Did another set of 10 drawings. This one was a mixed bag. Some drawings looked good, such as 4 or the hand on 10. But others were simply lacking, such as 1. I still have a long way to go before I'm able to be satisfied with the majority of the drawings I put down, but for now, it's fun to have the little moments where I try and land on a shape that I quite like, like the pointing hand in 10.

After watching the rhythm critique I think I have a bit of understanding, but I still need some help. The center line for some pose is hard for me to either jot down or I’m sure how to put down. I also can help but feel like the poses I did(sorry I tried to download the reference photos but they will not for some reason) feel stiff and not alive. I really need someone’s help on this. @Proko anyone on the team I’d appreciate your help! This is some I really want/need to improve upon.

Some attempts today after having watched the demos and critiques yesterday, took me around an hour and a half for these. I think my first attempts before watching were a little too focused on the literal lines and with making things make sense in my own head, with these I just tried to be quicker, and more focused on the "flow," of things in a more general sense. I think as a result they look sloppier, but also a bit more dynamic? Hard to say. There are definitely some parts I find consistently difficult, like putting in the deltoid in a way that doesn't make things feel segmented like lego people.

My third attempt drawing the 24 poses after watching the demo, critique, and reading the e-book. All of the poses were drawn in ~7 minutes for a combined total of around 3 hours. I felt more confident in my rhythms the further I progressed, and I am happy with these results. I will definitely incorporate this exercise into my practices. Critiques would be appreciated.

After the critique. Will eventually get around to enrolling in the figure drawing course.

Thank you Stan for answering my question. I took a short break to finish up my degree and I am very grateful and surprised to see that I made it into your video. Your explanation makes total sense and I was having some frustrations with trying to understand the concept about being "flow-y and also keeping proportions correct, my mind was having trouble comprehending how those could both exist at the same time and the critique have given me confidence to attempt the lesson now and catch back up to where we're at in the course. I have enjoyed the course so far and I hope to be able to continue to appreciate my time as a student.

I have been practicing. Started with the warming ups while watching, then did a whole bunch of drawings from the ebook (Great book!) and then did several poses twice... or more. 3 to 4 minutes. Used the overhand mostly... Did also 30 minute session on 2 minutes for the naked models in live action but found it was too fast. I am way out of shape. Will have to redo that with 5 minutes and post later. But probably need to screenshot the models to compare better later.

For anyone wanting to do more practice: There is a great website called https://line-of-action.com and you can choose your time of figure study and it will give you poses of either equal times (your choice and can be 5 min) or of class mode with 30 seconds warm ups, to 1 minute working up to the 10 minute pose... You can fill in quite a bit on the type of model (female, male or random) and the time for your class can be from 30 minutes to 6 hours!!! Never gets boring!

Because I was doing Inktober very intensively, I am a bit behind in this course. I decided to do a binge watch the two demos and the critiques and warm up with drawing along a few, but look forward to doing this week loads of rhythms in the poses... I started figure drawing when I was 18, and my teacher forced me to do 1 or 2 minutes with a 10 inch brush of black paint (on A2 paper) (30 years ago) so I would forget to focus on the details.... I would draw people on the market in Mozambique... but certainly not weekly. With some friends here in Panama, about 12 years ago, we had a model that was pregnant, weekly for 7 months.. those were a lot of drawings but I did not keep it up. Let me see, so I am a bit scared! Let me see that after doing the exercises I am going to look up those old sketches of the pregnant lady and see how I have progressed. I do not think I ever realized so well what rhythms and gesture was about! Thanks for the lessons so far. Now it is drawing time! By the weekend I hope to post my results. And I do not agree that digital should be as fast as normal drawing... I struggle in digital due to the smaller size of my ipad... and on the computer because I am drawing on a flat wacom tablat and seeing the screen... And I do not have the digital miles yet.... I do have pencil miles, although fewer with the overhand.

Hey stan sorry for being a demanding student in different courses, will you talk about how to draw sphere in perspective in the next session? coz i m trying to draw the head in perspective and it aint working... i guess my sphere is wrong and check some online resource but they seem to be too technical

Thank you Stan for your critique. I will go practice for thousand times more. Ever since I discovered Proko and this course, I started to feel maybe one day my dream of being able to paint anything I like would come true. Drawing is the stepping stone! And now doing the assignment and practicing drawing is my method of mental recovery after a day of busy work. I respects you, Marshall, and Jeff. You not only teach drawing knowledge, but also try to help us beginner seeing a bigger picture.

Thank you Proko for these rytm excersices and your explenation of it! My main focus outside this base course is gesture rytm and anatomy and i want to be able to create my own poses from imagination that also look good and are dynamic. And it has felt as such a slow process. But these rytm excersices have actually allready start to give fruit! Yesterday i did my warm up excercises scribbles and sketches. And tried to make a figure drawing with a dynamic pose from imagination. And it was the first time i felt it actually looked good without reference!

Thank you for the feedback Stan. I really want to get this right as this is pretty important so I got straight to work. Wanted to do more but it's way late and I'm not focusing. Again started off strong but I feel like I lost the point of the exercise mid way through. The 5th made me lose patience, I did that one a good 5 times. It's just such a straight pose. Anyway I'm open to feedback, I'll be doing more. If anyone knows where I can get more models please send me a link. This is all taken from https://www.posemaniacs.com/muscles.

Thank you Stan for explaining why you included rhythms early and the long term benefits. Helpful. I panicked at first at the unknown. Will practice and fail forward ; )

Thanks for this critique as always Stan - of course as usual it's post-assignment when the issues and challenges with the assignment become clear XD - I don't know if there'd be a way to show more "critique" in the initial lesson? It may not really help, I'm sure part of it is actually having done the work yourself first in order to understand the issues more. either way, thanks so much, great lesson.

Thanks for the encouragement! I’m not sure how I missed this the 17+ times I watched the explanation of gesture but when you spoke about finding the connections in the body in the critique video that really clicked for me. I’m going to keep practicing!

Thanks for the video Stan. Every time I watch a video of you doing / talking about your process for using rhythms for gesture drawing I gain more insight to ways of thinking of, and going about tackling, your method for rhythms and gestures. After watching this video I feel like I have a lot of room to explore using longer rhythm lines. I watch Michael Mattesi’s Force Fridays every week, and he has a different method for thinking about rhythms which concentrates on the rhythms of the forces of motion and gravity that move through the body, instead of drawing longer rhythm lines. In his case, the longer rhythm lines would be the imaginary lines that connect the lines that you draw, flowing that force from the one line to the apex curve of the next opposing sides line. So I had to adjust to the way that you go about it. I really like Mattesi’s Force method, but, at the moment, I find your method works in a way that is easier for me to get things more consistently “accurate,” when drawing from a reference. I feel like I am getting better results this way. Although I do find that when drawing using, more, your type of rhythm lines, I am still trying to think about how the Force would flow through it. I am convinced that there is some way to incorporate both of your two methods into one hybrid version of the two, and that that method will end up working the best for me. Right now my brain is a bit caught in between. I also wanted to thank you for your kind words about my comments. That was really nice to hear. It meant a lot. I always worry when I give feedback that I may be incorrect, or just think something is supposed to be done one way, when there are actually other ways, that I don’t know about, that are as equally valid a way of doing something. I don’t want to steer someone away from something that is just different from the way I understand it, but is not “wrong.” But at the same time when I feel like I might be able to help someone, I feel like I don’t want to not try to do that. You have encouraged me to keep trying to be of help, even though I am still just learning myself. I find it actually helps me understand some things more when I take the time to try and explain it, because I really have to think about it first.

Thanks Stan, I'll keep doing them! And I'll make sure my feet rhythms are up to standard! Honestly it just gets more fun once you get better at it, so for me it's not such a struggle anymore to sit and do quick-sketch! Can't wait to fail at drawing cubes and cylinders next, oh boy! :)

Thank you, Stan, it feels so strange to be called advanced when only 2 months ago I was first trying to understand beans and tapered lines and boxes and 3D space. XD I have been practicing and hopefully some of the proportion issues have and will continue to get better. Thank you Steven Wolf as well, you always help us with excellent critiques. 😊

Thank you so much for your critique :) This course is so much fun and helpful! Thank you for all the effort and time you put in your project, demo and critiques videos. Your instructions are making drawing so much fun that it's pretty hard to put the pencil away :D It's like burning through those scetchbooks! :)