I haven’t painted anything since my last Farm Road painting, but I haven’t been idle. I have been working on my draftsmanship by trying to draw my way through the Portrait and Figure Drawing courses on Proko.com. I purchased the Portrait course a long time ago, and won the Figure drawing course in the Proko Landscape Thumbnails contest. When I first bought the portrait drawing course, I watched the videos a few times, and drew the loomis head a few times, and then drew the eye once. Then, I stopped. This time, I want to force myself to draw through the whole course. It isn’t that long, so I should be able to. It’s great content, and it’s helpful when drawing any portrait.
I’m trying to treat my drawing and painting as if I were in school. I work all day, make dinner, drive the kids to dance and band. Then I put the kids to bed, and sit at the kitchen table with paper and a pencil. I pull up a YouTube video, or a lesson on Proko, and I “do my homework.“
Sometimes I draw exactly what is in the lesson. Sometimes I practice perspective instead. Sometimes I stretch the lessons by drawing something from imagination based on what I’m learning. It’s all helpful, and I do think I am improving.
The other day I watched the first lesson in the Proko figure drawing course – about gesture. I can see how this will help me improve. I drew all of the poses in that video to practice gesture before watching the second lesson, where Stan actually teaches you how to do gesture drawings (per his recommendation.) I honestly think I’m spending too much time on each gesture drawing. I should be sketching these gestures in a minute or less, but I’m averaging 5 to 8 minutes per gesture, sometimes as many as fifteen minutes. That’s not the point of the exercise. While it is helpful for me to see how the gestural drawing ends up relating to the larger masses – I should focus more on just the gesture, since I am trying to get better at seeing rhythms in the scenes I want to depict.
With all that said, I decided to post images of what I drew this past week for two reasons. First, I want to be able to look back at these later to see my progress. Secondly, I want other artists in training to see the level of garbage that should be expected when starting out with these things. This is not the first time I have tried to draw these things – not by any stretch. As a result, some of these (the detail of the eye, and the smiling baby) are actually pretty good, I think. Even though I have maybe a month or so of practice at this prior to what you see below – the drawings below are mostly really bad. I am not saying that because I’m fishing for compliments, I want others to see that when you start out, it doesn’t look as good as the drawings you see the teachers make. Its ok for your practice to look like garbage – ultimately that’s what it is. And that’s ok.
The point of practicing isn’t to generate high quality art. The point is to learn. You can watch a million hours of videos teaching you how to draw. You can read volumes of books about composition. But until you sit down at a piece of paper with a pencil, you won’t really learn the concepts that are being presented.
I don’t know why it’s different, but it is. For example: I always hear artists say “simplify the subject into shapes, and then draw the shapes.” When I first started drawing, I thought this meant “draw squares, triangles, and circles.” And this helped a little bit… but my drawings still felt rigid, and lifeless. Then I started thinking of the shapes as three-dimensional objects – I tried drawing cubes, and cylinders, and cones. This helped give my drawings more depth, but I still wasn’t able to accurately represent the subjects I wanted to draw. Then, I started learning about perspective, and have been trying to implement more and more of those lessons into my drawings. Instead of drawing cubes and cylinders, I’m trying to stretch ribbons, squash spheres, and sheer edges off of boxes. And all of these things work together to help me “see the shapes” in an object in a way that wasn’t obvious to me before. By practicing simple shapes, value structures, perspective, etc., I actually see things differently than I did before. I can’t quite explain it… but when I go to draw something now, I can tell that there is an underlying structure to what I see, and I want to draw that. The structure might be a cylinder, it might be a series of bending planes, or a slumped over bean bag… but I see “shapes” in a way that I didn’t before. Not only that – but I can tell that there is a deeper level of understanding that I don’t quite get yet. I can tell that there is a structure – a scaffold beneath the surface that I can’t picture exactly, but if I could – it would help me represent the object more faithfully. I wonder if that scaffold isn’t the gesture… more than likely, it’s a combination of everything.
Wow – that was a tangent. At any rate – here are the sketches I made over the past week or so. Again, my purpose is to encourage people who are learning like me – practice practice practice. Don’t be discouraged when your practice looks unskilled – it should. The only way to fix that is to keep doing it.
Perspective Practice
Rotate Boxes in Perspective Step 1: Column A will use lines A1 and A2. Every shape in Row α will use the horizontal lines α1 & α2. Where those lines intersect with the horizontal lines is where the vanishing points will be.
Step 2: A1 & A2 move to the left, which rotates the box. α1 & α2 stay where they were.
Step 3: A1 & A2 are now infinitely far to the right and left.
Step 4: A1 & A2 are mirrored from their position in Step 2.
Step 5: A1 & A2 match their positions in Step 1.
Step 6: In row β, the horizontal lines shift up, causing the box to rotate along its horizontal axis. A1 & A2 remain where they were in step 1.
Repeat these steps for every box, and you get this.
I tried to draw the same box three times, at different angles in each drawing, just to test my ability to maintain consistency.
I was going to try to rotate a loomis head in each box, but I gave up.
Portrait Practice
This was one of my first attempts at the Loomis head in this second attempt to complete the Portrait class on Proko.com.
Here I tried to create the same head, but from my imagination, without looking at the reference.
Tried to capture a likeness from the video, I did better, but still not great.
Tried to capture a likeness of a model in the video, didn’t work, so I drew mustache and chin hairs… because, I don’t know why.
I tried again to capture a likeness from the video, and Tom Hanks looks like his face fell into his face.
Loomis head of a baby – I really like how this one came out.
Tried to draw Stan with his mouth open – the likeness isn’t there, but this is just supposed to be a Loomis head. I went further and added details, and they look bad.
I tried again, and failed again. Hopefully after I complete the lessons on eyes, nose, lips, ears, and hair – I’ll be better able to capture a likeness.
Here I am trying to recreate a drawing from the video explaining the structure of the eye. I find drawing my own versions of the examples can help solidify the lessons.
Here I tried to draw a loomis head of someone’s face that I was watching on YouTube. Then, I practiced drawing the structure of the eye socket as it was represented in the Proko lesson. And then I tried more accurate drawings of eyes.
Again, I was trying to represent some of the things I was learning in the lesson. These kinds of drawings are sort of how I take notes when I’m watching these videos trying to learn how to draw.
The next few lessons focus on individual elements of portraits – eyes, lips, noses, ears, and hair. This is my attempt to follow along with the second episode on eyes.
Gesture Practice
Gestural Loomis head practice… not sure this is even a thing that people do.
Again with the gestural approach that didn’t work.
This is a gestural drawing from my imagination before I watched the lesson on gesture drawing. In some ways I like this better than the others, but I also wasn’t trying to match a pose, I was simply drawing and then refining whatever marks appeared until I had a pose.
This is also from my imagination, before I watched the lesson on gesture.
Another one from my imagination, before watching the lesson.
Again, from my imagination, before I watched the lesson.
These are the last drawings I made before watching the lesson. None of these are based on models – I don’t know why I think these gesture drawings from my imagination feel like they were more successful than those that were based on models, but I think it’s because when I tried to draw gestures of models, I was restricted to the actual pose.
After watching the gesture episode twice, I went back to the poses, and paused the video at each pose. Then I tried to make a gestural drawing based on that pose. I spent too much time on each one I think – the next lesson goes into more detail about how to do gesture drawings, so I’ll learn more about what I did correctly and incorrectly here.
This was one of the first poses in the lesson I think.
This is also from the lesson, examining how the vertebrae can shape the posture.
A gestural drawing of a pose from the lesson.
A gestural drawing of a pose from the lesson.
I think this was my favorite drawing that I did.
A gestural drawing of a pose from the lesson.
This looks like crap – but I think it’s actually more in line with what I’m supposed to be making.
This pose was hard, I had to do it a number of times, and I still didn’t get it right.
Another attempt at that pose.
Another attempt at that pose.
This was a hard pose as well.
Another pose
This pose was tough too – I screwed up the proportions a lot.
This gesture was highlighting the fact that sometimes you need to incorporate details in a gesture study in order to convey the story. In this case, it’s important to render the hands pointing up in order to make sure this figure doesn’t look like it’s trying to pull, or give a hug or something else.
More work on that one, showing how reduced details make it harder to understand what’s going on.
The last attempt at the arms out gesture, then a new pose. No, I wasn’t trying to draw a back rub.
Proportions are shit, but that pointed foot tells a story.
I think when I slow down, I get better results. When I go fast, things get thrown off too quickly.
This is another pose I tried a bunch of times. You can see that when I rush, my confidence actually goes down, and the results are less accurate.
This is from the lesson on gesture, the focus is on looking at shapes that are coming toward you, or away from you, and using cross-contour lines to represent them as if they were cylinders. This helps remember the orientation of the masses in the shape.
This is the last gesture drawing I drew before watching the second lesson.
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