Poyo's I wanna be good! Everyday Sketchbook

[Mr. Toodles]

lots of facial practice i see, I'm noticing the "dead expression" going across your faces, try over exagerating the expression you want to convey, Paintings are visual and much like theatre they are dramatized in order to convey feeling. give it a shot keep at it :D

[JonHop]

Nice to see you still at it! Keep pushing yourself, your colours are looking a little washed out on that last image but your understanding of form is increasing. Keep pushing your value studies also will help with defining form ;).

[poyo]

thanks for stopping by guys. I agree my colors are very washed out. I am going to start including the ref pic for comparison.

I'm stuck on how to get a more realistic skin tone. I've tried building up by overlays/multiply layers, normal layers on 100% to add details. I think my shadows aren't dark enough/ wrong color, but my eyes just can see where it's wrong.

If someone can spare the time for a paintover, it would be much appreciated :)




got some help from some peeps in the cd hangout to add a little green
still would love a paintover though! or any crits are good also :)




random no reference doodle, might practice coloring on it

[poyo]

short practice today, much schoolwork to do in finals week :/

it's too bad, because I was really getting into skin tone studies...

still seems very washed out. how can I give my colors a more lifelike appearance?

[poyo]

finally switching subjects! feeling ok with faces for now, onto figures!
my progress so far after long hiatus (both from memory):

[poyo]

more closeup muscle figures to come.
only whole figures for today. maybe one of these days I'll finally fix my desaturated skin problem.
also a bunch of random imagination at the end... maybe I'll take one of them and do a full painting later.


this one from imagination, no ref, though that clearly was a mistake because ugh, this fur :/

[eru]

wow your studies are coming along, do you paint traditionally aswell ?

---

and you got good observation skills, like you know where colors and light are coming from .

[JonHop]

good to see you still here. As for your skin problem I think it might help if you worked on a darker background maybe 50 percent grey or less. Also you are missing the subtle changes in hues around the face, there are blues and yellows and purples in your reference. Try squinting at the reference and really looking at it and catching those very subtle value and hue shifts.

Keep going!

[poyo]

@eru & JonHop, thanks for stopping by my sketchbook! No, I only ever did one traditional painting class, I painted some plein air and some portraits and still lifes, but I really don't like it. I don't have enough paint colors and the media behaves differently. I am going to stick to digital :)

today's short practice, definitely a miss on the skin color again, would welcome any crits, esp on color

[zou]

Hello Poyo :)

as a crits: for the colors, though i'm not a specialt, you should try to make a no opacity brush, and focus on each area of color (ask yourself how much saturation and value it is, and of course wich hue is closer (bluer, greener ....)
-don't assume lips are pinker, but look at the picture
-overal skin coor

-you should work black and white (values) before going color too

[poyo]

started muscle studies again today. I am using figure drawing design and invention by michael hampton, which I like better than loomis or bridgeman.
some towards the end are imagination

[poyo]

Hi guys, decided to get back into drawing again. 
If anyone that sees this is good at figures, can I have some advice?

I have looked at villpu, loomis, bridgman and I am still sucking at figures. I was all over the place before, but now I've decided to just focus on the figure so that I can get good at that first. My goal is to be able to construct figures in unforeshortened poses from imagination at least. 

However, I seem to have hit a wall. I don't have any figure drawing classes in the town I am in now, so I bought some high res photos from proko to practice from. These gestures were done 5 min each, but no matter how much longer I give myself after 5 mins, I can't seem to develop the form any more.

Do you guys have some tips for how I can understand constructive anatomy better?

[xelfereht]

Ah man... I didn't check the date before giving this a little paint over for you haha



Sorry its 4 years late.. but if you still want a bit of a crit.. few things to keep in mind, the values way more important than the colour, the colours are relative to each other and try to get a feel for the curves you are seeing and understand how much the form is turning to create those shadows..

k for your recent post about poses,
you look like youre building the figure limb by limb.
good idea when youre starting out, chuck a few gesture lines and get the whole shape down first



https://www.youtube.com/user/onairvideo/videos

I recommend doing some timed sketches using this channels vids.
it will help you practice getting down the feel and overall shape down fast
good luck and welcome back to drowwwwannnnnnn...
keep up the good grind!

[poyo]

thanks so much for commenting, I really appreciate the paintover, even if that one was a long time ago. You can probably tell from my other sketchbook stuff that I do know what the face anatomy looks like when doing values, but I seem to forget it whenever I try to do it in color :/

That's a weakness that I want to eventually address, every little bit of crit helps!

Thanks for the channel recommendation, I'll give it a try, looks like there's a lot of quality content for free. I'll sketch some stuff from there and continue posting in this sketchbook.

[poyo]

realized today my proportions are bad. Maybe they were always this way, but starting today I made a conscious effort to do the head after the main torso mass to scale it correctly before doing arms and legs. 

Had the most trouble with the shot of his back with one arm raised. The shadows and wrinkled muscle around the traps messed me up.
All 5 min gestures.

this one from imagination:

[Arteriorrhexis]

Hi there! Hmm, about the figure construction, I am also not a pro, I actually just began seriously drawing bodies last month but I think I can give a small tip here or there that might help out :D

Might be a long post!

Recommended book for this: Steve Huston's figure drawing book is good starting point. Like you I also had flipped through every anatomy book, all of them are valuable. You don't have to copy their style, only take what you can gain from it. Loomis has great stuff on landmarks and what bones show up on skin, while Bridgman helps you see the forms. And Hogarth is also awesome and real clear on anatomy because he is exaggerating so you can later also see those muscles underneath the human form. Vilppu is good at gesture, someone I should probably look at more often because my figures are really stiff! 

Ok. one tip that is really going to help you out is proportion. We all know the 8 heads model but it's hard to count head by head by head when doing figure drawing (at least for me haha). So what I noticed is that the proportions actually can be simplified from the 3 major masses: the head, torso, and pelvis.
Here's a procedure I took on for a while to help me improve proportions:

1) Head determines everything, draw head shape first
2) Then draw a rectangular form for the torso, the space between neck and head can be studied or until it looks/feels right. Usually two by four heads are in that form.
3) Then from the top of the rectangular box or pit of the neck, double that distance to get the bottom of the pelvis or crotch. Two by one heads which is why you can later take this into a "pillow" body with two equal halves.
3) To draw arms, elbows touch at the 10th rib and then double distance to add forearm + hand
4) To draw legs, similar procedure, only duplicate length of ribcage, or about 2 heads for femur and knee and foreleg + foot. Leg bone come out of 1/2 of pelvis box because of the greater trocanter of the femur, it's a bony landmark

Another tip: Bony landmarks! They help both in guiding your proportions and later in placing muscles. 

Here's kinda of a visual sketch up I did that I am talking about it's not perfect but I hope I am able to help in some way. 



Keep drawing! :D

[poyo]

Hi there! Hmm, about the figure construction, I am also not a pro, I actually just began seriously drawing bodies last month but I think I can give a small tip here or there that might help out :D

Might be a long post!

Recommended book for this: Steve Huston's figure drawing book is good starting point. Like you I also had flipped through every anatomy book, all of them are valuable. You don't have to copy their style, only take what you can gain from it. Loomis has great stuff on landmarks and what bones show up on skin, while Bridgman helps you see the forms. And Hogarth is also awesome and real clear on anatomy because he is exaggerating so you can later also see those muscles underneath the human form. Vilppu is good at gesture, someone I should probably look at more often because my figures are really stiff! 

Ok. one tip that is really going to help you out is proportion. We all know the 8 heads model but it's hard to count head by head by head when doing figure drawing (at least for me haha). So what I noticed is that the proportions actually can be simplified from the 3 major masses: the head, torso, and pelvis.
Here's a procedure I took on for a while to help me improve proportions:

1) Head determines everything, draw head shape first
2) Then draw a rectangular form for the torso, the space between neck and head can be studied or until it looks/feels right. Usually two by four heads are in that form.
3) Then from the top of the rectangular box or pit of the neck, double that distance to get the bottom of the pelvis or crotch. Two by one heads which is why you can later take this into a "pillow" body with two equal halves.
3) To draw arms, elbows touch at the 10th rib and then double distance to add forearm + hand
4) To draw legs, similar procedure, only duplicate length of ribcage, or about 2 heads for femur and knee and foreleg + foot. Leg bone come out of 1/2 of pelvis box because of the greater trocanter of the femur, it's a bony landmark

Another tip: Bony landmarks! They help both in guiding your proportions and later in placing muscles. 

Here's kinda of a visual sketch up I did that I am talking about it's not perfect but I hope I am able to help in some way. 


Keep drawing! :D

Hey man thank you so much!
I will definitely get a copy of this book and read it. I tried to emulate your angular style and sense of mass and it made an immediate difference. I haven't drawn anything for a long, long time and my observation skills are rusty so I was focusing too hard on the contour.

I'm still doing gestures, but they are not as useful as they could be because rushing myself to finish in 5 mins is too advanced right now. I'm not ready to make quick decisions on what lines should come first to define the mass, etc, etc.

I did this drawing in 15 mins and took a good chunk of time at the beginning just observing the photo, trying to imagine and feel the solidity of the mass. Then I started with your hourglass shape and added the head first so I didn't make the arms and legs out of proportion.

Still not perfect, but it is starting to click now.

[poyo]

So I realize that I had posted some super crappy drawings of a boy with a wolf hat a long time ago.
In 2012 I actually finished a piece of marvel fanart right when the avengers movie came out. This is also around the time I started trying to really learn all the tools in photoshop and tried to push whatever skill I had at the time to the max to see what came out.

2012:



Now I haven't been practicing the entire time since 2012, which I regret deeply. But I did practice a lot of bodies and faces in between and tried my hand at skin tones (my weakest point right now is color anything).

I saw a redraw meme on deviantart, and thought I would try to redraw this to see if I improved any.
Here is my progress so far, pretty slow since I am super out of practice, but I'll post updates once in a while as I do it piece by piece.

btw I am still doing the figure sketches to improve on my construction and proportions. Just gonna post them in bulk copied onto a few sheets to save you all some scrolling space later.

2017 WIP:

[poyo]

bought a the proko course for intro to figure drawing and anatomy for artists. It was extremely helpful, exactly what I needed at this level and full of technical details.

Here's my improvement for 2 weeks, a female figure from reference, and some figures from imagination.
I'd say that the course has really improved my ability to imagine the position of the torso and limbs when drawing without reference.

Still don't have the legs/balanced figure construction down, but that will be covered after I get past the arms section.

[poyo]

continuing to study proko's anatomy course. Seeing good results in being able to imagine figures without reference.
a few years ago, I drew a picture with two figures about to raid a dragon's nest. 

this is a quick redraw, finding it a lot easier to set up the poses/perspective now. I'm aware I didn't hit the darks, but it's just a fun imagination sketch to check my progress.

and of course... my hands are still crap lmao
will get to hands someday...