We’re going to see 5 gesture mistakes that come down to our brains pulling us towards the familiar, boring symbol you see on the ground here: Mistake 1 – Too parallel I very often see beginner and intermediate level artists lose the variation in the widths going down the figure. Reducing the way the forearms […]
When your torso bends to one side, your ribcage will come down really close to your pelvis. For some reason we are really reluctant to let the mid-section squash down this way. Making the mid-section too big and therefore elongating the whole torso is a classic issue, especially when the torso is bent to one […]
We are going to create 4 exercises to train different skills. The first is a straight forward simplification of the pose. The second is posterising the image to simplify the values. The third is combining those two types of simplification and the fourth is exaggerating the pose, which is hard to do and this […]
Some details are going to make your drawing, include them for sure, emphasise them! Some details are going to break your drawing, like the ones below, so just leave them out. Which is which, let’s get into it. No ribs, just ribcage Ok so here is the outline of a pose. Here I’m […]
The lord of the colors. One color to rule them all and in the darkness, bind them. Have you ever wondered what is it? When you grab that color picker thing in Procreate on the iPad and scroll through the hues you see random colours. As you move towards the left of the box for […]
Today we’re going to go through a powerful exercise designed to build your gesture skills, test your knowledge of the figure, build your brain’s visual memory and your ability to draw from imagination. So it’s useful for a lot of things. There’s a video version and an article version below that: We’ve teamed up with Simon […]
The ability to simplify what you see is, in my opinion, the number one skill that separates an experienced artist and a beginner artist. Even artists that create detailed and nuanced drawings and paintings use that simplification skill to build the foundations of their work. Today we are going to learn 5 steps for simplifying […]
In our article, the 5 stages of learning to draw people, we talked about how everyone starts at the symbols stage, where your drawings get distorted by preconceptions about how people look. The next stage was the analytical stage, where you learn to observe and draw what you see. With the help of my wonderful […]
We are going to learn how to draw the area on the front of the torso between the ribcage and pelvis. There’s the abdominal muscles, fibrous structures and fat and other components, but also there’s the gesture connecting the ribcage and pelvis to think about. We’ll look at how to draw all of this – […]
If you struggle with proportions for your figures, this video’s going to be useful for you. If you’d prefer to read it as an article, it is written out below the video. We’ve described before some techniques for getting things in the right place when you doing life drawing – alignment and negative space and […]