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Its okay man, art is hard and it can feel especially dificult when you can't tell when you are progressing. I've struggled with developing for a long time and all the rules and tips and tricks and tutorials can feel overwhelming. Here are somethings I have to remind myself when learning art.

Look at your work after you draw it. I forget thsi quite often. I used to think just the act of drawing was good enough to get better, but finishing and looking at your pieces analytically is super important. Figure out what parts of the figure works and what doesn't. For example, the piece you just shared has a pretty good torso and the shading on the legs is pretty good! Not perfect, but it'd fool most people. Then look at the parts of the figure that don't quite work like the face. It looks like you messed up the guidlines for the face and stretched the facial features out. Rexamine where you learned this technique and compare your piece to the one you were trying to emulate.

Another thing I have to remind myself is that pieces we make to learn things are different than the art pieces we make as a piece of art. The figure drawings we draw on this website, I am often trying to hone a technique, like accurately portraying the body in simple forms. It doesn't matter as much if I don't have time to start adding little details or shading, because the important part was understanding the body in simple forms.

Break down you artistic goals into smaller steps. The books Poly reccomended have great little steps to learn. Sometimes just reading a single page and copying what it teaches helps so much because you don't have to memorize an entire book before you draw.

And one of the most powerful things for improvement is critique from your peers or an expert. We all instinctively only want to share our best work, but getting advice from your artistic peers is far more efficient than just roughing it out on your own. Weekly, even monthly critiques will not only show you what you need to learn, but also remind you what parts of your art still work.

A completely extra thing art thing you can try is participate in some site critiques! Looking at other peoples work, trying to figure out what makes the pieces look good and what they need to work on will improve your artistic eye. Reading other peoples critiques of pieces also may answer artistic questions that you didn't even know you had and may protect your ego a little if your work looks similar. Art communities like these are very pwerful!

My favorites flip and change all the time too, but sometimes a cirtain model or pose just vibes with me and Im excited to try and draw the body. There is one models poses that are so exaggerated that its impossible to over exxaggerate the pose without REALLY pushing it. He felt like drawing spiderman in an action pose.

No problem dude! Im glad you've had some break throughs with hair! Recently I figured out that often when trying to learn how to draw one thing, I had an inclination to over do it on tutorials and try to incorporate everything I learned all at once wihtout practicing each lesson along the way. It helped a lot to slow down and learn lesson before really jumping to the next one.

Its funny, I actually love drawing the guy in the tree. His poses are usually at an odd angle or contorted so I have a good reason to really exaggerate the poses.

Keep up the good practice! Nothing better than just making art!

I rarelly skip poses or models, but sometimes certain models are exciting to draw when they come up in the rotation. I find myself very excited when the newest model ALex shows up, not just because of his different body type, but because he has a strangely nordic quality, like a viking.

Markers are great to practice with dude, esepcially if you are using the markers to just practice lines. Pencils are more useful to make different shades of tones for shadows.

THe thing is with markers is that they help practice line confidence. If you use a marker too much, as you have found out, the lines become overwhelming and the figure you are drawing becomes lost in the zig zags. This is a feature, not a bug. If you are burning through pencils that quickly, it sounds like your lines are really really dang sketchy, which only works for short poses, because you don't have the time for too many lines.

When you use the marker, draw the lines more deliberatly. Not slowly, but accurately.

Proko just put out a video that very useful on this matter

Don't be afraid to show your studies! THe community here will give a clearer direction of what to practice! Because it sounds like its the technique, not the tools that are causing your headaches. But if you are vibing with the Marker, then there is no shame in sticking with it.

You give these studies a lot of life with your quick sketchy lines. A lot of the lines add to the over all form.

I think you are being a little to frantic in getting all the toes and fingers on each piece. You are not taking the time to understand the basic forms and proportions of the fingers. You seem to draw the details and add the shade and form lines afterwards and a lot of the fingers seem flat despite having a ton of details.

Try breaking the figures down into simple shapes. Depict the feet and hands as if they were PS1 polygonal figures. FOr the hands, if the fingers are close together, it is sometimes easier to quickly draw them as if they were one shape. Make sure the palm and the fingers proportions are correct before adding wrinkles and shading.

Some already great advice in this thread! I think the two things that are really hurting this pose for you is the awkward angle of the figure's left arm and also the small hands.

Its hard to understand the logic of the form for the upper arm and how its connected at the elbow. Practice drawing cylinders a little bit longer than a toilet paper roll, drawing it at different angles. You don't have to draw something from life, a cylinder is simple enough that you should be able to understand it in your imagination. Rotate it, flip it, tilt it, forward and back. Understanding the cylinder helds to understand how to position the arms, because the base form of all our limbs is that of a cylinder. Draw the limbs as cylinders first, then add curves from the muscles later.

I think the hands don't work they are too small, and this hurts the illusion of a figure holding the hammer. Maybe the hands are actually a little smaller on the model and you didn't want to over do it, but its better to go a little larger when you are sketching something that you are going to add more details to later, because these detail usually shrink the form as you add to them. Also, I think larger hands might help sell the power of the pose a little more.

Enthusiastic amateur here! Take my advice with a grain of salt!

You got a great eye for form! I love your ten minute drawings especially. You are doing a bit of line finding though, not commiting to a single line and retracing it over and over. (also are you erasing your construction lines? or are you drawing the figure by eye?

A change in tools might be a decent thing to practice. Use a thicker and darker brush for relatively short poses, maybe like one or two minutes long. Try to make the line right the first time without retracing it. The exercise is all about making the most out of fewer lines.

Edit:

THis video has some great advice as well

• Drunkenelf edited this post on April 10, 2023 4:52am. Reason: found a video relevant to the critique

Doing a great job understanding the bean pose! If you want to just practice the bean in general, there is no shame in just drawing the bean and ignoring the limbs in order to really understand it. Reeeeeallly stretch or exaggerate the bends and twists in the torso. Most people unconsiously hold back and when the piece is built upon, the lack of bending becomes really apparent. Don't be afraid to fill a page with just these torso studies in order to really get the form.

As for the next step, if you are comfortable enough with the bean, i'd examine how to connect the arms and legs to the bean as if it was a torso, shoulders and neck especially. The bean is a usefull tool when undertsanding the torso, but it doesn't have great guidelines for wear those extending parts go. Marking where the collar bone is helps a lot, since thats where the neck starts and where shoulders typically extend horizontally from.

Would love to help out, unfortunately I don't think you uploaded the images correctly, they won't load for me even when I refresh the page. SOmetimes this can happen if the file size is too big. I'd suggest an image hosting website like Imgur if you can't get it working correctly here.

Easiest part of this critique and I can tell Im going to say this a lot on this website; use more paper and have more space so that your figures don't overlap. When you draw this close together, you stunt the length of the limbs or torso in order to make the figure fit in the page. Its really hard to avoid unless you are consiously fighting against it, and you should be using that brain power to depict the figure.The jumble on the page makes it a little hard to see the figures you made that really work.

Paper is cheap! Don't be afraid to use it!

I love how you are unrestrained you are in each figure. You are doing everything you can to get the full figure on the page which is very important. But you can do less with more. You are stuggling to get the whole body on paper in time, so sometimes you seem to just put a rectangle where a liimb is, not taking the time to match the proportion to the rest of the body. It doesn't matter if you are drawing fast if you are practicing the wrong thing. An accurate line is more impactful than an incorrect shape. I would either extend the time you are taking to depict each body or reduce the detail, essentially draw fancier versions of a stick figure.

Keep up the good work!

Really fun gesture drawings! Lots of energy in every piece. I enjoy how you exaggerate the curves. You didn't list the times for any of the drawing so Im going to assume they are quick. You do a lot of line searching, something that happens when you place a line, then redraw it right next to it to correct the proportions. You might want to try taking your time with the first line or try holding you charcoal just above the paper, practicing the motion until you are confident, then pressing down.

Af for some advice for practicing faces. This website has a great tool for that. You seem to know the general shape of the skull. Use the site to look at portraits, draw their heads. Know the general shape of the head, how the eye sockets sink into the face, how the nose sticks out and what angle the shapes and place ment of the ears are. DO NOT JUST DRAW THE EYES FIRST. It is hard hard hard to build out from a highly detailed drawing of an eye first, its very easy to misplace where they are on the skull.

It might be helpful to study the Loomis Method

These are some great gesture drawings! Very smooth confident lines and its clear you are taking your time and trying to make it right. Its is better to draw slow and correct than fast and wrong, so thats a compliment. I can't think of anything obvious to do with your gestures other than either going the next step and trying to incorporate volume, shortening the time, so that you are forced to work quicker, or just simply try pushing your forms even more, exaggerating the poses so that while they may not match exactly what you think is on the screen, the subject still have the same motion. These are three different directions you can develope, don't try to do all three at the same time.

One thing you can definitely do is use more paper, with lots of space. Make sure each figure has plenty of room, when you squish them together, you unconsciously squish parts of the body to fit the page or the empty space between limbs. Paper is cheap!

Really dope looking gestures! Im really jealous with how much they look like stuff you'd see in an art book!

Impressive stuff! I love how I can clearly recognize the volume of your drawings, the torsos feel very accurate and human. I must commend how well you're incorporating anatomy inside of you drawings, love the well drawn skeletons.

Are you erasing any lines after you draw the outlines of the characters? If not, you have been doing great without the traditional circle and square guiding how you draw the human torso, you must have an incredible eye. But I'd learn how to use the circle and square in at least a couple of poses because some of them could use more energy.

I see very little exaggeration in your poses, which may be a direction to take your studies. A lot of these poses seem very stiff and show little movement and its because you are just showing the outlines and not really showing an understanding of the underlying forms.

Also, might be a good idea to just practice how the head connects to the neck and shoulders for a little bit. Your kind of skipping over it. Maybe do a practice session or two where you just quickly draw the head connecting to the torso.

Good to try something new every once in a while dude! Are you drawing with a mouse or a stylus? Cause if you are using a mouse then I wouldn't reccomend a digital drawing program for these quick sketches.

I've seen people do some pretty good things with just a mouse, but they just don't have enough finesse for the quick lines you have to make in a gesture drawing exercise. I can see some jitteryness in your lines and that could be because of a lack of confidence in your strokes or from how difficult it is to make a quick line with a mouse.

It would also really help to draw the figures larger or to use a smaller brush size, that way the lines won't mush together as much and you can have clearer poses.

You got some good habits for a beginner though. Every figure is complete and you aren't getting caught up in the little details and I can tell that you worked from an initial gesture line as well.

My advice would be to use a pencil and paper, watch some online videos on some thirty second gesture drawings (search youtube, there are tons), and switch to photopea to edit and trace a scan or photo of figures drawn on paper, if you don't have an artist tablet.

I am psyched that you showed us your work man! Its nervewracking to show artwork in the best of times, and it takes guts to show off something that you are clearly new at! You'll get there, bud!