Thanks Kik, I can see it, and tbh i was quite proud of these drawings. Now my eye has passed them and all I see is mistakes, but I am grateful they look impressive at least at first glance. Some I still can't see mistakes in, but I'm sure I will in a few days/weeks.
So, I was thinking about the whole idea of grinding and stuff; That shit really doesn't work if you're not thinking. Really, if you're practicing well, I find, You'll get really mentally exhausted after just a 2 or 3 hours. And I think good practice comes down to acquiring new information. Of course in the beginning one should draw a lot, just to get used to the medium, even if they don't think as much; just get used to failure and putting in the hours.
But as you mature in art, you need to analyze things more, grinding won't help you at all really. I'm trying to think of an equivelant someone could have with my gnass experience for free. I guess someone could get a PDF or a book on gesture/dynamic anatomy and do the following:
1. Just look at an image for a minute or so in that book;
2. Think about how your hand would move to create it, how you'd define the form and what the artist was thinking.
3. Then close the book, do it from memory, trying to get it as right as possible.
4. Then look at the book again and see how different yours is and make notes on even the tinest of differences.
If you just copy a ref, theres no guarantee you'll learn anything, unless you can recall it without looking. And another issue is if you're even copying the reference correctly to begin with, which is why observation is extremely important to train.
Copying reference is good is you're learning edges/texture. But you should always understand the structure; I feel like I've said this a million times and just rambling at this point. But just read more, read a lot more art books and actually try to learn something. Grinding only gets your lines and boxes and curves to look nice, which, i mean is important, but it won't help you understand what you're drawing. But it can... ugh, nothings set in stone, so irritating.
Here's a scribble before my next meeting with the coach; should be interesting what i have to do next, and I'm quite eager to know!
alrighty, arm was kinda hurting today so i took it easy after my lesson. Next month gonna be just as busy working through more gesture stuff and facial structure; gonna "Git gud" as they say. I will say this more formal type training is wau more mentally taxing than whatever the hell i used to do, don't wanna even think about that. Watching art videos sounds easy and relaxing on paper but doing it is really intensive if you're actually learning stuff
So here's a little figure from imagination, i know the leg sucks. both of them actually.. have a wundaful night <3 xx
Amit: Thanks for stopping by man, I'll be trying to work in some feet stuff tomorrow for sure!
Umm, lots of Steve Huston today on NMA; even ordered his book called "making every mark count." just really basic brass tacks stuff, some of the figures are from imagination
Hey Feds.
Really great to see the consistent work you're putting in.
Something I've been curious about for a while is how quickly you work, and how much time you spend on each individual drawing. I hope you don't take offence to this, but your lines often appear kind of wispy. Perhaps because of the speed that you work at. It appears to me as if you know the general direction, but can't quite pick out the specifics, if that makes sense.
If I may quote Bridgman here
"The eye in drawing much follow a line or a plane or a mass. In the process of drawing, this may become a moving line, or a moving plane, or a moving mass. The line, in actual construction, must come first; but as mental construction must precede physical, so the concept of mass must come first, that of plane second, that of line last.
Think in masses, define them in lines."
This may be a bit of a non issue for you, since these are learning drawings, but I find some of these very visually confusing; With so many lines the specifics become a little unintelligible.
Matthew: that is a great point, and i was for the longest time having my lighter initial have heavy ghosted lines in it instead of like just a little planning before making the marks; I tried to be more conscious of it today and it had a bit of an impact without too much work. It's gonna take a while to completely work out, but i can see myself doing it
More Huston and a few imagination drawings to apply what I learned; also trying to make neater lines... its tuff
Got Huston's book today, Real perdy stuff, definitely gonna read and copy as much as i can from it tomorrow; He has a very philisophical approach to art that really resonates with me. Mainly based on structure and gesture in a two step process.
The pages are... very nice, eyes light up at each picture; He doesn't really break down anatomy into very small muscles and latin names from what i can see in this book but does discuss i suppose a more philisophical approach to drawing them
Enjoyin my Huston book today, you can really see the extent of his mastery in how little he needs to say to get his point across. Plus he uses lots of great paintings to show examples. So these are just a few things to try and get these concepts to stick in my head about gesture and structure; Trying to push each one a little more each time to be more coherent and functional
ALright, so got through about 6 hrs of charles hu videos on NMA today, tried to copy along and learn what i could (1.5X speed is a lifesaver.) I think all this gesture and structure stuff isn't teaching me tons of things i can write on paper, but more a way of thinking about drawing and imagining how structural or gestural one could make a drawing potentially.
Which is... the fundamental difference between a solid drawing and an iffy drawing. Most of these ain't great, but that's why I'm practicing. I can however SEE exactly why they're wrong, and could fix them; but I'll just not make that excuse and try to be more accurate next time
So had a pretty shit thing happen. I was just touching up a very nice line drawing for >pic related, and i hadn't noticed the battery was about to run out, then it did, and my corel painter is now fucked up and the eraser tool consistently causes it to crash. I'll probably try and download a free trial of a newer version tomorrow as something to work on in the meantime.. Kinda sucks, but I guess I'll just post what i had halfway done, but the finished line drawing looked so nice compared to this and I can't really redo it because i use the eraser tool a lot to kind of comb and refine lines
But you know, I'm not the first person to have technical issues with painter!
hey there, just had a browse of lest few pages here. good to see how much constructive study you doing, very commendable. I think your gestures have allot of room for improvement. something that helps me is to put a single line for the whole head to toe of the figure first and when i do this i seem to get a more cohesive figure. your studies are good, a fair few of them seem to lack weight and balance though and this may be a side effect from getting into the constructive side allot. not tryna put you down. youve got some nice works in here and i just wanted to give my impression.
keep it up, hope your painter stops crashing
Yea my man, I really appreciate you stopping by leaving that. Its interesting I have essentially the opposite problem now of what I had. Before my gestures were really spaghetti like and wopply in "some" of the drawings I would do. Yea, i really need to dig more into that matessi book if you see that as an issue. Today I did some 30 second gestures to try and think particularly about the "weight" of the drawing.
I really see what you mean like, I would draw poses a lot and omit the legs/feet and have em kinda just energetically posing or springing or whatever and now i see why that lacked that quality. I'll try to do some more tomorrow, its interesting to think about now how you can really "feel" something in a gesture, the movement and 2d quality, thanks again!
ALSO today i finally found a message that a person I'd mentioned about two months ago had harshly critiqued me and got me interesting in buckling down or something. Not that I haven't always taken this extremely seriously (double negative); but I found some messages he had been sending me and I thought it was something else that I wasn't interested in reading!
He was trying to encourage me to use straight lines a totally different method than what I am currently doing. So, I dunno what to do really; Maybe I can do both? we'll see...
Oh and the other things are some nate Kap dog caricature studies; I love working with these tiny thumbnail sketches for studies, they really help you focus on the big shapes!
Actually interesting you say, i find the best results sofar for myself, to be starting with a ling full body gesture line but then filling in the forms quite blocky before adding a few small curves.
i think allot of people dont like bridgmans blockyness but i think for learning how to day its very helpful to go blocky. i've experimented with a bunch of different approaches and the results can be real interesting. it really amazes me how much difference starting with a gesture line makes.
i like the idea that you start with something super loose like the gesture, then something hard like blocky forms then pull back to the middle ground.
i find this method of going beyond in both directions to find the middle works real well for me in many ways and im a big advocate for constant 'course correction'
as i heard once, to get to the moon they dont just fly straight, they change course as many times as they need till they get to their destination
Xebro: Thanks man i really tried to apply your suggestions today the best i could. I watched some Vilppu vids on drawing figures with boxes specifically from very lightly defined gestures and I can see a lot of things i didn't see before. It made me think more about how each individual limb can be curved or balanced in space or sit on a certain spot. Also I began thinking out loud while I was drawing, and like I hadn't really done that before; trying to push certain aspects or limbs to be more attractive by moving them slightly or deepening their gesture lines/overlaps.
Vilppu has some interesting ideas about gesture, and he shows how old masters have very crude initial drawings just to block compositions and show the idea. Gesture essentially is the idea and the fundamentals are what make the idea interesting and noteworthy, no matter how mundane the subject matter may be.
Dont know what I'll do tomorrow, maybe watch some more vilppu vids about figure drawing because I like how he explains things and his process. I get more out of them now that I see the value in the basics hes explaining and not just assuming I know them already. I also feel like my taste is getting more refined, as I'm enjoying things about classical art I never noticed before and paying more attention to the subtleties of basic forms/lines and rythms. I bet if I read that sentence 2 years ago I'd think it was a load of crap and vague or meaningless or something.
Also got painter working, it was just resetting the thing to default, fixed it real quick!
awesome to hear, i know first hand how much a few words can open up the way you think see and feel stuff. I developed a major appreciation for william bouguereau's work over the last year that i didnt have before. his hands and feet and faces are just so expressive and natural at the same time. Im still trying to work out how i can best take figure studies into better unreferenced work. doing more quick studies focusing on single aspects of the form or gesture.. really been helpful
Xebro: Thanks for stoppin by bro, Yea boug is a big fave of mine, and yea thinkin is most of drawing, so it's super important!
More Vilppu, learning the circular shapes tool for breaking down gestures. These are really helpful, like the box and circle thing, you can style a gesture to find certain fundamentals in gestures. Some of these are ballpoints pens and they're pretty scratchy and terrible IMO, but i like the china marker sketches, since I've been using pencils that have that kind of swooshing feel. Probably should do some more pen drawings and get a better feel for em, it feels so foreign coming back to penz
Okay, I wasted a lot of time today looking into that whole vegas shooting thing about what happened, trying to learn about as many angles I can find because it's very fascinating from a political perspective, but I won't get into it here...
However, I went on Lineofaction (formerly pixelovely) and did 30 minute class and loved it; Back in the day I never did the class mode but now i can appreciate the different intentions of longer pose and the levels of analysis you can get into for each one. Since I wasted so much time today, my goal tomorrow is to watch vilppu's cylinder lesson for figure drawing (2hrs) then do a full 6 hr class on lineofaction.
I'll use that big stretch to apply all these theories from Vilppu, the box, the sphere, the cylinder; and try to get my drawings more coherent since I haven't done as much figure drawing on my own so, wish me luck!
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