Artenthusiast wrote:It's a good thing to try exercises! I do them each day whenever I can, try different pressure with my pencil, basically learning to control it better. Draw circles, squares, triangles, 3d figures every day for at least 5-10 minutes. Make more organic closed shapes (like "blobs") and draw over them and add and retract pressure for darker and ligher areas. I do all this using the overhandgrip. It really is step 1 cause it is such vital thing to learn and you will have to use it so many times. Learning to draw without using overhand grip is like learning to eat your food with only a knife. I am sure you can find a way to make that work, but it is a severe handicap... xD

Didn't update this thread for a while now, as there wasn't really anything worth showing. Line control exercises were all I did, over the weeks. And to be honest I can't seem to do monotonous exercises of line control for too long, I'll lose all the desire to draw. Which I did... Only 3 days ago had I started again. This time I picked up figure drawing for all it's worth, seems like it's oriented at average-beginners so I'll see how far do I get with it. I can not draw gesture without knowing actual proportions of human body, and measuring is hard for me especially when I need to double-check proportions.

Owner of /r/ArtFundamentals doesn't allow to submit homework in pencil, just fineliner. I've got some random red ink gel pen, which I believe will dry out if I attempt to do his second lesson. I'm planning to buy staedtler fineliner set when I have the means to do so, after that I'll give a more focused attention to drawabox.com lessons, until then I'll draw from andrew loomis book. I did try to draw with using overhandgrip, but using this grip on a usual table is close to impossible. I have no drawing board or an easel yet.

And here are 4 last sketches from last 3 days.. It may seem like they were done by rushing and not paying attention to measures, but actually they were quite tough to do... Drawing from imagination isn't something I will bother with for a good while. There can not be imagination if I can't draw from reference correctly.






Will try to update more frequently. And I've only noticed that imgur offers picture edits right on the upload page. Silly me

Still trying to follow Loomis' Figure drawing book and I've made smaller progress than I had hoped for, but drawing is far from being easy - especially when learning.

Anyway, here are my not-so-well-drawn sketches from the book.



I didn't bother to draw a detailed human figure here, because it'd take me way too long time. The layout of simple proportions/measures took a lot of time tbh. >_> I wasn't taught to use imperial measurement units, but metric and the inches/feet are rather obnoxious for me.







These curves aren't really round, as I've got no compass. And proportions are quite bad.

Here I've attempted to draw horizon/perspective relation to the figure but failed miserably. Didn't want to draw detailed figures as it'd take far too long of a time and numerous erasing.

I got as far as first batch of mannikin lay-ins in Loomis book, I've drawn first five so far but I'll only scan it in when I've got more of those done.

And mannikin of loomis looks quite confusing. Wing-like shoulders for starters, then that odd looking cape. Anyway I haven't yet got to it so I'll see how will it go and hopefully I won't get stuck, like I mostly am...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waHuGbyjghA
try this technique for the mannequin, you are doing well,but dont just copy loomis drawings, apply the knowledge, and if you are going to copy it be aware of form, sometimes while copying we tend to forget the form.

kai47 wrote:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waHuGbyjghA
try this technique for the mannequin, you are doing well,but dont just copy loomis drawings, apply the knowledge, and if you are going to copy it be aware of form, sometimes while copying we tend to forget the form.

For now there aren't much stuff to apply to my own practice of drawing, so all I can do for now is attempt to copy loomis drawings.
Which turns out pretty bad, only mannequins ended up good enough, I've done first 5 of them for now.

I could attempt to draw a bunch of "quick figure lay-ins" but it would be only one pose with crappy details. As I honestly don't know how to draw detailed enough so figure doesn't look like some kind of a mutant without a face.. Then Loomis had perspective sketches which were even hard to copy, not because I have no knowledge on perspective but because figure in perspective is more complex.

Mannequins are a bit easier to apply to practice though, than proportions or horizon related to figure head length.

Thank you for that video, I'll watch it tomorrow.

Finished drawing first page of mannequins today, it doesn't seem too tough. I believe I'll practice drawing these mannequins a little more from pose references, maybe then I'll have a solid grasp on it. So far I'm filling in lines on paper with slight uncertainty that I'd mess up right after the first try. :/

Anyway, here's what I did yesterday and today.





That's about it for now.

I really like those inked mannequins!

Artenthusiast wrote:I really like those inked mannequins!

The most difficulty with them for me is alignment. I had to double check their height and width so all of them fit. Ended up drawing some mannequins overlap each other at different spots. But I must say I understand this mannequin stuff a little bit more than gesture, so I'll keep on doing studies from Loomis book for now.

Okay, I'm still trying to work through Loomis figure drawing book and I have a few more mannequins drawn. Though I must say these ones were a tad harder than yesterday's batch, probably because I had to show some kind of movement. Maybe some of them got pretty bad proportions, and uh some didn't fit entirely on a page. I'm bad with measuring proportions, or eye-balling them even

Good work. Make sure you spend as much time as you need to nail down those proportions.

Moe wrote:Good work. Make sure you spend as much time as you need to nail down those proportions.

Thank you, the mannequins of Loomis look like a good foundation to figure structure. Although there are other means to draw a figure. Hampton, Vilppu, Huston etc.

I had a try at somewhat detailed mannequins and this is the result. This was a bit complicated I must say.. I liked that every view was shown front, side, back, 3/4 front and back



Probably there are a few mistakes. And that's inevitable. I'm still learning.

I'm s-s-lloowly progressing through Loomis book and today I've attempted to draw more detailed mannequins, the ones that are dynamic were tricky to draw and probably proportions aren't good enough. But anyway, here are latest stuff I've drawn.