figure drawing mannequin - as interpreted by a tard

[Thistlegorm]

Hey guys, not sure if this is where I should be posting, but here goes; basically I started drawing some months ago, I am getting confident with perspective and shapes and I'm starting figures from scratch, I have quite literally made a hundred figure mannequins (using the Loomis book), but they all look wrong and I can't grasp why; might be your more experienced eyes will? I can do an "okay" portrait or cast drawing, but figures have me beat

[keeptime]

It doesn't look like any of your figures are falling into the eight-heads-high proportion rules. You should try reviewing that chapter of Loomis.

[justa]

Hi

The problem may be that you have repeated the same errors across all 100 mannequins... One idea may be as follows: do the most basic figure freehand, copying one of his examples at the same size. Do another using a grid. Do them both on tracing paper, and then overlay them on the Loomis image. Note where you went wrong, and do another version. Don't stop (or move to another pose) until you've trained your eye well enough to produce a good match. It is probably this eye training you need. Most of us don't see what is there, but what we think is there, and then we do a bad copy of that erroneous image (I certainly do).

Cheers

D'Arcy

[Thistlegorm]

@keeptime, you know, I just noticed that even though I always add the guidelines, I just phase out and ignore them completely, and I had no idea I was doing that until you pointed out that proportions were off (and I was convinced they were correct, vertically) so thank you for opening my eyes there!

@Justa, I'll give that a shot, thank you very much for your advice! I also decided to do a couple of skeleton drawings, and I'm seeing what's going on and it's making a bit more sense; before I was drawing simplified shapes representing bone structures which I thought I knew, but I actually didn't

Thanks to both of you, I know it was a terribly stupid question, but your answers really helped!