Hello Trancematica! Nice question! I love the art style from artist who are still alive the most too. E.g. Adam Duff, Karl Kopinsky and Tite Kubo (Bleach). Absolutely adore those art syles. I think it's more important to draw in a style that fits your tastes than to pressure something on your art that isn't "you". I still think it's worth to explore the artstyle from older artists too, but in the end I would go with the stuff that really hits you. Than I think an art style that's interesting will come afte a while, because your combining all the awesome aspects in your style that you like about those you take for inspiration :)

Hi Trancematica! One idea might be to decied who your favorite amongst manga and cartoon artists are, and see if you can find out who their favorite artist are, whom instpired and influenced them? Then you can kinda have them as your “art grandparents”, that way you can take some of your inspiration from those who originally inspired your favorite artists! Here's a link to a fun and illustrative comic strip I have read about this: https://www.deviantart.com/stephenmccranie/art/Know-Your-Artistic-Lineage-341651390

Hello everyone, these are 2-minute gesture drawings I've done for the past couple of days. I feel like they're a bit on the cartoony side and not that realistic/proportional. The way I drew these was by starting with the robo bean and then attaching the limbs.  Do I need to learn anatomy in conjunction with figure drawing to make my drawings look more realistic/proportional? Or should I just focus on figure drawing for now and worry about anatomy further down the line?

Draw a box is exercise-heavy and has a strong emphasis on perspective and structure. Its exercise can be more tedious than fun per se. ArtWOD is almost entirely exercising; they do a class session, but typically, it's gear around exercises, but it is a great way to learn structure and perspective without learning perspective. Other than that, Bookwise. Perspective Made Easy by Ernest R. Norling & Perspective Drawing Handbook by Joesph D'Amelio. In my experience, all dedicated perspective courses/books typically cover the gamut; so it's up to you to know when to walk away.

Erik olson!

Mannequinization practice. A question I have is exactly how much to mannequinize before you're really just drawing the figure? Like for the hands, should you start by mannequinizing the hand as simple forms, or go down to the level of drawing out the fingers? Or am I overthinking this and it just doesn't matter?

@Liandro @Bradwynn Jones @Stan Prokopenko Hi all, I have been practicing gesture almost every day and here is my today 2min gestures. I have tried to do as Liandro and Bradwynn adviced me last time - to slow down, think about more simple curved lines, less contour and more exaggeration. I do not feel I did it right. I try to do it like Stan, but I get stressed when in action, wanting to get the important lines and then suddenly I have lines everywhere. I get into the same situation every time - to follow one contour line, then add one on the other side and waam! - a lot of contour and unnecessary lines. I usually start in this order: head, shoulder, rib, pelvis, arms, legs. About slowing down, did you mean that I should try to spend 3- 5min instead of 2min on a gesture? I am only doing 30sek and 2min because the gesture assignment is set at that time. I am about to move forward to mannequinization, but will keep practice 30sek and 2min gestures 30+min every day.

Some robo beans + a little bit of landmarks. I feel I'm struggling having the boxes be the right size for the model - I'm having a hard time making out some of the landmarks under the muscles (like the scapula).

@Trancematica Off the top of my head, I can't remember a good and fun course on perspective that includes assignments, sorry. I'm still waiting for @Marshall Vandruff's perspective course on Proko to fill in this gap :D But I do have some "consolation" recommendations. Personally, I'm a fan of the tutorials on CtrlPaint, and they have a paid series about perspective that I watched a few years ago and that were a huge help for at the time. Unfortunately, it doesn't include assignments either, but it's very practice-oriented, so you might intuitively figure out how to apply the ideas directly into drawing studies or personal projects (ah, it's also targeted towards digital drawing in Photoshop by the way - not sure if this is an advantage or a disadvantage to you). But overall, in my opinion, the highlight of this series is that it brings a view of perspective that makes it easier for beginners to get - it explores a lot of using a perspective grid instead of placing vanishing points "from scratch" on the drawing page, and at least for me, this helped deal with constructing scenes in perspective in a whole new way. So, if you'd like to check it out: https://ctrlpaint.myshopify.com/collections/foundation-skills/products/perspective-sketching-1-the-basics Also, there's the book "Perspective made easy", by Ernest Norling, which I haven't read, but a lot of people seem to love. Not sure if it contains assignments though. And, while Marshall's course on Proko won't come out, I can't recommend enough his 1994 perspective lectures. But since it has no assignments, one thing I did when I watched them a while back was to make a lot of notes for myself - I'd basically pause each video a bunch of times and make diagrams of all his explanations, and I felt this helped me almost as much as a real assignment. Have you tried it?