Hi and welcome to Figuary! Every day we are going to post a video and an article with guidance about figure drawing and Croquis Cafe will post a practice session – life models posing for you to draw.
We’re hoping you’ll watch our video/read the article everyday and then do some practise at Croquis Cafe. 28 days is the perfect amount of time to build some powerful drawing habits. The most important part of the whole thing is to do a least some of the practice session. The theme we’ll be looking at for this first week is the Story of the Pose – seeing and drawing the most important things and filtering out the rest. But before that, we need to get our minds in the right place for Figuary.
You may feel some self-doubt about your drawing. If so, you’re not alone. You might wish it wasn’t there, but I don’t think the problem is that it’s there, the problem is if you take it too seriously. I’ve talked to a lot of professional artists and it seems that the self-doubt doesn’t leave you no matter how good you are.
The drawing on the screen is by Mayko. She has tons of self-doubt, but she draws all the time anyway. The key is to accept the doubt being there, and get on with practising anyway. Remember that drawings while you’re learning don’t need to be good, they need to teach you something. Let’s take a moment right now to remove that pressure for this month.
There’s good news and bad news we need to accept:
- We can’t learn everything now, it takes time – skill builds over months and years, not days and weeks.
- Massive improvement – maybe more than you imagine – is possible over the long-term.
From a technique point of view, we are going to start to build the habits of seeing and capturing the essence of the poses and not getting caught up in irrelevant details.
In week 2, we’ll focus on simplifying and drawing the light and dark. Week 3 is about making expressive, confident marks on the paper. Week 4 is about gesture & other useful tips.
We’re keeping the videos as concise and doable as possible – one thing per day that builds on the previous day. All you have to do is take 20 out of each day to watch our video and the Croquis Cafe practice session, and do some drawing.
Ok, enjoy the Croquis Cafe practice, and we’ll see you in the next post!
PS, We’ve put together a FREE ten-day challenge called Fresh Eyes, which is specially designed to help transform the way you see the figure. Signing up will also give you access to our reference library, which has hundreds of high quality life drawing reference images for you to practice your drawing with.
