Videos now on YouTube & Vimeo instead of large .movs (but beware NSFW drawings)

Virum

Ok, so this is my weekly dump thread. Most of this weeks are already in the doodle thread, but I'll probably start dumping most of my stuff in this thread for now.

Monday and Tuesday:



Wednesday:



Thursday:



Friday:



Too scared to shade that one....

I dunno what all you guys can say but any tips, pointers, crits, etc. None of these are serious works in that I plan on fixing them up, but that doesn't mean I can't apply what I'm told to the future.

I really want to get good; and I'm actually drawing every day now that summer started and I actually feel like I'm getting better.

lifeartist

Good for you! I'm still having trouble getting started with drawing everyday. I can't say much about the drawings, but I would love to see you finish the dress on the second drawing.

Good luck, and keep at it, don't let yourself make excuses to not draw like I do lol

Edit, some of the eyes on your faces in the first drawing seem a bit odd in my opinion. Besides that I like your stuff!

Virum

Last week I was pretty happy with my work. This week was an exercise in frustration, it feels like I'm getting worse.





I did the shoe after the foot.



I forgot ears in both my self portraits, but didn't notice until I scanned. Weird.



bleh

MagicToaster

Hey Virum! Though I don't have any crits, I want to encourage you to keep at it! How much time do you dedicate to this excersice?

HugmasterGeneral

I think you have lots of potential. That being said, if you're serious about wanting to depict realistic humans, you'd do good to learn stronger facial structure to really make your pictures pop. Right now, the faces, despite their heavy shading, seem very flat and two-dimensional. (A bit redundant, but you know.)

What gave me great help was giving "Drawing the Head and Hands" by Loomis. Here's a great excerpt to describe what I like to think of as the magic circle. Learning the simple shape with the middle line and other guidelines will go a long way towards making more three-dimensional faces.


(Click to Enlarge)

If you'd like to read the entire text, I'm sure someone here knows the link to the Loomis books in Acrobat format.

Virum

MagicToaster wrote: »

Hey Virum! Though I don't have any crits, I want to encourage you to keep at it! How much time do you dedicate to this excersice?

It depends. I didn't draw several days this week (I did more than one a few days to make up for it). When I feel like i'm regressing, it's hard for me to sit down and draw because it's not very satisfying.

I bought Drawing on the Right Side of Your Brain the other day which is why I did the last three exercises; the author says to do those before you start going through her exercises so that you have something to compare to at the end of the book. I hope it helps.

I'd say I took about an hour and 10 minutes to do the exercise, but I didn't look at the clock.

rfilyaw: thanks, I think I might have that book hanging around here somewhere. I need to spend more time setting up my figures, I hate that part of drawing and I don't spend as much time hashing out proportions as I should. On a skull study I did a while back I took a lot more time with it, and it was a lot better:



That was in April, and it's better than my latest stuff.

Virum

Well, it hasn't been a week, but i haven't exactly been that productive lately either. I was pretty busy, but it was more I didn't feel like drawing until yesterday. I'm just posting what I did today because the other doodles from yesterday aren't worth scanning - I was watching TV and I never draw as well if I'm not just drawing.



Giraffe neck!



I like this, but her arm is messed up.

BananaChips

On the last one I would say the eyes are a lot more noticeably wrong than the arm.

Baldasarre

lmao @ "Arr"

NakedZergling

those last post are looking good!

Virum

Thanks guys.

Virum

Brolo

Nude woman is good, but man, you're having some real issues with faces, particularly with eye placement. I'm not really sure how to help except to tell you to find some photo references for your faces if you're not using them already.

Virum

Yeah, I know my eyes suck, that's why I've been doing so many faces. I always reference.

Virum

Better?



This shit is hard.

rts

Hopefully this will help:

http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=14119

A tutorial by a guy who used to teach at my school.

Kewop Decam

slow down. Drawings are made in mere seconds, at least not highly rendered ones.

Also, always take frequent breaks and look at the drawing from a distance. Makes it very easy to spot mistakes

Virum

cakemikz - thanks, that looks helpful. Quick question though, what are plumb lines?

Kewop Decam - Ok, I'll try to slow down.

Thanks.

rts

A plumb line is a straight vertical line. Some artists used to use a string with a weight attached to get a perfectly straight line and then hold it up to the model or whatever they are drawing or painting to help divide the form and find rhythyms. In the sense that Ron is using it he just means look for shapes that are connecting vertically, and make sure they are lined up vertically in your drawing. Its just an easy way to check to make sure you are putting things in the right places. Say, if you were looking at a generic person from straight on, the inside of their eyes might line up vertically with the outside of their nostrils. This is something you would want to push in your drawing, by putting down a plumb line (or a straight vertical line) and making sure they were lined up properly.

Hope that helps.

Virum

Makes perfect sense. Thanks.

Grifter

I'd suggest doing some more actual eye studies. Draw just the eye and all of its anatomical structures so that you have a better understanding of how it should be drawn on the face. You are progressing with the shape and placement of the eyes but they are still lacking in a few areas. If you have Dynamic Anatomy, there's a very nice section on the eye in it. Or you could take some close up photos of some eyes and study them to get a better idea.

Kewop Decam

Virum wrote: »

cakemikz - thanks, that looks helpful. Quick question though, what are plumb lines?

Kewop Decam - Ok, I'll try to slow down.

Thanks.

Just to make sure I was clear...

I meant to type "Drawings are NOT made in mere seconds, at least not highly rendered drawings."

You probably understood that, but yea. The first couple off minutes of a drawing are the most important. It is not hard to put high detail into a drawing, that's actually the easy part. Getting everything where it's suppose to be is the hard part.

Virum

Yeah, I understood that, Kewop. ;p

Grifter: Sounds like a good idea. I'll hop to it.

Virum

I tried starting with a sphere but it's not really helping.

Well I guess it is. The bottom one I didn't and it's the worst.

Grifter

Getting there, mate. Remember that most of the time your iris is covered in part by your eye lids. Right now your eyes all look very surprised. I'll make some scans when I get home for you to study, ok?

Virum

You're the man. Thanks.

Grifter

Turns out that my home PC is offline right now. I'll get you the scans tomorrow for sure though. In the meantime, take this excerpt into consideration:

The Eye: The eyball, almost as large as a golf ball, in the human head, is an exposed internal organ of the body protected by great structures of bone, the brow ridge (superciliary arch) and the cheek bone (zygomatic bone). I tis suspended  from the roof of the eye socket (orbit). The eyelids curve like short visors on the eye; the upper curves wider across the fuller circumference of the orb, while the lower turns on a shorter arc, around the base area.  Seen from a side view, the lower lid lies angled down almost 45 degrees from the upper lid. Surrounding the eye is the orbicularis muscle, enclosing and circling the orbit, It gives little shape, however, to the surface form of socket and cheek bone.

Virum

That's helpful, thanks Grifter.

Highlander_77

Grifter wrote: »

Turns out that my home PC is offline right now. I'll get you the scans tomorrow for sure though. In the meantime, take this excerpt into consideration:

The Eye: The eyball, almost as large as a golf ball, in the human head, is an exposed internal organ of the body protected by great structures of bone, the brow ridge (superciliary arch) and the cheek bone (zygomatic bone). I tis suspended  from the roof of the eye socket (orbit). The eyelids curve like short visors on the eye; the upper curves wider across the fuller circumference of the orb, while the lower turns on a shorter arc, around the base area.  Seen from a side view, the lower lid lies angled down almost 45 degrees from the upper lid. Surrounding the eye is the orbicularis muscle, enclosing and circling the orbit, It gives little shape, however, to the surface form of socket and cheek bone.

If I'm not mistaken, this is an excerpt from Burne Hogarth's 'Drawing the Human Head', am I correct?

An excellent book, as are all of Hogarth's instructional books. Highly recommended reading.

Grifter

It's actually from Dynamic Anatomy but you're very close.

tmccool

One time I got shot in the eye with an airsoft gun. I hope I don't get glaucoma in 20 years as a result.

I drew a lot of eyes from close up references, it seemed to help understanding the foundations of it.

Kewop Decam

google images of people and just look at there eyes so you know how open they should be. Most people eyes usually aren't that open.

Also, once the areas of the eye are broken down to you, you'll instantly understand and know why some eyes look flat and poor. Andre Loomis has a good break down in his Heads/Hands book linked on the first page (it's in PDF format, just clip through it)

Virum

Thanks for all the suggestions guys. I seem to somewhat get drawing the eye by itself, but I still strugle with placing it in the face.

Meh, anyways:

Didn't feel like doing a straight up portrait or anything this day, so I decided to make a one page thing. Yeah the writing sucks but I did it for a drawing exercise. I don't know a thing about perspective.







Man oh man was 8 hours of orientation freakin boring:



I didn't like the above crap so when I got home I did this:

Grifter

I think you may be concentrating too much on detail, mate. You may want to go back and do some structural studies to help you out. Seems like you're trying to get too much detail. A lot of the time you can attain more by drawing less lines.

Virum

What exactly makes you say that? I'm not sure I follow. Could you show me what you'd do instead for instance? I'm trying to define shapes with shading as opposed to line so I'm not sure what I need to be doing.

Kewop Decam

Virum wrote: »

What exactly makes you say that? I'm not sure I follow. Could you show me what you'd do instead for instance? I'm trying to define shapes with shading as opposed to line so I'm not sure what I need to be doing.

"It's not always what you draw, sometimes it's what you don't draw."

Heard that somewhere, don't remember where but it's a common thing to think about


You want to get a good symbolism of most things, not duplicate it to hell most of the time. Think about it this way... how detailed would someone's eye be if they were 1 foot from you? Now think about how detailed it would be 5 feet from you.

You still get it's an eye, you still have the shape of an eye, but the detail changes. You wanna work with that a bit. Just let go and try something new, be loose.

Virum

Ok I tried to implement what you guys were saying.









I don't feel like I'm getting any better.

mattharvest

Well, getting better takes time. I think your biggest problem is that you're essentially breaking the perspective of the objects you're drawing.

In other words, lines that should be parallel - e.g. the lines from top-to-bottom for each eyeball - are divergent, or worse, they aren't straight lines. This results in a pseudo-Cubist look, where the viewer is apparently occupying more than one position as it looks at the subject.

Take a photo, and literally draw the contour lines on a face. Look at the relationship between these lines, especially in perspective. For example, draw a line that runs along the face from the top of the head, down the forehead, down the precise middle of the nose, through the center of the lips, and finally to the exact middle and bottom of the chin. Then, consider the distances that symmetrical points are from that line. For example, if you're looking straight at a face, the eyes should be equidistant from that center line, as should any pair of features (the cheeks, the lip-corners, etc.).

This is what drawing involves: the ability to recreate real-world relationships on paper, until you're able to synthesize your own.

BananaChips

Not Samuel L Jackson : (

made me crack up, I don't know why :P I like the little "Not feeling like I'm getting better" part, how long has this thread been up? Three weeks? That's only 5.6% of the year! It takes time time time. Go look at some killer art and get inspired. The stuff on these boards absolutely fills me with glee And don't ever think of giving up, I mean, fuck that. My suggestion would be too loosen up, do some larger drawings with maybe only 2 or 3 really defined tones. I agree where it's been said you're trying too much detail. You need to get a feel and flow more for the general work than trying to sort out all the intricate stuff.

Creambun 007

I'd suggest you stop shading everything and just focus on your linework. Lots of shading doesn't make poorly constructed lines look better. Start by paying attention to contours, proportions, and where elements are in relationship to eachother. Once you've pulled off a few successful line drawings, then you can start shading stuff. It's all a natural progression. Keep practicing

Grifter

Sorry for taking so long with getting you this stuff. Here's the section on eyes in Burne Hogarth's Dynamic Anatomy. Hope that it helps you out a bit.

http://www.griftart.com/ref/hogartheye.pdf