Week 3, attempt 2 - twelve more hands and feet! This was a great challenge. I've got a long way to go, but seeing how much I can improve in just 3 weeks is really encouraging. I can only imagine the gains if you did this daily for a year or two. Fantastic submissions everyone, and good luck!!

Week 3. That was even more challenging, for me, than the full figure gesture drawings. I think it’s just a matter of me being more used to thinking about, and drawing, the entire figure in gesture, than I am to thinking about, and drawing, feet and hands as gestures. I did feel my mind getting less awkward at thinking of hands and feet as gestures as I went along, but I feel like I will need a lot more practice at it to get to a more comfortable place where I feel more confident on how to handle it. This was fun. I’m going to try and keep up the gesture drawing every week, and try to get at least 10 in.

Week 1 and 2 I’m so glad I decided to participate in this gesture drawing challenge. I felt myself level up while working out how to draw with a balance of speed and accuracy. I was having a lot of issues with proportion, and also angles, which made me have to stop and think how to better find that balance. For instance I noticed that the problem was that I was trying to figure out the angle distance and curve of a line a while at the same time drawing that line, hoping it would work out, because that felt like it would be faster. But what happened was my proportions and angles would be off and I would hate the drawing and have to start over. What I learned there is that sometimes slowing down and taking the time to first find the angle, then find the length, and then finally connect that with the curve, actually saves time because you are more likely to get it right the first time. I also realized that even a bad drawing can be very helpful. If I take a moment and think about where I went wrong, and what I should have done, things go much smoother on the next one. Coming up with a game plan to improve the next one, I think, is really where the leveling up happens. I always look at gesture references and get this strong feeling of wanting to draw them. However, I have felt like I need to psych myself up, and be in the right head space to problem solve and deal with the frustration. But going through all these drawings and all the iterations of them, and coming up with methods that give me better results, has helped me click past that feeling, for gesture drawings. Somewhere they stopped feeling stressful, and started to just feel fun and interesting. I no longer feel like there are poses that are maybe just too hard for me. I have stopped taking it personally if I don’t like how the first attempt turned out. Now, that bad first attempt is just another tool to help me measure how to do a better version. I also got past the feeling that parts of a gesture drawing can be precious, and because some of it is good I need to be stuck with the part that is bad. No longer do I mind erasing arms that I think look good, except for that they are too long, and worried that I couldn’t recapture the good if I tried to fix it. It all feels attainable with gesture. It’s not like it will take forever to redraw anything, that happens pretty fast. Which all means it doesn’t matter if I mess something up, I can just fix it, so it’s not stressful. I’m feeling really good about these gesture drawings, even though they are not perfect, I can see the flaws, but I also feel like I could easily improve them if I wanted to spend more time on them. I also see the strengths in them, and I’m happy enough, for now, with their quality. One thing I notice, though, is that I like these drawings a lot better when viewing on a smaller screen.

2024/11/13. Good evening everybody. This is another fantasy character I drew this week (Lyra Rembrandt-Polycolor indian red on Hollbein drawing paper, 50 x 65 cm). Thanks for any comment or critique!

This was very challenging. I wanted to start with one that was just a value scale that I could pull off with only using my HB graphite pencil, which is what this is. I planed on doing one next with just my 4b pencil but I ran out of time. I’m still going to do it though. Then I was going to do one with 10 values. I wanted to smudge these so badly! The light erasing, that you should us with the kneaded eraser, is a helpful technique to even out the darker spots, but if I tried to be too perfect with it, which I did, it would end up giving me spots that were too light, and then I would need to fill in again, and repeat. I felt very much like a dog chasing his own tail. So I realized that I would have to be more forgiving with what I considered was good enough. The other time consuming thing is, when you realized, after spending so much time trying to make things look smooth, that you need to change the value to darker or lighter and do the whole thing over. It is hard to not take note of the time you are putting into this and not feel rushed. This was made worse by taking a picture. In the photo it ends up looking different than in life. One thing I noticed about the photo is that it seemed to exaggerate the darker and lighter spots on an individual value square. I ended up using that as a tool to find areas that I needed to fill in more or lighten more. Some places just didn’t seem to want to fill in evenly. That might be oils from my fingers, like was mentioned on the video. As far as the values go, I think there is a noticeable jump between them, but I think that there was a bigger jump in value at the end. It’s just something I will have to work more on to get that balance just right. It would be easier when I attempt this with different pencil hardnesses. Also, I am sure it would be easier on better paper. I was just using copy paper.

I’m not sure what my favorite perspective artist are. I’ve always been more interested in drawing people and animals than in backgrounds. But I have also always wanted to be able to imagine and create interesting backgrounds to put characters in. I found a few perspective pictures that I like. I’m having trouble finding ones that might have been better examples of cool backgrounds that take perspective mastery to draw. I’m not even really sure what I’m looking for. I guess just things that really jump out at me. One thing that I’ve always struggled with is how to have a scene where you have multiple objects that have, not just different vanishing points, but also different horizon lines that they vanish to. For example you have a person standing on the ground, but they are holding a staff that’s coming at an angle towards the camera and above it. It will have a different horizon line than the rest of the room, that is in a one or two point perspective. It’s very hard to find stuff on how to handle that correctly so that everything feels the correct size in relation to the rest of the perspective objects in the room and the room itself.

Hi Patrick. @Patrick Jones I am hoping you can make it a bit more clear how your new course, “Fantasy Figure Drawing Wizardry,” differs from your other course, “How to Draw Fantasy Females.” One question I have, is which one would you recommend going through first? Is one more advanced than the other? What are you hoping people will come away with from the new class, that maybe they wouldn’t get in the previous class? If you already have, “How to Draw Fantasy Females,” why should you want this one as well? Right now, just reading about the classes on their overview page, doesn’t really give me a clear idea of why someone would want to get both, or if they only wanted to get one, which one should that be to best suit them. I mean the new class looks awesome, and I love your work, but if I am confused about it I am sure others are too. I feel like you said the new one would be better for beginners, than the previous one, on a stream, but I see nothing that indicates that in the descriptions on their overview pages. I would love more clarification here. Thanks for your time.

Here's 2 attempts for Level 2, Game 2! The running man went pretty well, but I struggled hardcore with the stretching woman, especially the lower half of her torso. Other than getting the proportions / perspective right, I sometimes worry that my drawings lack appeal. I realize this will come with practice, but I think sometimes I get too caught up with the technical side of things and forget to make shapes that look good in addition to being correct. This is exciting, though. My first time working seriously with mannequins. Great exercise!

I’ve made two collages of some of my drawing, one from last year and one from this year, that I think is worth looking at. None of this is really finished work, and there are gesture drawings where I’m not too concerned with the proportions, where instead I am just working on flow and line control. I typically don’t bother correcting the proportion issues, even though I do see them. Right now, I have more the attitude of, fix it in the next one. Anyway, I thought I would share them here.

I’m planning on doing more of these, but this is what I have gotten down so far. I had some problems figuring out the male pose with the twist at first. It was looking too flat a points and just wrong. I still don’t think I got it perfect but I think I got it pretty close now, and I feel like it holds it’s volume. For the other one I just thought it would be fun to do a gesture sketch first and then draw the torso box on top, so I did, and it was.