly difficult if not almost impossible to get proportions from an un-traced drawing 100% accurate to a photo or life drawing without tooling (more below), so don't let yourself get hung up on that. You are just trying to develop an eye for putting things down as they are rather than what your brain thinks they should be. Accurate drawings in general also tend to take a longer time (sometimes significantly longer) than gesture drawings and will usually look more 'stiff' at the start of learning. Eventually, you can combine the two gloriously together.

If accuracy is extremely important in the future (for example, capturing a likeness) or you just really like doing very accurate drawings, do not be afraid of using things like grids (something you can often switch on top in digital tooling and make your own physical ones/buy them if you are working from life), the old plumb and line to capture angles, and even the humble pencil can all be used to 'measure' from life or from a photo to get accurate proportions. These are tools we have used for centuries in art, they are not 'cheating', despite what some people may tell you. See the following links for explanations:
https://www.art-is-fun.com/grid-method - grids
https://www.sightsize.com/the-only-cure-for-measuring/ - plumb line
https://www.drawinghowtodraw.com/stepbystepdrawinglessons/2010/01/how-to-find-measurements-proportions-and-angles-to-draw-with-pencil-thumb-method/ - pencil

I hope this was helpful to you. Regardless, your drawings are a really good start and I'd love for you to continue!

Getting there for sure, but I think you got a bit nervous when it came to the head! If we're foreshortening the head needs to be bigger at this angle, and the chest is a little wide at the moment. Using https://posemy.art/, I tried to recreate your pose, as I would have taken a photo but it's dark here atm lol. Their anime head might be a bit oversized for the current style of anime that's popular atm, but it gives you a better idea I think. 

https://imgur.com/gEU1YgX

The other thing is the model is quite tricky to get the kind of hip movement I think you were aiming for, so you might want to push some elements more than the model as it's a little static, but yeah hopefully that helps you refine that pose a bit :)

So for starters, it can help to realise that nearly everyone feels this way. Even people who have been drawing for years professionally. I am not a pro myself, but I've sure watched enough content from pros to know that they say that all the time. If people didn't feel nervous, everyone would be drawing all the time, akin to how we are as children. 

So, obviously, since limited experiences, children have no judge of if their art doesn't match what they were attempting to draw, they just do it. Unfortunately, as you get older, that sense of 'it just doesn't look right' starts developing and that's what puts people off going any further with art. That, and obviously combining that with the social ideas of 'talent' and occasionally bad experiences of feedback. 

However, if we didn't have that sense of 'it just doesn't look right', we would also all still be drawing trees like lollypops and humans who are bigger than those trees and the houses they supposedly live in, so it's a double edged sword!

The overall advice I've found from many, many hours of content I've consumed, and not just related to art but literally any hard endevour (including STEM subjects such as engineering and computer science) is get used to the feeling of failing as quickly as you are able to. Because if you can pick yourself up from that and keep going, then not only will you learn extremely quickly, you will be doing what a majority of people give up on doing almost at the start. A good quote I saw was 'A master has failed a thousand more times than a beginner has'. 

So that's all good in theory, but the emotional burden can be quite heavy. In my experience as a beginner, I do three things currently to combat that:
1. I do drawings without references or tutorials where I try my best to connect to the child-like 'I want to draw that' and just fill a big page full of ideas and sketches of things, most of which look bad but at least get the idea across, and see what I really struggle to draw. In this way I learn what I really struggle to recall from memory, AND I realise that my brain isn't just boring, I do actually have some pretty wild ideas, I just can't draw them that well yet. The only thing about this process, especially at the beginning of trying it, is that it can feel extremely frustrating and make you anxious. See 'Draw a Box' website for this idea, he suggests making 50% of your time in drawing dedicated to just doing this and talks about it at length.
2. I have a lot of books, websites and places I can go for tutorials, and I do them regularly for that 'instant win', because that takes all the brain work out of picking colours, compositions, etc. out of the picture so you can just get that feeling of making something and having a good result at the end. Another easy win for me is drawing birds, I absolutely love birds and I draw them well because I've practiced them a lot, so I will do this for that instant good feeling too.
3. I study concepts and then try to apply them. For example, I use Line of Action and other figure drawing books to study people and their shapes. Because my thought is if I can draw people well, anything else I learn afterwards will feel a lot easier. Or, if I've identified I can't draw something in step 1, I'll maybe study that (like I found out I can't draw dogs for example). This can be extremely heavy on my brain though.

The combo of these three keeps me going with drawing and painting. This is just how I deal with feeling unconfident, so you may find the specifics to be not right in your case and need to adjust some stuff. I've now clocked around 300 hours of drawing and painting, not including time I spent as a child and teenager as I have no way of estimating that, and I have actually found it significantly easier recently to just start and 'enjoy the process' rather than focus purely on the result. I now lose hours just drawing and painting and don't even notice the ugly stages as I go through them, and I often enjoy my results too even if they do look weird and aren't drawn accurately. I love being able to actually fill a sketchbook instead of them just sitting there unused the most!

The only other thing to say is, and this may not apply to you at all so don't mind me if it doesn't, I lost a lot of my 20s to endevours like this because I was struggling along with undiagnosed C-PTSD. I've also had 100+ hours of intense therapy at this point before I could really get started with art, as my reactions to failure were really quite extreme beforehand. So if you are finding no matter what you do, you absolutely loathe what you've created, and you can't find any joy in the process at all. Also especially if you find that your very ideal of happiness itself is tied to the thought of recognition as 'something', be it as an artist or whatever, then it may be worth seeking out professional help alongside of doing art. 

I hope that helps and I haven't rambled on too long ^^; Keep going, I'm sure you're doing great!

Hi! Bit late on the feedback sorry, mostly use this site to track how many hours I'm putting into drawing and painting so I don't always check the forums.

First of all, really good job on sticking to using a nice sweeping line of action as your base. Looks like you are mostly getting all the features down in each pose, and the poses you have spent some more time working on look very fluid.

In terms of feedback, I would say your 'ribcage' ovals are probably a little large in proportion to the hips in most cases. This seems to be even if you are capturing someone quite slim, as I can see in the 5th image you uploaded that although you settled on a much smaller ribcage for your more fully drawn out male pose, your original sketch oval extends where you eventually settled on for placement by a noticable distance.

The other thing I can give feedback on is that you are making sure to put in hands and feet which is great, but they tend to be underestimating the size of these features, which has sometimes then affected your poses proportion accuracy when you choose to spend more time fleshing them out.

Ultimately, you are correcting the ribcage sizes when you spend more time on a pose, so you clearly already can see that, it may just help speed up the process if you try and get as close to the accurate size from the start (similar with the feet and hands).

Sometimes not feeling happy with a sketch has to do with feeling as though the sketch hasn't fooled your brain into perceiving the drawing with depth. In which case, you need to focus on creating distinct areas of light and dark and convincing transitions inbetween. You have started reinforcing dark outline areas on your more drawn out poses and then adding shading, which is already a great start as you have a good tonal distinction between your darkest darks and bright light. It may help you to feel happier with an image if you make sure you leave no gaps in your shading for the shaded areas, so there is a definite distinction between shadow and light and how the shape is shaded to make it look 3D. This helps to fool the brain and might be what leaves you more satisfied with your images at the end. I am thinking of the top more-drawn-out pose on image 5. You were likely reacting to the timer so I wouldn't worry about this drawing, this is just the pose that most shows where the shading with gaps leaves the viewer somewhat confused as to where the shapes begin and end. Your shading on the pose with the bow and arrow was very good, I could see the image as a 3D image instantly and that is the kind of work you want to keep practicing.

I hope this helps and I hope you keep practicing, there is some really good work here!

+1 for the site saving our settings for class modes, perhaps with two buttons at the start with one to 'continue previous practice' and one to 'start new practice session' that then takes you to the menu as it is. Also agree a setting to change the size of the timer would be helpful. I don't like sounds from browsers, so if you do include countdown ticks or alarms, please set the default option for them to be off. I would not mind a visual indicator on the timer though, for example it slowly transitioned to a different colour as the time ran out (maybe options to set the colours for colour blindness reasons).

I would also love if this site was optimised for mobile and tablets so that zooming in still kept the skip options visible and timer as well, as zooming in will usually hide these.

Finally it would be kind of nice as a premium option to be able to just mass block the full set of images of a particular model, rather than having to do it one by one as they come up when there's sometimes a lot of images of one model to go through.

Otherwise can't think of much else, apart from maybe converting some of the larger images to .webp which may help with loading times. Thanks for making this site, I really love it!