It begins!

[Spivak000]

Look forward to seeing you Alternative!

Here are my combinations of spheres, cubes and cylinders. Next page I will make the hybrids.

[Fissionmailed]

@Spivak: thanks for the advice! will definitely give it a shot very soon.

[Spivak000]

Fission, wonderful work on that sphere in perspective. Its kind of a tricky assignment isn't it? You made it look easy.

[Fissionmailed]

@ Spivak000 haha, it's kinda tricky the first time through and u find ur way after that. You did a great job in the second batch of sphere drawing! Kept lines very neat and after that it's just filling in a few circles!

P.S took your advice on line drawing and i think I'm getting closer to the two minute mark.

Still feel like these drawing are missing something as most of the looks boring. Although I can't quite put my finger on it yet (probably the emphasis+ thickness variation of the lines? e.g. I like the left shoulder on the middle figure on the top row, a happy mistake indeed.)

[Spivak000]

53 gestures and my arm and back are sore and my brain is a mush. I'm posting them all as they appeared on the page they were on. I felt really slow this time and got off to a rough start. For the gestures, I used various pieces of sculpture and old master paintings that had nude figures. I can see that the old artist's liked to use S curves a lot in their work.

You guys are right, 2 minutes is really difficult to get much down, but I tried my best. Some are incomplete or their are no wrapping lines. But I think there will be enough info to do the form overlays. Thoughts?

18 X 24 newsprint with charcoal pencil

[Spivak000]

Hey everyone- I've been thinking about a good way of doing the gestures. I still think we should keep the 2 minute time limit, but it would be good to do many of the gestures more than once in a different 2 minute setting. So if you do a pose 3 times it will count for 3 out of the 50. I think this will be a good way of improving upon mistakes and will allow us to get faster at putting in all the necessary info- line of action, wrapping lines, overall motion, general proportion, etc... So if you make mistakes on a pose or its incomplete, don't keep working on it after 2 minutes, just do it again in another 2 min time. The great thing about a short time span is it gets you moving.

[Fissionmailed]

@spivak: I feel like a part of the 2 minute timeframe is to pick out the lines of action and the shapes to train your mind to understand the underlying aspect that makes the motion. I feel like redoing the same drawing kinda defeats the purpose. With that said I think everyone is trying to get differnt things out of this exercise so for instance if you want to work on putting the lines you have in your head on paper I think redoing the same pose would work better. I defintely agree with you that the point here is to practice, practice, practice.

On a unrelated note, I need to get myeslf started on the combination of sphere cylinder and rectangles... will try to get that up either today or tmw.

P.S. Anyone wanna volunteer to come up with the third assignment?

[mitchoo]

The problem is that I have too little time to do everything. I'm following 3 tutorials that are taking a lot of time now. And I feel that I first need to learn a bit more on anatomic before I should draw figure drawings from mind or photo. But maybe figure drawing is something you always should do.
I would like to focus next assignment on something more specific, like the face. Or maybe the nose. How do you guys think about that?

[Fissionmailed]

@ Mitchoo: I'd be down for that... Although i'm not sure where you would find a guide on drawing noses.

Throwing Ideas out there: Maybe we can learn more about the proportion of the face (or another body part) and the approach to drawing it from like straight lines and flat planes this way it'll kinda combine anatomy study + basic shapes + possibly help us in quick figure drawing?

[Spivak000]

I'm all for focusing on the individual parts. We could do the arms one week, the head one, legs, etc. Heads and hands we should probably spend longer on since they are ultra important for artists.

I'm okay with doing the next assignment, but if you guys want to take over that would be awesome. And I believe Alternative is coming back soon so I know he wants to do some more.

[Fissionmailed]

had 40 min in the morning and decided to do as many as time allows. Tried to focus on construction line variation +volume and failed on most of the count here
I guess when it's 2 minute u really don't have time to think and constantly remind urself to keep x number of things in mind... Maybe it's more of a beating these things into your head/hand kinda thing.

Also if no one post an assignment by Friday noon. I'll try to pull something together from Loomis' book and also try to google up some resources/tut on either arm, leg or chest muscles.

Note to self: At work and I'm just looking at the stuff I've done this morning and realized how inconsistent they are

- fell back in the bad habit of having multiple scratchy lines
- not enough construction on most of the figures
- I realized I'm looking at the reference photo too much. Looking at works you guys have done. I feel like you guys got the general motion of the figure and can almost finish the figure w/o looking at the figure again except for references on the direction of the arm, the way the chest is facing.

Whereas I am constantly referring back to the model to find out just about everything.This is probably the reason why my drawing don't show enough construction.

blegh... back to square one

[Spivak000]

Fission, we still need to superimpose forms on our gestures before we move on to a new assignment. Its an important step before moving on to breaking those forms up into anatomy.

[Fissionmailed]

@Spivak: Sorry for being such a noob but, I'm not sure if I understand what you meant by superimposing form into our figures.

Do you mean to indicate volume using line variation (shapes-circles squares, cylinders) and perspectives?

Can you elaborate please?

[Spivak000]

No problem Fission. Well if you look at the previous assignment, you'll notice we did our 50 gestures and then redid many of them using the Loomis Mannequin from our reading. This time we are using these primary forms we are studying plus the new and improved Loomis mannequin from the reading. Its a lot of work but I'm hoping we each atleast do some of them. I don't think Mitchoo and I were able to redo all 50 for the first assignment. Here is a repost of the gesture portion:


Part 3

The same as last week do 50 2minute gestures. Divide it up so that 25 are from life or reference, and 25 are from imagination. Then take these gestures and construct mannequins using the primary forms. Draw the mannequins as such:
10 box-based mannequins- only cubes for the different parts
10 cylinder mannequins- only cylinders
10 with cubes, spheres, and cylinders
10 Loomis mannequins- the more complex one using primary forms
10 hybrids- forms merge into one another; really have fun with this one

DO NOT forget LINE OF ACTION and WRAPPING LINES! Always continually use and practice these things.

[Fissionmailed]

Hm... so we still haven't finished with the last assignment and we should finish up before we start on something new. Finishing up our assignment from last week will be our assignments this week.

Makes sense... I'll get started

[Spivak000]

Fission, just use whatever gestures you have done now and add primary forms to them. You can either go directly over them with a darker pencil/pen/etc., draw over them on waacom tablet, use tracing paper, or redraw them entirely. A lightbox is also a nifty tool.

[Fissionmailed]

Finally back for the week! Here's my batch of gestures... Went over some gestures I drew up with pen directly.
I can see what you guys meant when you said my gestures lacked construction now, Thanks for forcing ... errr... I mean reminding me to do this exercising. Defintely learned a lot from this.

[Spivak000]

They look good Fission. I even like the square boobies on the cube figures Thanks for getting all these done. Now the rest of us have to catch up.

Here is my batch of 10 cylinder figures. On to the next...

[Fissionmailed]

Hey guys, I've been thinking for a long time about why my figure drawing still looks lacking compared to your work and I found myself on Vippu's youtube channel watching "constructing figure from your imagination" and the video emphasized starting with the general line for the feel (i.e. stick figures) and creating contours around through general shapes.

It made me think immediately of this drawing group and on how/why your (nudity, mitchoo, Spivak) figure drawings is better than my own and I think I came to (another) conclusion.

I can't stress the next two points enough if I had Captalized, italized all the letters and made it 106 size font.
1. Focus on creating the action lines, the underlying motions... THEN
2. Construction of the basic contour (i.e. just do boxes, cyclinders, etc at this point.)

DO NOTS
1. Feel inclined to include anything overly complexed at this point. So that means don't bother breaking out the arms into three muscle groups, don't bother veins below the neck or the collar bones and such, unless you're comfortable with it. If you are just starting/learning, don't even think about this
2. Focus on Contour Drawing... Look at the reference photo to understand and to create the underlying lines. Should not have to refer to the photo for the construction of the boxes, cylinders and such, instead, use it as a reference to begin with and to double check your construction

Hopefully I'm not just ranting and this will help someone who's trying to follow along with this thread in the future. Took me quite a long time and I only just realized some of the things I am missing.

Another batch tomorrow I guess... Feels like I'll still be working on this assignment weeks from now as there something new to learn everytime I visit this assignment, I'm a slow learner... I know.

[Spivak000]

The cubes were a lot of fun. I started with cylinders to get a better idea of their orientation first, then squared em off. These are imagination.

[Fissionmailed]

Trying to put some life while keeping construction, it's still hit and miss. Think I can get away with a little less wrapping line and get the same effect.

[Spivak000]

These look better Fission. A little looser and more fluid than previous. It may help to do some gestures where you just let go and do a lot of scribble. Then look for the forms in the chaos and tighten them up.

[Fissionmailed]

first batch is from imagination and I took the chance to make lots of scribble. Kinda failed pretty hard. Still they're a lot better than the stuff from imagination I used to do. Most of my scribblings are looking terrible at this point so 'll refrain from flooding this thread more than I already have.

The stuff in pencil is from random pics on the internet.
Anyone think we should start getting into anatomy? Spivak u're already kinda started on your own and so have mitchoo from the look of your sketchbooks. So why not just make it an official part of this thread?

[Spivak000]

Ya it would be cool to do anatomy for the next assignment. Sorry I haven't been posting a lot here. I was thinking for the next assignment we try and tackle less work that way it doesn't become so overwhelming and we leave things incomplete. It would be good to focus on just one area of the body at a time.

[Fissionmailed]

Hey Guys!
Sorry that I haven't been posting much. I'm proposing the following assignment

Scope of assignment: A body part of your our choosing (this means that if you have studied the chest before you will not have to do so again, or arms or head, etc.)
Details of assignment:

1. study the muscle (and if you would like, the bone structure) of the proposed body part
2. go back to the 2 minute figure drawings you have previously done a add in the muscles (as to help memorize each of the muscles and where they start/ connect)
3. Find a picture of the body part of your choosing and produce a rendered picture (or if you are short on time, a quick sketch) of the body part. Keeping in mind what you have learned.