Hi! This is my first time posting in this part of the forum, as I'm pretty new to this whole 'art' thing. I started practicing earlier this year using
Drawspace as suggested by the sticky here, and then signed up for a 10 session drawing course to get some more personal help. That's over now, so here are some of the fruits of my labor.
First up, a blind contour drawing of my hand. Obviously a bit abstract, but still a fun exercise:
These are a few random picks from the Drawspace tutorials:
A couple of bigger (A2) charcoal pieces from the drawing course:
Random doodlings since the course finished:
At the moment I'm just looking to find my artistic feet, and get some of the basics down. I'm becoming more interested in learning to draw people specifically, and to that end have signed up for a life drawing course running for four evenings this week.
Any comments, critiques and suggestions welcome. I'm from a design background, so I know how to take crit - do your worst!
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I'm sure you will have a blast in that life drawing class, and remember that you can also take a sketchbook with you to public places and sketch the folks you see. It's good fun and helps you notice things about the way people look and pose. Try doing them in pen and this may help with your line confidence also.
Good luck!
facebook.com/LauraCatherwoodArt
I've picked up a smaller sketchbook to keep with me, and also potentially found a group of people who meet up around London to draw on location. While the focus is generally on drawing the locations, I don't see any reason why I couldn't get some practice drawing the people around too.
I've been copying people from dvd covers and game manuals:
And today I found a group that meets up every week for life drawing:
The current plan is to keep on going to the life drawing group, and get good!
me too! minus the life drawing group =,( FOR NOW! keep up the work man. I notice you have confident strokesl you don't do what I do and do like 10 strokes to make a line. ya? I'm told it's necessary for this 'good' achievement
(copied from a bag of chips)
(using a single line)
...and paintings?
(bottle and pineapple still in progress)
(some weird exercise from a painting course)
Crit/suggestions more than welcome
I'm really not a good person to offer advice on figure drawing, but I think you're focusing too much on the making the lines, and then doing the shading. You should be focusing only on light and dark, highlights and shadows. Build your forms through the shades that you see. You can start to learn by maybe only doing a few shades, like a light, a mid-tone, and a dark. This will help you be able to break things down in a more manageable way. Just my 2 cents!
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You're getting there, but your still dropping back into symbology when drawing faces in a couple of the examples you posted.
But first, a painting in progress:
Reference:
Life drawing - I've tried to keep them in chronological order but they only go back a month or so, so it's not that important:
I like the head on this one, and most of the torso down to the arms. The rest not so much...
Go foreshortening!
This one was originally only going to be a 5-10 minute pose so I was rushing to start with. It turned into about a 15 minute job, so I think I overdid some of the shading.
Really messed up the couch on the right hand side.
Tried not to smudge the charcoal on this one and really liked the end result.
As always, comments and crits welcomed. Thanks!