You only realise how important these topics are when you’ve been practising and you’re serious about it. So you know how important weight is in figure drawing, let’s get the tools needed to succeed with it. Spot the difference in these two sketches of the same pose below. Hopefully you agree that the one […]
Most of the advice you’ve heard on this has probably either been impossible to implement or just wrong. A lot of figure drawings don’t have the figure balanced, I’ve done millions of drawings like that, and it feels weird for the viewer. So let’s get your figures balanced. The really cool thing is that often […]
This tutorial is a the first part of the Fresh Eyes 10 day figure drawing challenge. It’s all free, and the exercises are designed to be suitable to all abilities. If you make an account, you can access poses to practise with, plus you can get the 2D models described in this tutorial to practise […]
Before throwing my old life drawings away, I took a marker pen and saw if I could fix them quickly. It was a lot easier than I thought it would be! I was so much closer to good figure drawings than I thought I was, and maybe you are too. Some of the adjustments required […]
In this video we review a series of pencils specifically for life drawing. The pencil you use needs to have a few characteristics to help your practice be successful, but there are various materials that meet those requirements. We tell you which is our current favourite and which to avoid. So we look at: A […]
This article is the second part of the 3 Levels of Gesture Drawing series. You can see part 1 here and part 3 here. We’re taking gesture from clear as mud to clear as crystal in this series. In part 1, we started with the foundation of gesture drawing, which is angles. Those are clearly defined […]
This article is the first part of the 3 Levels of Gesture Drawing series. You can see part 2 here and part 3 here. We want to do beautiful drawings of people. Drawing people comes down to balancing two things – the structural and the gestural. So gesture is a huge part of drawing people […]
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 […]