My Climb From Absolute Beginner

[Prinn]

Hey everyone, I started drawing about 1 1/2 weeks ago and this is some of what I dumped out so far. I'm making this sketchbook as motivation for myself to constantly improve and show progress(hopefully for years to come). Below are just some exercises and "gesture drawings" that I've done from various models on Pixelovely. I've also picked up various books like Vilppu's Drawing Manual, Figure Drawing For All It's Worth, Figure Drawing: Design and Invention and have read... I would say the first couple of chapters from each, but I really don't have any direction as to what I should be focusing on.

   I would love to work toward becoming a character designer, so if anyone has any critiques/advice to offer as to where I should go from here, please feel free to comment and tear my scribbles apart :)

[Eyliana]

Hey, welcome!

I feel familair with your situation, about half a year ago I also decided to start drawing for realz. As far as I can see you picked the right exercises to start with. I mainly focussed on portraits, but now I realized I lack some fundamentals so I'm getting back to that as well.

For studying; Books are nice, really important is to practice what they write/illustrate. I refused to do this, being like when I read it I know it. Well, I might know it, but being able to do so is something entirely different ;).

Some stuff that might be helpful to check out as well:
www.proko.com a lot of videos on figure drawing and anatomy
Burne hugarth also has nice stuff on figure drawing, dynamic poses and stuff.
... And I have another figure drawing book at home, but I can't remember it right now. I'll get back to you
And I just bought 'How to draw' from Scott Robertson, people here say that it is really a great book to learn perspective.

And I know it seems like a lot in the beginning, and well it is. There are so much aspects to learn and to train. What I think is important to realize is that by practicing one thing, you also improve other things a bit. So by practicing different subjects like gesture, anatomy, lines, perspective at the same time, you learn quicker than by taking it one by one.

That said, I think this is a good base to start and sure there is a lot more but I don't want to overwhelm you ;). Good luck!

[nutriman]

Hi there Prinn,

good start! Lot of people want to jump straight in with crazy characters but I think it's really nice that you do take the time for fundamentals.. your creations will be much more believable later on.

I'm not an expert but from my view you could try to find a stronger line of action in your poses.
Try to describe the figure in C, S and I Curves..try to convey the pose with the least amount of strokes possible. Once you got that try 1 to 5 minute poses.
I hated those short timed poses first and the figures gonna suck first but it's a great exercise that will teach you how to be very economic with your strokes.
Since proportions usually are not that accurate on gesture poses make sure to exercise them seperately.
Rock on..

[Prinn]

@Eyliana

Yeah, I'm kinda floundering on what fundamentals I should tackle first. I'm thinking of getting my gesture down and then moving onto accurate proportion and then anatomy. I've actually been to Proko a few times before, but I should probably revisit his gesture videos and examples.

@nutriman

One thing I was confused with when learning gesture was how I should represent the character. It seems to depend with how much time you have(30 seconds/1 minute/5 minutes). I'm guessing for really quick 30 second poses that you should just get the gesture in as quick as possible, even if it looks like a curved stick figure.

[Eyliana]

Not sure if I have the right answer to that. I have a background in a bit of product drawing, so the focus there was basic shapes, construction and perspective. But that was a long time ago. And I just started of with portraits and studied a lot of books (not so good on the creative side, better at the technical side) and notice that I miss observation and accuracy and perspective.. So yeah :P

I guess it also depends on the person, something with natural talent, things that come easier for you, things you find difficult.

About the gesture, I get the feeling from hearing other artists talk about gesture that it is something you need to keep doing because it gives your character more loose and dynamic poses. Gesture is really about capturing the movement, the feeling. And especially with the short time poses it won't give you much time to think about porportions and such. When you learn porportions and anatomy, the gestures will also look better because you are able to apply those without spending more time on it. It is one of those things that typically strengthen each other.

The book I meant was Figure drawing from Micheal Hamption, but I see you have that one already on your list. It helped me quite a lot with getting my portraits better.

And sorry for my rambling, I hope it helps a bit.

[Prinn]

Hey, sorry for the long absence. It's not that I haven't been drawing, it's just that I have been doing a ton of studying. I started really studying anatomy this week, so I picked up The Atlas of Human Anatomy for the Artist a few days ago and am going through the bones at the moment.  I'll probably also start watching the Vilppu anatomy videos when I get into the muscles.

One of my biggest problems was focusing on a specific fundamental, and I think that for right now I'm just going to focus on Anatomy... and maybe perspective when I get tired of looking at muscles and bones.

Anyway, here are my crude drawings with chicken scratch handwriting. :D

[Prinn]

I must have some form of ADD because I can't just stay on a book for more than one day. I went from anatomy, to perspective, and now I'm practicing the mannequin. I also practiced some basic shapes to see if I could get them right. I really need to work on my mannequins, but I'm not really sure where to start. Any advice appreciated :)

[Prinn]

Have been extremely busy with work the last couple of weeks and haven't really been able to draw a whole lot. Here's just a few of the latest gesture drawings I have done the last day or two.

[KurtJeremy]

Hey Welcome

I see that you're working on your fundamentals thats good.
so first off,
While drawing from books are good, you will learn alot when drawing from life. so as much as possible try to do that. In order to do that you need to improve your accuracy and observation. theres a (free) though you can donate! gumroad tutorial on that. in here https://gumroad.com/l/accuracy

try to practice as much as possible drawing accurate lines and seeing angles and alignments properly.
mix it up with what you're doing with the gestures as to break out the tediousness that is drawing carefully.

you asked how to improve your mannequins? I say try to learn perspective, learn how foreshortening, diminution, scale, 1 pt, 2pt and 3 pt perspective give a sense of space.

thats all I can give you at this moment. I say try to focus more on drawing accurately as it will help you in a long run.

[Prinn]

Did my first "anatomy study" today (don't punch me! There will be more to come)

Just did the torso as I had to look at many different sources to find out how the different muscles connected. The second picture is a mix of reference and imagination as I had to use many different pictures for reference for each side of the torso. I was also fortunate to find a 3d model that I could use of just the muscles... but unfortunately it was nowhere near as detailed as I wanted it to be.




I'm also noticing that the head not centered in the back view :(

@KurtJeremy

Thanks for the awesome advice and gumroad tutorial :)

Yeah, I keep hearing that one of the best things you can do to learn a lot of the fundamentals at once is drawing from life. I'll have to at some point dedicate a certain amount of time to just drawing from life.

[Amit Dutta]

Hey dude. :) nice start.
Seeing these I would say to not spend too much time on doing much rendering / lighting of the muscles.

If you are studying from something that is shown like that maybe you can focus on your line work to get the accurate muscle shape / proportion, overlaps and placement first. For each muscle you can just draw a few contour lines to show form and a few down the length to show direction of fibres.

Definitely go back to your main reference after you do your imagination drawings and try and analyse where you went wrong. I would say you have exaggerated the serratus a little and the curve of the ribcage looks a bit too pronounced in general given the width of the chest. The chest muscles generally seem to be a bit on the small side for the torso size.

[Prinn]

Yeah, I'll have to focus on one image and stick to that for my reference. I was going all over the place because certain images of the torso wouldn't show all the muscles, especially the 3d model. It was especially frustrating because the book that I had planned to use had very dark pictures of the torso, but was very detailed. 

Tomorrow I will try to stick to just one reference as well as make the structure more believable.

[Amit Dutta]

Yep. It's good to do extra research to understand something if the ref doesn't make it clear, but generally it will be a lot easier to just try and work off studying one drawing at a time to start with, even if it doesn't show everything. You can hit the missing bit in the next study. The more drawings you do the better anyway.

[Prinn]

I tried only using one reference image and measuring more for this one. I think I made a bit of an improvement, but I'm not sure. I'm going to have to do the back and the sides again at some point.

[Prinn]

More anatomy study. I'm finding that a lot of the images that I find are very inaccurate, so I will have to try again with some better references tomorrow.

[Amit Dutta]

1 down! :) Good job. Proportions are already looking heaps better.

Check these links for teres major/minor attachments.
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/476255729325113568/
http://image.slidesharecdn.com/themuscul...1418895860
https://christopherdhoward.files.wordpre...=412&h=356
A google search of any specific muscle group should bring up some ref, if it isn't clear in your reference, and you can synthesise attachment points and overlaps from these. Those are pretty secondary muscle groups and covered up by others quite a bit so not a huge impact overall in drawing figures well.

[Prinn]

Yeah, I should probably get into the habit of studying my references before I try to draw from them.

I also notice I made the Teres Major and Minor a bit too big.

[Prinn]

The reference for the one of the left was quite dark, so I probably messed up a bit. Also, my back door just decided on a whim that it did not want to lock itself today, so I didn't spend as much time on these as I wanted while I took half the day to fix it :'(

I did notice that I was doing these a bit faster today than yesterday.

[Prinn]

Tried doing a bit of the leg today. I'm going to need to do a lot more from different angles.

[Prinn]

Sorry about the long absence. I guess you could chalk it up to a combination of my birthday and getting horribly ill at the same time. Anyway, here's another lower leg study, but this time I didn't sight size and just drew from a reference. I also noticed that I was able to do these in about 3/4 the time as my last set of lower legs.

I was about to an upper leg study but decided that I needed to go to bed early as I only got about 3 hours the night before.