[edible snowman]

lately i've been drawing a lot of human bodies using photos. some of them i've taken, and some are downloaded from various websites. i can't go to any life drawing sessions, so i figure this is the next best thing. anyway, a lot of the time when i'm working on a drawing the original sketch is pretty far off. when i get it wrong i can tell, and if i spend enough time on it i can fix it. my question is, should i be doing this? should i work on each drawing until its correct, or just quit once i see its going the wrong way and start a new one.

[xXxPZxXx]

I don't really know what is best but I have gone to a couple life drawing sessions. If you want to treat what you are doing as life drawing then I would just start over. Since the poses are timed you don't have time to rework it really. If you mess up you start over.

It's quick and a 1 time shot (unless the poses are longer)

hrmmm I hate making posts that don't answer the question. Just telling you what I have experienced. I am sure someone knows what is best. (and as long as you are practicing it isn't going to hurt anything.)

-PZ-

[edible snowman]

thanks. thats pretty much what i was thinking, based on my limited life drawing experience. i just want to do whatever is going to make me learn the most, in the shortest period of time. well, that would be life drawing, so besides that.

[edible snowman]

i hate to bump this up, but is no one replying because this thread hasn't been noticed, or because xxxpzxxx is right. does this mean i should get an egg timer or something and do a bunch of 1-5 minute drawings? how do i know when to start spending more time on them? im thinking when the majority of the quickly done drawings are well proportioned. any advice you could offer on this sort of practicing would be helpful.

[c]

hmm, i hope i can help but your mileage may vary.

working from photographs is rather problematic. the resolution is extremely low (even though it may appear fine) life drawing is hard enough with the infinite resolution of real actors, but when you have 72dpi stuff on screen it's just... very frustrating.

that said do what you can to 'simulate' life drawing so when you do take a class you can take off with your feet running. get one of those big clipboards and large paper (18x24" at least) and prop it up so its facing you (not laying on floor). graphite is okay but i'd suggest charcoal pencils (sharpened, long tips). draw big. use the entire paper.

quick 5 min poses can be helpful in lifedrawing, they loosen you up and stuff, but that is not where the focus should be. 'speed' comes naturally when you begin to know what you are doing. the first mark you make is going to be wrong, the second mark is going to be wrong too. its ALL about corrections. just make sure when you are correcting your drawing you are thinking big and in terms of overall structure. if you are noodling around with some hair or a little detail in the ear over and over you are doing yourself a disservice.

if you work in charcoal you wont have to worry about the 'how long should i draw' dillema because the charcoal will let you know when to stop. you'll find at some point you simply cannot keep working on it. at least, i hope so, technically you could keep noodling till the paper tears ;(. oh and dont 'cover' up your drawings with shading and stuff. concenctrate on proportion and drawing what you see in terms of line. if you want to shade you have to make sure it is to help DEFINE a structure and not to make it look nicer or more finished.

why can't you take life drawing? don't have a community college nearby?

[edible snowman]

i can't take life drawing for a lot of reasons that all kind of combine together, i'm sure you dont want my life story. thanks a lot for the advice. i'll try to dig up some of my old charcoal, although i think the majority of the time i'm going to be using pencil, if only because i think that much charcoal around my computer wont be good. i also want to learn to draw with a pencil because charcoal always seemed a little bit like painting to me. but who knows if i know what i'm talking about. it seems that if you want to be really good with a pencil you need even more confidence with the lines you put down. that could just be because i have a crappy eraser right now though. about drawing bigger though, i really agree. i'm very limited in the size of the drawings i do, so i'll work on that also. there's a lot more i could say, but i tend to babble a lot, so i'll shut up now. i've been completely wrong enough times(at least once in this thread alone), so i'd like to hear as many opinions from people who know what they're doing as i can.

[jester1966]

If you can't take life drawing classes, draw yourself (mirror), relatives (room-mates), look out of your window (hopefully you don't live on the 31st floor) and draw passers by.

Drawing from photos is ok (I do it myself for learning and reference) but I find that I learn most when I draw other people's drawings (copy, not trace) - since I have not problem seeing forms and shapes but I'm not sure how to draw what I see (questions such as should I make a line that touches the next or should I leave a little open space - hope you understand what I mean). There are so many really good drawings around here and on other forums that in no time you should be able to collect a lot inspiring stuff.

To get quicker I use my VCR: Pause it wherever you see something you want to draw and then you've only a few minutes (my VCR pauses for 3 minutes) to sketch what you see.

Hope this helps

Jester1966

[faB]

Most important is to learn from your mistakes.. 5 minutes drawing is fine if you take a minute afterward to look at your work and figure out what went wrong. (i.e. worked on detail too early on.. didnt pay attention to the whole shape.. )

As for life drawing it's as simple as drawing your cat/dog/ficus/girlfriend/bed/lamp/bookcase/etc.

[edible snowman]

i guess i should have elaborated a little. by life drawing, i guess i really mean figure drawing. i do draw a lot of other crap lying around the house/outside etc. sometimes i rent dvds just to draw stuff from. its cool because when you pause them its not all fuzzy. in terms of drawing people from life i mostly just draw my teacher(its a long and boring class). i started drawing from pictures because i feel like i cant learn all i want by drawing someone who's constantly moving. maybe you get what i mean. anyway, thanks for all the advice so far.

[ July 26, 2002: Message edited by: edible snowman ]

[faB]

If you want to draw people say, as in doing comics, where you can place them in imagined settings, in lots of different perspectives, then I think you need construction & perspective. Construction methods such as the well known 7 heads and a half for the full body height for an adult, or the 3 and a half divisions in the head, etc.. coupled with studying anatomy, check out the Loomis books at www.fineart.sk. It's really boring to do.. but that's the way it gets into the brain.. our memory stores relations rather than numbers. For example we remember the colours by their difference, or we remember some place because how it is configured, we dont actually store a photo of it.. thats why I believe it's so hard to draw imagined people even when copying lots of photos. So while using construction is a real bore at the beginning and slows you down, it will work without you thinking about it with more experience.

This is from my limited experience I've only just started studying heads and I felt my drawings without reference were more solid after just a few days, so I think this is the way to go. It's just the shame that the experienced artists out there never show us what kind of 'crap' they did at the beginning, it would be encouraging but somehow they never do. So you always get to wonder how the hell they got so good, we guess they worked pretty hard and yet.. we suspect those bastards were just super gifted.. but I dont think so :P Anyways thats how I feel about it

[edible snowman]

good idea. there's a head construction tutorial done by ron lemen over at www.anticz.com that really works for me. i think it might have come from loomis, but i'm not really sure. i'll add reading the loomis books to my to do list. is there a pdf of them somewhere?

[ July 27, 2002: Message edited by: edible snowman ]

[Lunatique]

It's a misconception that life drawing alone will make you better at figure drawing.

Life drawing will only really help you if you study anatomy in conjunction to drawing from life models. If you JUST draw from life models, you will have no idea what the bone/muscle structure is underneath the skin. But when you study anatomy along with life drawing, you will get the best of both worlds--structure and form, and real life applications under real life lighting situations.

[edible snowman]

sounds good lunatique.

[Malachi Maloney]

If you're comfortable sketching in PS, you can use it very much the same way you'd use a light box. Get your sketch down, then create a new layer above your original sketch and make a new sketch on the second layer, making your corrections on the new layer. If it's still not right, you can repeat this process over and over again until you get it right. Not only that, but this process (much like a light box) will help you from repeating the same mistakes over and over again.

If you're sketching traditionally, I'd suggest the use of a light box.
They're relatively cheap to purchase and if you don't want to buy one that's already made, you can construct one yourself using items that you can easily be found in any hardware store.

Anyway, I hope this helped.


~M~

PS. I didn't read any of the above posts, so if what I've said has already been mentioned, I apologize.

[SuperFish]

Drawing from life and drawing from photo are two very different exercise.

When a person is drawing from life, objects are viewed with both eyes. Each one of your eyes view things with a slightly different angle. Thus your brain uses the offset to judge the distance of the objects in relation to each other and give a sense of depth. Because of this, you might often find a significant difference on the looks between the subject and the drawing you have on paper. That's why usually the painting is better or worse than the original sebject, but rarely the same. What you have been doing was converting a three dimentional medium and recreate the effect on a two dimentiona surface.

It is a different story when you are drawing from photo or other two dimentional mediums. Let's say you are drawing from a photo reference. Although your eyes has a slight offset, since the photo only has one view of the object, what your eyes sees are exactly the same. Thus what you have been doing is simply copying a 2d image onto a 2d paper.

A few more thing for drawing from photo. Since the human eyes is roughly the same as a 50mm lense, the perspective may vary depending on what lense was used for the photo. Also, film and other recording media tend to give higher contrast to the images (especially TV and VHS tapes), you will lose a lot of subtle details that you can usually find on a lige drawing situation (for example: reflected lights, a few steps in the grey scale, color depth, etc).

Now you wonder "So what the hell should I do?". As you can see, drawing from life and from photo are very different. You want to do both exercise if possible (After all they are two different but relating skills). If you cannot attend a life drawing session, I would recommend going to a bus stop, park, or malls (basicly where people hang out) and get your dose of the drawing from life. The only two difference being you can't see nor identify the anatomy parts(unless you go to a beach) and you have to set your own time constraints. Once you have enough experience drawing from life, you will be able to tell "How does it look like in real live?" when you draw form reference. As for advise on drawing from 2d mediums, I would only use them as a rough map for my drawing and fill-in the missing pieces(details) myself. Be aware that most of the professional photographs and films are altered in their value, color, and every other way in varying degrees. I won't eat them too deep.

Anyway, just my 2 cents worth of comments. Hope it helps and good luck.

[ July 29, 2002: Message edited by: SuperFish ]

[edible snowman]

malachi: thanks for the idea

superfish: that would be ideal, except i dont think it's happening. pretty much anywhere i go, people will be constantly moving, so all i'll get done are gesture drawings. i do a few hours of those in class, so i dont really have the energy to drive around and find other places to do it. maybe if i was a little bit more of a loser and didn't have other things to do. that's some interesting information about the differences between life and photo drawing. i'll try to keep it all in mind.

[Eshara]

This thread has really helped me out. I've been using Malachi's idea recently and already I can see my improvements.

Just wanted to say thank you to the people who replied to this thread.

(I'm also bumping it for other people to read)

[pixtur]

This is a great topic! I find it quite amusing that a tried all of the methods described here. My personal experience (in chronological order):

Sketch from photos (with egg-timer): Great training for recognizing forms, values and colors. I did a few hundered and still do them now and then if a photo looks interessting. Spent not more then 15 min on one. I overlay the original (afterwards) if something went wrong, but you can't see what exactly.

Coal on rough paper: Try it! It's a good training to build up form with a few (thick) strokes. 3-5 min each. Never think about wasting paper.

Lifedrawing classes: Best thing I've ever startet with, although I'm not planning to draw many figures it helped me alot. I can't describe why, but after a regulary attending lifedrawing-classes my drawing-skills improved not only on figures but on every aspect of design.

Lifedrawing at train-stations: I do this since a few months once or twice a week. It's always frustrating for the first minutes but after a while I get into some "drawing-flash". Don't know. Somehow its like I see a face or a figure just for a few seconds and start to draw and struggle to finish the person's "expression". I wonder if there is something like a "visual memory" and if so, why I don't have it. My memory seems to be made out of symbols. During the moment my victim sits still I can only do a few lines. The whole image must be made from informations like dark, long hair, looking down, old, wrinkles a.s.o. I have to think about how wrinkles would look like. Most of the drawings are just crap, but its fun for me and I slowly get better.

Well bad explanation, I know... sorry.

sorry for bad English.

tom