OK, I think you have developed a decent understanding of the poses the human body is capable of. Especially the sketches were you focus on the underlying foundation seem very natural and convincing in proportions and range of motions.
But when you switch from foundation to final figure, you suddenly become insecure about proportions... maybe try starting with foundation anyways, but draw them very lightly or with a hard pencil that leaves little traces, then draw your outline over it with a softer = darker pencil?
And one other aspect, that holds you back is line quality. That you draw the same line several times until you are confident with the results doesn't matter so much for your foundations, but it looks insecure if it happens on your final outlines. I would recommend checking out drawabox.com, at least the first three or so chapters, and generally to adapt a technique called "shadowing". You plan your line beforehand, whether it is curved or straight, and where exactly the ends are supposed to go, and then you move your pencil several times along the preplanned line, until you see "a shadow" of that line before your inner eyes, and only then do you draw the actual line. The result should be, that you can do the outlines with perfect, confident lines, and don't have to "search" those lines leaving traces on the paper.
It takes quite a bit of discipline to get used to that, as it will probably break your drawing routine quite a bit. If you watch any video where Stan Prokopenko actually draws something, you can see his hand twitch a bit before every line he puts on paper, as he definitely preshadows each and every line. I personally tried to pick it up, too, but I am generally a bit too sloppy and undisciplined to really get used to it, but even practising it ocassionally helped me get my lines way cleaner. If you get to the point, where each outline and each feature is presented by one single clean line, the overall impression of your drawing will immediately jump up quite a bit.
Then on the longest pieces you added a bit of shadows by improvising a few scribbles about where you thought the figure needed to look darker. I don't think that improved the figure, instead it reinforced the problem with your somewhat shakey line quality.
Now getting shadows on a figure looking good is a bit of a science in itself, or maybe two or so sciences overlapping. There are a bunch of websites and videos that explain how to shade an egg. You should watch some of those, to understand what values are, what a terminus is, why reflected light is a shadow value and why medium light is a bright value and why all shadow values always have to be darker than all bright values to produce clean brights.
I know that sounds like a confusing warble of words, but if you use those terms as search words, and looks for eggs, you will find good explanations.
And science part 2 of shadows: You must find a way to distinguish shadows from lines. Shadows do have outlines, shapes, usually along the terminus, and it is often okay to draw those outlines and shadow shapes as lines. But if you just want to fill in an area with a given value, and randomly scribble into it, the eye will pick up those scribbles as additional information and will be confused, so you have to find a way to "camouflage" those scribbles, so the eye knows that is just the value of an area, not a bunch of additional details. Easiest method is with soft graphite or coal, where you can just softly rub over the area to smooth it out. If you are using ink or harder graphite, or just want to demonstrate your skill by NOT smoothing stuff out, you need to learn hatching and crosshatching. You present the area with a pattern of parallel lines, that is so regular, that the eye knows, it isn't a bunch of extra details, but just the darkness value of the area. Learning hatching or crosshatching is probably science 3 or 4 or 5 or something, as deciding the direction of the hatching lines is somewhat close to black magic.
For now, reading up on how shadow values work, and paying attention to keep your shadows smooth, not scribbled, and with clear seapartion between values should be enough for your next task,.... after you improved your line quality.
About your proportion mistakes... I still have them occur on some of my drawings, they become less over time with experience with the human figure, but if you want to push faster, there are also quite a number of different measuring techniques, that you could research and practise separately. I use a half-remembered mix of several, that I picked up over time, and do a lot of it subconciously anyways, until I annoy myself with wrong proportions a lot and task myself with retraining one or the other thing.
1
Aunt Herbert
8 months ago.
Ash
edited this post on March 21, 2024 2:26pm.
Reason: Forgot the links!
