what would be the best painting medium to start with in terms of ease of learning. I watched a video where Jeff Watt recommended oil paints because they can be layered, do you agree?

After what essential foundational training in draftsmanship is needed before painting?

These are amazing grace! These remind me of Steve Huston's gesture drawings. I think you should move to longer gesture studies maybe add in some more anatomy. Anyway these are very elegant!!

Hi Renaldi, Your gestures have a lot of charaacter to them! What I believe you can improve upon are lines. I see a lot of sharp lines with are adding that character to your drawings but you need to balance them out with some slow sweeping lines. If you find a line to be somewhat straight don't try and give it a curve rather make it more straight, try and amplify the function of the line. I also feel the proportions are a bit off so keep a look out for negative shapes and overall proportions of the figure. Anyway these are great drawings and seem pretty animated, which is always a good sign!

Hi Pedro! Great effort. If I may I would like to point a few things out to you that might help you. First I would direct you to drawabox.com they have easy to follow lessons with video instructions to help you achieve a greater control over your line quality. They will also teach you the proper way to approach geometric forms with the right perspective. Right now your geometric forms are not accurate, to make them better you need to understand 1point, 2point perspective properly. As for your figure drawings, I would ask you to focus less on details and more on the overall gesture of the pose. Watch proko’s gesture videos and try to use sweeping lines (C,I,S curves only) to make your gesture poses. Try to emulate Stan’s line control and decision making. These things are important to pay attention to as they bring more life to our drawings otherwise they might seem stiff and loose. Keep learning and posting your work so we can see you progress! Hope this helped.

Hi figaro, I can share how I approach such things. I usually use a Copic to lay a basic structure( a sphere in this case for the head of the flower and then I add the elements like leaves and petals. This very basic layin acts as a guide for me as I usually use a fine liner to ink it. I usually focus on the bigger shapes ignoring all the details at this point. I try and draw the shape of petals and other elements focusing almost entire on their contour. After than what I believe adds the most 3D look to it are contours. You can be done here if you are practising forms initially otherwise you can go ahead and add the shadows , just separating dark from light. I will try to upload an example whenever I can till then you can let me know if you found this useful. Feel free to ask me if you didn’t understand something.

These are great! I love the rendering, can you share how you render in photoshop? Coming from a traditional background I find it pretty challenging. Btw Steve Huston is a great inspiration for me too, I love referencing his work and book.

Doing the same pose multiple times has worked so well for me as well, I feel I learn a lot more when I dive into studying the same pose rather than doing them at random.

Just uploading for today to make sure I'm keeping myself in check ;3 visualizing the plumb line is a but of effort but if I just enjoy myself things go much faster I feel.

Hi Lynx, Are you trying to depict a turning movement in the second pose? If so then I guess the front side of the hips should be higher than the other side in the exaggerated drawing because of the shift in balance. You could even try striking the pose to check it. Hope that helps.