Danilo - Art School Journey

[dangras-almeida]

Hey @alrooke64 ,

Thank you so much for the detailed breakdown.
I would agree with you that looking at Mark and Proko, one can be deceived by their level of expertise (especially marks video, the part where he finds the reference spots is super fast).
And you are right, I’m not checking those comparative angles enough. But it feels like in order to do that, I need a correct “starting point” in order to draw them correctly? But most likely is my insecurity and perfectionism kicking in because I want to draw as accurately as possible.

And I will definitely check on the artist you recommended. The picture you posted is amazingly beautiful!

I agree with the anatomy part. I really miss being able to actually “construct” the model instead of just eyeballing things like this.

Once again thanks a lot for the help and references! I’ll practice some more today and will try to apply what you just told me.

Cheers!

[dangras-almeida]

And the practice continues

Following the conversation with @alrooke64, I decided to, instead of marking every single corner of the body, just to mark down the main joints and then go straight to building up the figure with the knowledge we have so far from the video + paying a lot of attention to the relationship between the body + negative space. And I got to say, things were a bit easier (and less stressful). Them lines landed very well where they were supposed to, with not a lot of adjustments to do. This time it was way more fun.

One thing that I missed and noticed just now by watching the class for the 39203x time: Mark actually says something along the lines of "if you are doing this digitally, it doesn't make sense to measure things in the way I just explained. Instead, grab your entire stylus/pen, put it on top of the reference and you can use the different markers there". I tried that as well and it was VERY helpful indeed... to a point where I remembered thinking "well shit... why didn't I try this sooner" 😅

Thanks again for everybody that is helping out and I hope you are still practicing.

Cheers!

[alrooke64]

Looks great! keep it up man. In response to what you said earlier about having the first measurement correct, in my experience, the first one is always incorrect as well and I tweak it later in relationship to other lines and angles. It's just one of those annoying little things; you're not alone in that regard! haha

anyway glad to see youre having a better time with it
kind regards,
Al

[dangras-almeida]

Just keep grinding

This time I felt I was able to progress MUCH FASTER to a final stage where everything fits(-ish) than before. What I did differently:

• Put the stylus straight into the monitor to find the basic spots of joints (shoulder, elbows, wrists, knees, ankles, naval, center of clavicle.
• From there just went straight to building up the body, just like what we learned on the other proportion class. I had to do a few adjustments but things fell into place surprisingly well.
• Finding vertical and horizontal lines helped a lot this time around. Today I was feeling a bit lazy and would trace the lines on the model and then try to mimic them onto the piece.

That's it. Maybe a few more and I'll move on to the next class.

Cheers,

[mau.wamp]

Good job Danilo!
Looking really good!
Very accurate work, I like it

[dangras-almeida]

And the grind continues,

This pose is probably the hardest so far, which made me get lazy and started "cheating" a bit (going back and forth too much to be sure the markers were in place). Altho I was able to mark the references and still construct the character from the ground up (instead of marking everything down). Had to do a lot more adjustments - and it's still far from perfect - but I think I get the gist of it now. Way better when I first tried at least.

I'll probably try moving forward in the class starting tomorrow.

What do you think so far?

[dangras-almeida]

Ahhh.... the fresh smell of being back to scratch... square zero (not even 1)... to start over.

Yes friends, today I started exercises of gesture drawing. Ohh..... THE MADNESS!

Above are my 30 sec drawings. And damn this thing is hard. Drawing stick figures (with all their limbs) is, literally, being too kind 🤣

Above are the 60 sec ones. It's nice how you can cover how fucked up it is by adding (or traying to) some volume to the figure.

But hey, today was the first day, so let's keep on going.

How was that exercise for you? Any tips or tricks to share?
I noticed that focusing on the action line really does help, and from there trying to go for the legs with some volume to the hips makes me feel like the drawings suck less, but not sure.

Cheers,

[Shellac-Belly]

Hey Danilo,

It's great to see you've started gesture drawing. I personally think that gesture drawing is the fastest way to improve your drawing skills. I've been gesture/life drawing for about 7 years now and still feel like it teaches me new things every time.

As for tips, I'd say learning to identify angles and negative space shapes as fast as possible helps you to capture the figure and proportions with in the time limit.

Also practicing everyday helps a lot. I usually do 1-3 hour life drawing sessions a day depending on how busy I am. Eventually you'll realize you can draw those 60 sec figures in 30 seconds, and maybe even 5 minute figures in 60 seconds!!

I included some of my gesture/life drawings as an example for where you're headed! First are my 30 second, then 60 second and 10 minute.

I hope this was helpful! Let me know if you have any other questions about gesture drawing of life drawing.

[dangras-almeida]

And the adventures of the stick people continues!

Some 30 sec poses. At first, I found myself with no time left to draw the arms 🤣 But after some warm-up as got there. Proportions overall are still pretty messed up. Trying an exercise of going through them one-by-one to see what is wrong with them (pretty much everything, but oh well ¯_(ツ)_/¯)

Some 60 sec poses. Funny how, when moving from 30 to 60, you can think "Wow, I have all the time in the world now!" #not

I had a hard time (with a stupid thing) of drawing people standing up. I messed up the proportions there the hardest. But getting used to it + the timer.

@Shellac-Belly amazing pieces you had there! Congrats!
After looking at some of your 30-sec examples I tried doing the basics of pelvis and ribcage as well and it helped me with arm placement a lot. Thanks for that. Will definitley keep on with the practice every day from now on, even when doing other assignments.

Need to keep practicing the other things as well tho, I'm afraid I'm already forgetting the measures from the proportion grid 😅

Cheers,

[dangras-almeida]

One day at a time

The 30 sec piece

The 60 sec one

No particular insights today. I see a tiny improvement on the overall proportion (like, legs are now NOT super short if compared to the last time 😅) but still a long way to go. Even with 60 sec ones I'm not able to add a lot of volume to it. I feel like I'm still getting the hang of how to approach the construction. But not to worry, just keeping one day at time.

Cheers my friends.

[dangras-almeida]

Hello friends,

And the grind continues! Here some 30 sec gesture drawings:

It took me a while to actually warm up, but some of them turned out quite ok. Must still suck, but it's fine. One day at atime.

Now the 60 sec ones:

Now, weirdly enough, this time I liked the 30 sec better than the 60 sec ones 😅
I think I got too involved in trying to add volume that I forgot to do the basics. Some of them are ok, most are terrible, but it was nice to go back through them and spot the mistakes so I can learn.

And today decided to revisit one of the previous assignments, to be sure I don't forget anything and keep on practicing everything I know so far, so I went back and did the grid proportions again.

Super fast and rough, but just to be sure 😅 (I had the video on the background tho. You know.... to company 🤣).

Hope you all are safe and studying hard!

Cheers

[stratocastus]

Ah, the good ol' gesture drawing grind. Best to do something everyday, even if it's just a scribble. It looks good though, keep it up!

[dangras-almeida]

Today wasn't great. Was able to do some gesture drawings tho

[dangras-almeida]

More gesture drawings

Didn't do a bunch of them today because I started watching the Perspective Class today! Excited! Still in the middle of it so no assignments.

Cheers!

[dangras-almeida]

Heyooo friends,

I discovered something today that made me feel VERY stupid, in the sense of "why the hell wasn't I doing this before all along?!"

It's related to my set-up here.

I have a laptop that sits on a desk close to an external monitor and I use a graphic tablet to draw (trace on the tablet while looking at the screen).

For these latest gesture drawings, I was placing the pictures on the monitor and then drawing on the laptop. Crazy eye movement from one screen to another (only 30 secs to draw is DEFINITELY not a lot).

I had a problem with the tablet where the pressure sensitivity was flickering, which I was able to solve by changing the mapping just to the external monitor. Which made me place the reference images right next to Photoshop.........

GOOD! LORD! How things because SO MUCH EASIER (for this particular exercise).

30 seconds drawings:

60 seconds drawings:

Don't get me wrong, things are not "super better", but it was easier to just trace stuff right next to it, because then I didn't have to worry much about the "sizes" and pay more attention to angles and relationships between the shapes.

(I told you how stupid it was).

But I was making things a bit harder than they needed to be.

Anyway, that's it! Soon posting some perspective exercises!

Cheers,

[dangras-almeida]

And so perspective begins!

It was fun doing the first assignment.

Some of them were very straight forward:

But I had 2 pictures where it got me thinking: "What the F is going on here?"

Notice how the lines AREN'T converging into one single point, and just converging all over. Freaking weird!

Any thoughts?
I'm not sure if just the reference pictures and their buildings are weird or if I'm doing something wrong.

Cheers!

[Vonschlippe]

Hey!

Try focusing on doing at least a few lines for a single building instead of comparing convergences between buildings sitting across the street from another. Be very precise and try to conform the line accurately to the shape of the walls.

You'll find that yes, some buildings line up to a different point on the horizon; they might not be parallel to the rest of the scene. A given building, analyzed on its on, should always converge into a single point if it's indeed composed of parallel lines. If this point does not land on the horizon, it means there might be some increase or decrease in elevation, or the building may not be level at all.

Finally, analyzing pictures from cameras that have not been corrected for fisheye distortion will lead to some slight errors too.

[dangras-almeida]

Doing some more perspective exercises!

Also finally practicing drawing the cubes with 1 VP

This last one was more fun than I expected it to be 😅

@Vonschlippe thanks a lot for the tip and explanation.
I redid some (#1 and #2 are also from the previous post) doing what you said: focusing only on one side and really paying attention to the building lines. I think it improved the position of the vanishing point where now, even tho they don't quite get ALL in just one point, they are a lot closer, which makes a small area looks like it is the VP of the picture. Altho in those pictures, I could see that the level of the buildings and constructions where different, so in my mind, it makes sense that they would converge slightly off. Does it make sense? In any case, thanks again for the help!

Anyway, will keep going until I finish the assignments here.

Cheers,

[Vonschlippe]

Have a look at this; I retraced lines over one of your pictures.

If you take one building at a time (one building, one color), you will find that every horizontal architectural element will match up to the same vanishing point on the horizon. This is assuming the building is built level and with parallel construction elements, which is usually the case.

Try to take your time doing this, carefully matching your line to your photo. Use the line tool (in pixel mode) and with a thin line, make sure your line matches the construction outlines exactly. You'll find that they should all converge with very great accuracy, not just loosely crowd in the middle.

Good luck!

[dangras-almeida]

Very quick exercise today on 2 VP perspective:

Work was crazy last night so I had to work a bit late, which made me wake up late today 😅But was able to squeeze in some drawing.

@Vonschlippe Thanks A LOT for the tracing that you did there. It made me realize a few things that I was missing. Will definitely try these exercises again over the weekend to get them right. I'll try something new based on your suggestions and see how it goes. Thanks again for taking the time to do this! Really appreciate it!