Activity Feed
Ren
•
1yr
added comment inHow to Simplify the Motion of the Torso – The Bean
Asked for help
Here are all of my bean studies from this week! Things might look a little repetitive since I often would draw my interpretation first (beans marked 1) and then study proko's drawing (labeled 2) as I made my way through the example videos. Also started incorporating the bean into some gesture drawings, which has been an interesting exercise since I usually start figures with the head. Going to spend another week practicing beans and gesture together before I move on to the next section!
Dawn Wong
1yr
Your beans are really nice! i like the consistency of your circles
Gabriel Azzalos
1yr
Wow! Beautiful design. I hope to get there at some point too! You look like you have good experience with drawing.
Ren
•
1yr
Asked for help
Hello! Around 2020-2021 I attempted this figure drawing course, but unfortunately I never made it through. I'm back again for another attempt and decided I'd start at the beginning since I was really out of practice! Spent a little over a week studying mostly 2 min poses, so here's a few of them. I tried to share the most recent ones since that feels most helpful in terms of addressing what I could work on now. I apologize that the image quality isn't the best; it is a little clearer if you click the original image option!
I also have a bunch more that I did (starting around the end of August?) posted in the 2023 figure drawing album on my profile page, since I figured (pun??) there were too many to share in one post. Any feedback/critique is appreciated and would be very helpful! This week I think I'm going to move onto adding the bean into my practice.
I'm also hoping that I can be more active on here, so I look forward to seeing others' work! And good luck to everyone! (:
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1yr
Hi @Ren, really nice work! I don't know if there's much I can critique, but I'll try ;)
It would be interesting to hear what your goals are. If animation, then I'm sure there are things to consider that could help with the story of the pose.
- The rhythm is really nice in these drawings, but the structure and proportions are falling behind. You want your drawings to have proportion, balance and rhythm, all working together.
Try this:
Do some more where you start with drawing the structure, rather than rhythm lines. So the lines you put down establishes things like the lenght and width of the body parts. But as you do, your main focus is gesture. You try to feel the pose, just like you would when drawing rhtymical lines, but you express that gesture, by the placement of the structure. If you put the shoulder line and the asis-to-asis line, in opposing angles, you will have an implied c-curve rhythm in the torso. And depending on how they relate to eachother vertically, you can shift the weight.
I'm not necessarily suggesting optical accuracy; it's about getting the proportions right. You may tilt and foreshorten things to tell the story more clearly, but you try to make sure that the proportions feel right in space. Be especially aware of corresponding parts, such as right upper leg and left upper leg.
The idea with my suggestion, is to help with improving the structure and proportion in your drawings. Keep in mind that this is something I'm working on myself, so take my advice with a grain of salt. You might find another way to improve the proportion and structure of your drawings.
A drawing process that might help:
-Start with the shape of the head
-Find the pit of the neck
-drop a vertical line that gives you the lenght of the body and something to refer to when establishing the weight
-Place the foot that takes the most weight (the one closest to the vertical line)
-Draw a line for the angle of the hip and a line for the supporting leg.
-Draw the shoulder line
Now the main structure and weight has been established, and within that the rhythm.
I hope this helps :)
Ren
•
3yr
Asked for help
A couple more drawings from the last two weeks or so from the landmarks section in the figure drawing course! To start I wanted to focus on the back and I think this week I'm going to move on to front view landmark studies. If anyone can offer any critique/things I should look out for going forward I'd really appreciate it! There's still a lot of the anatomy that I'm not super familiar with, but just tried to go off of what I know to start somewhere.
(This is also a small note, but the two pictures that don't have the image referenced next to them are the ones from Proko's videos.)
Thanks! :)
•
3yr
Hi @Ren Zimmerman, really nice studies!
- It looks like you're often placing the psis and great trochanter too high up. The great trochanter can be really hard to see because of all the bumps at the hip
I would recommend moving on to the assignments in the anatomy course, espescially the bones exercises. You can't get much closer with the landmarks than you have, without studying anatomy in depth.
Cheers :)
Ren
•
3yr
Asked for help
Not sure how many people will see this since I've been so inactive, but if I could get some feedback/critique on some recent figure drawing I've been doing I would really appreciate it! Here are a few drawings done over the past couple weeks--they range from about 3-5 minutes for each pose so I was able to add a little more detail. Sorry if the pictures aren't the best!
•
3yr
Hi @Ren Zimmerman, these are really good! Great gesture! Beatuiful lines! I think you're at the level where what will improve your figure drawings the most is to learn anatomy. Also I would recommend not making the same mistake as me and forget to study other vital fundamentals of picture making, like values for example. I hardly knew anything about them before last autum and they are such a great tool. Dorian Iten's The Shading Course – Fundamentals of Realism, Light & Shadow, is a great place to start (if you can't afford buying the course, he has a monthly membership available on his website https://www.theshadingcourse.com).
I tried to look for things to critique:
- The head is often too small
- In some poses I think you could have given the limbs more s-curvature (see paintover)
Hope this helps :)
Ren
•
4yr
Haven't posted in a while, but I've been trying to work on researching anatomy/landmarks more! So here are a couple ones I did recently; the way I went about it/filled things in is probably a little different than Proko's, but I felt like I was making progress! Mostly I'm concerned about whether things are generally in the right area, since I don't want to develop habits of putting things where they don't really go. Any help/critique is greatly appreciated! (I also opted to just work on the torso, since it's a lot of info and I didn't want to get overwhelmed with the arms and legs yet.) Hopefully everything is easy to read!
Ren
•
4yr
Asked for help
Beans from this week! Somewhere along the line working through each of the bean example videos I finally realized that the shorter ones organized by tilt/lean, twist, and foreshortening repeated examples in the longer video, but I was having a good time so I just went with it :') That said, there is a lot of repetition in these. The beans marked 1 are the ones I drew first on my own, and the ones marked 2 are me drawing along to Proko's after (with a couple marked 3 where I tried again). Hopefully the pictures aren't too small!
If I could ask for help on anything it'd probably be the twist examples, since sometimes it's still pretty confusing to me. It's gotten a tiny bit better with more practice, but it still takes a while for my brain to process things like which direction the overlap/twist goes, how severe the twist is, what's going on with the part of the bean that isn't visible, etc. A couple times I would use my shirt sleeve or a sock or something to help me visualize a twist :'D
I tried to pull some screenshots from the twist example video to show the comparison with my drawing, Proko's and the model to hopefully make things more clear.
Any help is greatly appreciated, thanks!
Hi Ren, these are great studies! I did a bit of critiques on the robo bean drawings next to the models that you uploaded. Hope that you find it helpful.
I personally think that you have a good understanding of the bean, and would love to see you apply what you've learned in future figure studies, or do some studies of the Robo Bean.
Let me know if there is anything that I can clear up for you. Great work!
Ren
•
4yr
Asked for help
Here are all of the figures from this past week's challenge! Day 1 had some 30 second ones in there but other than that they're all 2-3 min. poses. I was able to get in around an hour each day, and I think I'm going to try to keep it up if I can even for 30 min. a day since it was good practice. On some of the pages there might be the same figure drawn three times; that was just me drawing the pose on my own, copying proko's, and then drawing it again on my own (they go from right to left in most cases).
I think a lot of the critique from my last post could still be applied to these, but if these show anything else that could be worked on I appreciate the feedback! Still trying to think of the pose as pure energy to try to capture that movement and look for a single action line. I tried to exaggerate some poses a little, but I might try one day of really pushing them more to see how far it can go. I also added in any chairs and objects to help give more information! I want to keep practicing these but I might also move onto the bean soon!
Thanks! (:
•
4yr
beautiful work!
•
4yr
@Ren Zimmerman Really solid work, Ren! Great job going through this challenge. Jesper's suggestion of moving on and directing your focus to the following lessons is a great one which I'd endorse. It's true that the lessons ahead will build upon what you've accomplished so far, so you'll still be putting gesture into practice. If you'd like, feel free to keep us updated with your progress along the course. Best of luck!
•
4yr
Hi Ren!
These are SO good. It's a pleasure to look at them. There is so much energy that it feels like the pages are moving. No remarks on gestures from me :) I just wanted to share my thoughts on one thing you wrote:
“and I think I'm going to try to keep it up if I can even for 30 min. a day since it was good practice.”
I would actually recommend taking a break from this exercise. What I experienced as I went through the figure drawing course was that the things learned in the coming chapters helped me with the previous. When you´ve practiced the bean you´ll have a whole new understanding of torso gesture. And when you´ve practiced the robo bean you´ll be able to tackle the bean in a different way.
The new knowledge also challenges your gesture skills; how do I maintain gesture while introducing anatomical detail etc.
There is also this thing about how taking a break can help you see gesture from a new perspective (even when you haven't learned anything new). The same way you notice errors or pleasant surprises when you come back to a drawing after a break.
In short:
I would take a break from this exercise and move on with the bean. Then come back to it when I feel the need or want to investigate something new about it, maybe introduce it as a warm up routine
Hope this helps :)
PS
I wrote some about this in this post https://prokolab.com/profile/vduncombe/activity
(scroll down to the first one about “quick sketch assignments”)
I wrote:
Obsession
You asked yourself if you were a bit obsessive. When I started the figure drawing course I wanted to nail each concept before moving on. That´s a great mind set! It meant that I cared about building a strong foundation. However, alone I wasn't able to see when that foundation was strong and ready to be built upon. I practiced gesture every day for 3 months before asking for critique.
But now I wish I had done like this. If practice time is 1h/day. I would:
- Take 2-4 weeks for each course part (gesture, bean, mannequin etc.).
- After those weeks, submit for critique. Then move on with the next part. When feedback is received: I would go back and try again, focusing on the issues pointed out. Maybe 2 days is a good amount. I don´t wanna stay too long. I don´t have to worry about missing something fundamental, since the exercises are interlocking so if I´ve missed something or if I´m having continuous issues, that will show as I move on.
- I would continue like this until I finished the course. One sectiont at a time, to help me focus.
Moving on helps me see whether I should have moved on or not. If I´m moving too fast, I´ll notice that or people will point it out. Then I just slow down
🌸✨🌸✨🌸✨🌸✨🌸✨🌸 Great job, Ren! I really feel that sense of energy in your work! I hope you keep going with it ☺️.
Ren
•
4yr
Hey everyone! Hopefully it's alright if I post this here, but I was curious if anyone was interested in joining me in doing a challenge to work on gesture drawing for a certain amount of time each day for a week! For a while I had a good momentum going with practicing each morning but recently I fell off track, so I thought having some outside accountability might help. :')
I haven't decided how much to do yet but I usually have enough free time each morning to do 1 to 1.5 hours of practice. But even if it's only 30 minutes or so I think that's still valuable!
I figure I'd just post all of the drawings from each day at the end of the week so I don't make a ton of posts. I'm planning on focusing on 2 minute poses but will probably work on 30 second ones too.
If anyone's interested let me know!
How is your weeklong gesture challenge going, Ren? Thanks to one of my friends, I've decided to return to learning and continuing gesture as part of my warmup each day - nothing like what you're doing, just 15-20 minutes. 1-1.5 hours a day is a lot! Looking forward to seeing how it goes for you ☺.
Ren
•
4yr
Asked for help
I've been trying to practice gesture since late January and feel like I'm just starting to get a little bit of a better hang of it! Here are just a couple from this morning, if I could get some critique on how to keep improving that would be greatly appreciated! Even though I've been drawing for a while I was never really properly taught anatomy/figure drawing, so the figure drawing course has been challenging but I'm really thankful for finding it. Thanks again for any help (:
