Hello! I want to improve my drawing skills, practicing every day, and all that good stuff, but i have a lot of questions that come up and really gives me anxiety and puts me down every time when I start to think much about practicing drawing.. I don't know the "way" to practice, the order, i know that the very first thing to practice is to drawing the basic shapes, getting comfortable with that, and then move on to construction, anatomy and so on, but, maybe maybe it might be a silly question, but, studying and practicing the basic shapes would include studying perspective too? So i can't move on to construction and anatomy without knowing perspective? That's the big question that's always put me down..

A good start. It's also good that you've started using a skull reference. As someone who tried to learn drawing by starting out with the manga/anime style, I would actually recommend learning via the traditional style first. This is because anime style uses deformation of facial/body features; when in reality beginners need to learn the proper proportions, structure and anatomy first, or it would be difficult to see where the mistakes are as they are hidden in the stylistic deformations. As the saying goes, learn the rules first before bending the rules. Certain anime styles are also rather 2d and it would be difficult to learn from them as we need to understand the 3d forms. I'm not dissuading from learning anime style, but it would help perhaps to split the time set aside for drawing into 2 modes, one is a disciplined mode - learning anatomy via the traditional style, the other would be your leisure drawing - using the anime style or anything that strikes your fancy. For 3d reference, try using one that also has skin and muscle overlay that can be toggled on and off. There's a free website https://www.zygotebody.com where this can be done via the sliders. If you have instagram, I would recommend looking at taco1704 . He has anime/manga style tutorials and tips that more closely follow realistic proportions. It's in korean, but the images are so straightforward that it's easy to follow along regardless. He has also published a book that's on Amazon. If you get too bored or turned off with traditional style, this type of tutorials would be a good inbetween. Also, if you haven't drawn the skull yet, I encourage you to try doing so! As the skull is the hard bony structure that does not change regardless of expression, learning how the skull looks in different views will help toward a baseline for understanding the facial landmarks.

Hello there! Great job so far, you nailed the perspective on some of those :) I don't want to be that guy, but if you want to learn anatomy - or fundamentals in general - you might want to drop the anime style for a bit. It's important to learn the basics before you actually start to stylize. Overall I think you should improve your lines, so they are much cleaner. Don't be afraid to make long, bold lines instead of chicken sketches. If you want to use the Loomis method, you probably should get into perspective. Good luck on your journey! :)

Hey Patrick! Great job on these, I can tell you're grinding on drawing. The first thing I'd say is start doing long drawings. Like spend 3 to 4 hours on a single study with a specific goal in mind. The goal shouldn't be like "Draw a perfect head" it should be like "Make sure that the plumb lines on the nose, mouth, chin, and eyes are all the same". Loomis is all about simplification of really complicated forms. The head is one of the most complicated things to draw, on top of it being the thing that humans are literally the most sensitive in seeing slight differences in. The biggest problem I see here is that it feels like you're rushing ahead when you draw. If you're doing a study of something and you restart because you've made a mistake, stop. Think about the mistake and ways to fix it. From those experiments will come your style, and high quality drawing. At this stage, do not worry about doing good drawings. Focus on doing the worst drawings you possibly can. Make as many mistakes as fast as you can. I was told this by Jeff Watts, but I've heard it dozens of times. "You have 100,000 bad drawings inside of you before you can get to the good ones. The job of an art school is to help you get through 10,000 of those". If you're looking for someone to study. Look up Brian Lee, or funkymonkey1945 online. He does some really solid anime/ traditional art cross over stuff. Good luck, and seriously keep up the good work! You're on the right track -Kristian Here are a couple of Brian's images: