Still studying the head and reading up on everything I can.
I've been having fun trying to capture likeness of some more recognizable faces.

Mainly having trouble keeping proportions and distances between the planes which causes the faces to have resemblance but look off.

This took around 2 hours (Still feeling pretty slow)

In my quest to try and get better at drawing faces I've been experimenting with breaking down famous faces into simple shapes.
I feels like the simple structures of the face holds the secret to creating good faces (and achieving likeness)
I don't care too much about achieving likeness but it bothers me that I'm not capable of doing it well

Here is Emma Watson (which once again shows that I have trouble with proportions and spacing I need to get better at planning out the face and measuring before i start)

Still just doing basic 20m studies and trying to get the essence of the faces down.
Starting to feel that I'm becoming a bit stagnant in my studies so I'll probably be changing my focus to revitalize my energy.

Definitely feels like I've picked up a bunch of smaller knowledge bombs in the past week that are helping me create faces better/faster.

Been sick so I decided to let the pen rest until I got better.

Currently trying to gauge what I should be working on next. Mainly just experimenting with different drawings to see where I feel uncomfortable and what i have issues drawing.
I'm moderately satisfied with my anatomy, but hair and hands are still a struggle.
I'm also not great on clothes which is why I tend to draw figures in underwear.

I'm leaning towards sorting out those 3 subjects and getting a better grasp on them and then trying to get better at rendering.
I can do rendering to an okay extend if I have reference but when I'm drawing from imagination like below, it tends to looks unfinished and messy.

As a side note I've been trying to do gestures by drawing using exclusively my elbow.
They lose a lot of proportion and "finish" but gain a whole lot of movement from it.
Regardless it is helping me let go of my need to populate gestures with anatomy and details which lets me focus on the flow of the pose.

Been switching between practicing hands and clothes today.
Sticking to line-art since it feels like if it can't describe the form using line-art I probably won't be able to shade it anyway.

For clothes it mainly feels like I need to treat it like any other object and start with large shapes then work down into details.

My main issue with hands is figuring out which folds best describe the form without making the hands look too old or manly by giving them too many wrinkles.
I find that if I leave out too much detail on the hands they end up looking more feminine but require much more thought regarding which lines are kept and which are discarded.

Still studying hands and cloth.

Tried starting my studies with a shotgun hour of 60second hand studies since doing things fast usually reveals where your flaws lie pretty quick (as you don't have time to correct and just have to apply your knowledge on the fly)
I'm struggling quite hard with the proportions + attachment of the thumb and the foreshortening of the tips of the fingers when I don't have more time to draw guidelines.

I was surprised at just how difficult it was and just how bad some of the hands I tried drawing came out.
Definitely a humbling exercise to pinpoint the gaps in your knowledge for anyone interested.

Spent the rest of my studying time circling out the hands that were lacking and then focused on studying the specific poses that gave me trouble.

Thanks, perhaps I explained it poorly.
I wasn't looking to become faster by doing this, I was trying to figure out what I should focus my studying on.

I'm not good yet so when I finish something like the first set of hands i posted, I look at them and have a hard time seeing my mistakes.
But if I spent less time on them (like the 60 second ones) and then look at which type of hands I mess up the most, then I can easily spot where the gaps in my knowledge is.

I've always found that you can mix fast and long focused studies to achieve better results as they have different purposes.
It might be controversial but I don't think that doing things fast is bad, as long as you stop after a set interval and make notes on your mistakes and why they happened and then work on them with longer more focused studies.

Haven't had much time to draw these past days but It should be better in the coming weeks.

Still just trying to unlock the secrets of hands by drawing the type of hands that I messed up the most during my 60 second hand galore.

Feeling small improvements here and there in my understand but there is still so many facets to hands and so many places where I fall short.

Main point I've taken away today is that the fingers are a lot more flat on the dorsal side of the hand, and that the contrast between that flatness and the more chubby sections on the palm side can really help describe how the fingers are rotation/bending.

I'm also noticing that I feel less uneasy about drawing hands, so overall positive progress however small.

Today's main project: Master studies on Disney artist Kin Jim

I absolutely adore the emotion and feeling of movement his hands have.
I found a few character reference sheets from the Disney movie Tangled and tried to decipher what makes them feel so alive.
It felt like a good way to start the day before doing more hand studies.

What surprised me the most is how many small muscle/fat pockets the hands have, and much they can be emphasized to get all kinds of movements a relatively simple hand.

Doing this also made me realize I have been ignoring the skin folds opposite of the knuckles (on the palm side) in my hand depictions so far.

Definitely a good day with lots of small discoveries!

Thanks.
I kind of got stuck and tunneled on trying to eradicate my need to add anatomy from my gesture drawings these past few weeks.
I've noticing more and more how I have a very hard time converting/keeping the gesture when trying to refine and polish it into a drawing.

I was going to call it for today, but after you mentioned this I might just have to try doing some more gestures to see if i can figure it out
I would love if I could add more depth/form to my gestures without them losing their flow, and cylinders definitely seem like a dynamic enough shape that they could do the trick.

On a side note I really love how other people can (and are willing) to help and spot mistakes like this since learning alone has a a habit of making you blind to your own mistakes.
When I learned to program a decade ago the developer community was very far from this kind, so thanks again

I hope to one day be at a level where I can help others out with art!

---

On the studying side I spent another day of drawing hands on repeat.
I'm finally at a stage where I don't feel scared of drawing hands, which is a huuuuge relief.
Finally feeling ready to move on to the next subject for now (I'm 100% coming back to hands. There is so many more facets to learn)

I've drawn like 250+ hands these past few days and boy have I picked up a lot of good info.
My main take away that I found during this grind was:

1: Redraw hands:

When hands look wrong it can often be faster to mark down which areas are off and then start from scratch.
If you start over and focus on setting up extra guidelines for the areas you disliked it becomes much easier to correct them.
I found that when i tried to stick with a drawing and "feel it out" by making adjustments over and over, I ended up frustrating myself because I had no direction. Starting over with better guidelines solves that.

2: A lot of hand can be simplified into a curved/bent piece of paper:

If you are having trouble drawing a specific type of hand. try to think of it like a sheet of paper (disregarding the thumb).
If you consider the top of the pinkie and index finger as the top corners of the paper and the sides of the wrist as the bottom corners you can easily draw a flat piece of paper that connect the 4 corners across the surface of the hand.
It works especially well for heavy foreshortening and cases where the hand overlaps and folds (since a piece of paper is just a rectangle)
Once you have the flat surface you can add depth and flow to it bit by bit and feel out the overall shape.

3: Draw overlapping cylinders for the fingers at first:

This helps speed up the process immensely since drawing 3 overlapping cylinders is so much easier than thinking of the whole form.
Once you have 5 "cylinder fingers" down on paper you can always start thinking above how the dorsal side of the hand is more flat and how the palm side's overlapping pieces would look.
It also just helps practice drawing the small bumps on the hand since you have a mannequin that you can draw over on another layer until you get it right.

4: Asymmetry:

No matter how still or simple a hand pose you draw. Lack of Asymmetry in the fingers/knuckles kills any indication of life or movement.
Bend one finger more than the next, Push the knuckles a little bit further, foreshorten some of the fingers further way.
Whatever you do, just don't draw every finger as the same type of cylinder with varying lengths.
It feels like the more you can master this concept, the more alive your hands become.

And that's it for my very long winded exploration of hands.
Hopefully I have this much success with my next subject of study too.

So I totally didn't get sidetracked and started studying gestures to figure out what I can do to improve them.
Or well.... I kinda did.

I tried doing some freehand gestures using cylinders like @don_ghebray suggested but I couldn't really get it down and I struggle to make it look good.

Realizing that I din't know what I was trying to achieve I decided to spend all of yesterday reading all of "Force - Dynamic Life Drawing for Animators" by Matessi to try and see If i could get any extra pointers on what I'm missing.

I then spent today trying to apply it doing gesture reference draw overs and writing down what I was seeing and then eventually transitioned to doing gestures for like 6~ hours.

I did sets of 10 and switched somewhat regularly between 5, 2 and 1 minutes per gesture.

These are the last ones I did today.
I've noticed that I I'm not good at rotating the torso and showing movement in the torso/hips, but mainly I just have hard time pinpointing what I'm doing wrong.
I can feel that I'm getting better at making things flow but I'm struggling to have any particular "goal" or something to compare it to.

How do you even begin to describe a great gesture outside of "it feels alive"

Thanks, that means a lot.

So far I have been following a lite version of Naoki Saito's advice in terms of pinpointing struggles/areas to improve https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRmgLBCaV6Q
Which essentially just boils down to "Compare your art to someone you admire and make a list of the things you dislike about your art in priority"
Slightly painful, but highly effective whenever I get stuck.

I did a more compact version of it today (involving multiple rounds) by taking an older pose and trying to figure out what I could do to fix the gesture.

Also works pretty well for just general studies.
Here's gestures I did today. After I did them I sat down and wrote a list of what I didn't like while looking at gestures drawings from professional animators.
It really helps to have something to compare what you are doing to, so you can say "I like how they do X, how come I don't capture that in what I do" and and then try to study that and figure out why.