Thank ya Nate. Had no idea you've studied something unrelated too yet you got them drawing skills up pretty fast.
Oh .. and I've asked myself that question a lot. I was wondering what you guys think about it as well , that's why I've asked mostly. I have to say I like this community and I'm happy to be here with ya guys.
I don't think it will happen anymore. My parents are too pissed about it and if I would do it they would expect me to be a master and hired in 1 year ... yea sure....
Oh well ...
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just a few imagination poses and chow experiment I did earlier today.
Yeah ... I never get the ribcage right. Can't take any credit for the idea ... I've seen this in a link that Gliger (?) shouted on the main page , it was a vid in which Ron Lemen was speaking about how he's teaching his students and there was a part where he was doing layers like that on top , also with muscles which I should be doing too at some point. Right now I'm obviously not too happy with how they look.
sidenote: Keep putting up them links peoples xD ... you never know how helpful something might be to someone.
Tried a few stuffs this morning ... also paper .. super sorry for the extremely low quality ~ rainy day and done with phone camera. I don't have a scanner ... nor better instruments for working on paper. I should really get the later mentioned soon. Although I keep in mind the idea that it's not the tools ... it's the wielder that makes the difference ... I still think I need at least blank papers rofl.
You made some good progress with your figures, congratulations :). I believe you can do it in 2 years, if you think about what youre studying instead of just copying stuff and ask lots of feedback, work hard, why not :D I started 2 years ago, even with a background in art school for 6 years, i've wasted my time there learning no fundamentals at all and look at me now. I'm not a pro, but at least I understand some fundamentals to get clients from time to time. My parents were pissed too, and they still are xD Now I even have a cleaning job on the side for a few hours a month and it's still not good enough :P The thing is... It will never be good enough, until you start making $$$$ amount of dollars. I'm sure they just want you to do good and financially support yourself. Do what YOU want to do, and not what others want you to do ( even though it can be difficult and discouraging sometimes ) ^^
Thanks Angelique :) . Yeah , you're right ... nothing is easy after all.
And don't worry ... I can't really copy properly so I don't try that much to copy stuff xD.
Fundamentals are indeed hard but they have to be dealt with. And anatomy ... oh dear ... I'm having a hard time just finding a way to understand everything properly. I wanna learn muscles by function and by pairs and stuff but doing that in the forearm proves very difficult.
If anyone has recommendations for that please do ...
I don't know if someone has suggested Bridgman's "constructive anatomy" yet or if you're already looking at it but he really goes into detail of how all the parts work. Anyway, crushing the fundamentals is definitely the right thing to do. Keep on working :)
Hey man, like ben said above Bridgman anatomy is pretty awesome for learning how muscles fit and how limbs move. The forearm is super tricky so don't beat yourself up about not getting it straight away, but yeah, Bridgman defiantly helped me.
Those x ray studies look pretty cool too man, you've already made some decent progress here so just keep hammering those studies!
As for the parent thing, ive been in the same boat man. I finished uni with nothing and chose to move back into my parents to hammer the studies. I also have to work 2-4 times a week to put food in front of myself amounts other stuff. At my parents I don't have a bed or a desk or anything. I work off a dining room table and sleep on the sofa. It all sounds shit, and well, it is! But in all this you gain something others with better positions don't. You gain desperation and that will force your back against the wall which will MAKE you take action. There's always going to be people in worse positions than yourself who make it work out and succeed and people who are after the same dream as you are working harder, so you have to ask yourself, completely honestly, what is it you want? And what are you willing to sacrifice to get it?
That got pretty deep lol but it hope it helps man. You'll be surprised how many are in the same boat man so don't feel alone. Just put that work in and never give up on your dreams.
I have a sketchbook before this one, which was when I first started with my back against the wall. It might help coz I had very similar thoughts as you at that point - http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthr...sketchbook
Thanks Ben , looked over it in the past when it was far too complicated for me to go through it ... I think it's time I'd give it a go now. Totally forgot it was more detailed on this subject. Thanks again !
Thanks Warburton. I totally know that situation haha. Back home I've been sleeping on the sofa since forever. Never really had my own room so I'm kinda used to that.
I totally agree with you and I want to make this change more than ever. Hopefully the planets will line up properly by the end of the month ... lol. I'll have to get over my parent's disappointment and start to work real serious.
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In Bridgman's book he calls the area on the forearm in front view "supinator longus" but when I've searched for it on Zygotebody .. the visible muscles in that area were only brachioradialis and maybe a bit of "extensor carpi radialis longus". There was indeed a supinator there but it's small and under them. Why is he calling the whole area that way ? Am I missing something there ?
Yo Adrian, thanks for the comment. Got a few thoughts for you
First, concerning Bridgeman. You were wise to fact check other sources to learn the muscles, Bridgeman's books are actually full of inaccuracies. Matter of fact, if you've got "constructive anatomy" turn to page 151 and you'll find he drew the pinky toe on the wrong frikken side of the foot.
Don't go and throw away his book though, Bridgeman has some techniques worth learning. He's especially good at finding the plane changes in muscles, which makes it easier to make shadow patterns that explain the anatomical forms. He's very useful for painting and understanding complicated muscle groups as simple forms, but don't use his book as an atlas or you'll go crazy.
Next, about the kinds of figure drawings you're doing. You're definitely improving by doing them, but it's not really clear what your goal is in doing them. It seems like you do them pretty quickly, find the gesture and then draw contours where you try to get the muscle shapes right, then sometimes draw those contour rings around the limbs. I think those are three different approaches that can go hand in hand, but I think you could be getting more out of the studies.
I'd recommend doing studies where you only focus on gesture, then focus on form, and then focus on anatomy.
First find the gesture, just a very simple expression of the action or motion in the pose, shouldn't take more than 30 seconds to do. Try drawing a bunch of thumbnail gestures of a figure and change things around until you get a gesture you're happy with, then draw it larger and use it as a foundation for a longer drawing. You shouldn't be concerned with getting the proportions right or what shape the muscles have in this stage, just getting the pose down. It can be fun to try to exaggerate the pose, make the gesture a little more extreme than it really is, unless you're doing a very precise long study. Some books that would help a lot with this are Michael Matessi's FORCE, Proko's gesture videos, and Walt Stanchfield's Drawn to Life books.
Second find the forms, instead of those quick contour lines think very hard about what direction the masses of the body are turning, what's closer to you and what's further way, and draw the entire body using spheres, boxes, and cylinders. Try to get the perspective perfect, the lines straight, the ellipses getting thinner or thicker in the right way as the forms turn. Glen Vilppu's drawing manual would be fantastic for this, as well as a lot of Ron Lemen's tutorials and videos.
Third, focus on the anatomy, putting in the bone landmarks where the skeleton shows up on the surface of the body and using those to help place the muscles. It could be useful to get tracing paper or a new photoshop layer and draw over the form/gesture sketch, adding in the skeleton like you were doing, then drawing the muscles on top of that. For this step Bridgeman, Michael Hampton, and anatomy apps/atlases will be helpful.
Eventually you can fuse the steps and find different figure drawing methods that work for you, but I think it would help you now to focus on gesture, form, and anatomy separately to improve at all 3. Good luck!!!
This was spot on ! You are very right , I am being hasty and I'm not sure why. I used to do a lot of gesture drawings in the past , with time limit and that might be one of the reasons ... and I think I was concerned with more then just the gesture when I was doing them ~ which made me draw in a hasty manner. I do not contest that it was extremely helpful to do so many in far less time tho.
When I wrap around some lines on just some of them I'm trying to confirm the form I'm thinking about when it doesn't appear right on canvas ... but that's also hasted ! Terrible !
Thanks a lot for the tips ! Should also practice forms individually more.
Have to put these on a sticky note somewhere , lol:
1. Haste is waste
2. Practice self-discipline
3. Accuracy
In regards to accuracy/patience , a bit of study I did this evening lol (still not exactly patient but .. eh)
Edit: Wow ... I rushed even what I wrote on the lower left one , ignore that if you can LOL.
They aren't too good but eh ... trying my best not to haste over them and practice my observational skills , form and all that other stuff involved xD. Paying a bit of attention to negative space too.... from time to time.
I kinda forget anatomy is not the purpose of this lesson .... in some of them I try too much of that and fail ... some people just have too much muscle on them , it's hard to ignore lol.
Side note: I did establish a gesture in a separate layer before going over them.
I wouldn't call them failures, they seem to be coming along nicely! Looks good, your heads just look a little off (either too big or too small on some). Fix that and I think they'd look nicely proportioned. (I do the same thing, its almost part of my process to resize the head once I've got the gesture down, or else I start with the top of the spine and add the head on at the end).
@Jyonny: Thanks. It's very hard for me to like them since I have the reference to compare them with hehe. I actually do find myself resizing the head a lot of times. In some of them it actually looked kinda big for some reason ... I think because one of them were skinny.
@Cracked: I sure hope it's that way heh ... sometimes I have a feeling like I'm repeating the same mistakes and not even know it.
Dammit I've ordered a Bammes book like 11 days ago and it's still not here >:C
Some of the stuffs from today. First 4 ref , last two from imagination.
