[ A quick note: if you haven’t posted any art in 2016, I will skip your request for critique. Accept this mini-critique instead: Encouragement: We all believe in you, you are strong and wild and free. Exercises: 1. make some art today ]

@keyhala / @keyhalaportfolio: You know what I love? I love when artists put sharp contrasts next to subtle gradients. It just pushes all the right buttons for me, and you’ve got it down pat. There’s a sharpness and clarity to your work that speaks to the practice and thought you put into it. You’re in control of your medium; it’s doing what you tell it to do.

Let’s take a good ol’ look at Eizen.

“He looks much younger than in the game!  The Phal blossoms are nice; the glints dripping off them are very calligraphic. What a grim ol boy he is. He’s not doing the weird Posh Spice backwards lean that he does in the game. In fact, he’s slouching a bit. Overall, giving off a a very ‘grumpy teenager’ vibe. Not entirely sure where the light is coming from, or where we are. He’s quite far to the left in the composition -- like he’s stopped in mid stride, maybe? Or something else is going to occupy the space behind him? Shiny doublet.”

Artists to look at:

List your five favorite artists. Go find out who each of *their* favorite artists are, and study them.

Exercises:

1. Material studies. Your current approach to rendering and shading is lovely to look at, but you tend to approach every material the same way. Make 20 circles on a page, and paint each one as a different material. You’ll have an easy time with glass, metal, and ceramic, I expect, but also try tweed, silk, fur, wood, feathers, flesh, wax, lace, and tulle. Your goal is to convey those materials by the different ways they scatter and reflect light, NOT just by changing the outline and color. You will need to use reference photos.

2. Anatomy studies! You’ve got a grip on proportions, but there are a number of places where you’ve let shapes and forms be replaced with iconized marks too early in the process. For instance, the jugular notch on Eizen:

I suspect that this looked great when you did the line-work, but when the time came to paint it, you lost the forms beneath the skin, and it ended up as a little uncomfortable to interpret as flesh. 

So do some skeletal and écorché studies of the neck & shoulder girdle (pay particular attention to the collar bone, sternum, and sternocleidomastoid). Also do some anatomy studies of feet, and (ain’t it always the case) hands. Then continue through the rest of the body, because it’s good for you!

You’re doing beautiful work, @keyhala​, and you’re only going to keep getting better!

@personathief​, you’re thinking critically about your own work, and you’re striving to get stronger. Those are very good, important things! You’ve designed your own species, which is an ambitious and exciting world-building project that will give you lots of juicy images to make. I can’t wait to see where you take it!

Inner Dialogue: “A jellyfish mermaid is SO COOL but I want to see THE COOLEST PART: Where is her bell/tentacle/tail?

“She looks nervous. Her shoulders are raised, her brows turn up in the center. Tense. Is her nose wiggling? (Looking at the other portraits, I guess not -- but I don’t know how to interpret those below-eye-around-nose lines)

“Is the light coming from inside her? Or is that coloration instead of light? Why do I have that impression? No shadows from the hair or the chin, no bright light on the bosom. Glowy eyes, so maybe the light is inside her?

“The gradient on the hair is nice to look at, but it reads as quite stiff. Is the left front ringlet an exact mirror image of the right? I think it is. Strange to see hair emerge directly from the head in ringlets, but maybe that’s how jelly-maids work?”

@personathief, I have a dreadful secret to tell you.

Come close. No, closer. It’s dangerous, and no one likes to hear it. I’d better whisper.

Style is the Thing that Isn’t.

Style isn’t medium. It isn’t technique. It isn’t proportion, or detail, or influences. Style is the ghostly thing about a mature artist that peeks *through* all of those things. Style is the voice that whispers ‘Dürer’ in your eyes no matter if you’re looking at his paintings, his etchings, or an absent minded doodle.

Style isn’t shopped for. It isn’t chosen. It slouches in late, after every other skill has arrived.

Just like muses, style is best thought of with the corner of your mind. Concentrate on improving control, and technique, perspective and anatomy and proportion, and all the things style isn’t, because those are the sea in which style swims. Make a sublime ocean for it and style will come home to you, unbidden.

*cough*

Exercises:

1. Still life. You mention that, when you attempt full realism, your work tends to “look flat, lifeless and boring”. I couldn’t find anywhere you’d posted those experiments, so I’m flying a little bit blind, but I definitely want you to feel comfortable working at ANY level of abstraction, from photorealism through all the levels of cartoon and down into bleak minimalism.

So gather some fruit, or some bottles, or mugs, bowls, baskets, or whatever you have hanging around that has some serious volume. Stuff that has nice textures, that you want to pick up and run your hands over. I mean actually gather them up and set up a still life for yourself! Doing this from a photo or from your head will make it 1000% harder to convey the volume and vitality you see in person.

Now draw your still life -- multiple times. Do it in several different media, from several different angles. Do it with pencil on paper, and practice feeling around the volumes of each object with your pencil. Do it with watercolor. Do it digitally. Do it with every medium you have available to you. Expect each drawing to take several hours to complete -- be prepared to walk away and come back to it. (One second thought, maybe not fruit. Cézanne used to spend so long on a still life that the fruit would rot. Gross.)

2. Grisaille. Make yourself a value scale. Start with 5 values spaced evenly, starting with white and ending with black. Now paint a bust *but make sure you use the full value scale*. Sort out where the absolute whitest highlights will go, and where the darkest of occluded shadows are. The end result may look more like a marble sculpture than a living person, but concentrate on VOLUME with this exercise. For life, it’s time for (you guessed it):

3. Gesture. Yep, it’s gesture again! Looking through your tumblr and deviantart, I saw only a handful of postures and positions, repeated. Do some gesture drawing (see this post) and then I’d love to see you pose individual Zee-Greeub using the gestures you capture. Reversing the knees, removing the wrists, but still capturing the life and motion of the original gesture will be a fun and rewarding challenge.

Some Glen Keane handouts, as promised. He, and Disney animators in gerneral, are a rich vein of interesting material: https://www.google.com/search?q=glen+keane+advice&tbm=isch

In which four artists working together on Disney’s Sleeping Beauty all paint the same tree. These artists struggle to speak to the camera, but watching them is still enough to get my art-mind ticking along.

...and we’re back! Sorry for the off period, doing these critiques takes time and energy that easily gets spent elsewhere.

@avatarkasia​! You have a MAJOR advantage: you’re making beautiful things. You combine colors and make interesting marks in was that reward the eye for looking.  (For instance, these animal studies are almost a year old, but they’re just really lovely to look at,)

Beauty is far from the be-all end-all of art, but this is a strange fact: there are artists who can’t help but make beautiful things in spite of what academic artists would point out as weaknesses. And there are artists who have hard-core technique but don’t instinctively make things that are pleasant to look at. There’s nothing wrong with being either of those people, or neither of ‘em. Both qualities can be learned, and every artist has some of each in them -- but being a maker of beautiful things can be a heck of a lot more comforting than being a technician, on a bad day.

Let’s talk about your character design, since it’s recent. (The Character Design Challenge is a great exercise for those following along) 

Inner Dialog™: “Is that blue-glowing hand magic? Or just lighting? Reasonable lady-armour, that’s nice. Is that, like, a saddle blanket without a saddle? I don’t know enough about horses. Quiver and hair mixup -- takes a long time to interpret what her hand is doing. Is the light warm or cool? Where’s it coming from? Why’s it dark? What kind of person is she? From her face, down to earth, maybe a little grim. A soldier? Don’t see any insignia.. unless the leave on her quiver is, or something on the pauldron. But no, the saddle blanket doesn’t read as military; it reads circus-y, almost. Wild-west show sharpshooter? The magic doesn’t quite fit there. Don’t feel like I have enough information to work it out.”

Artists to look at:

Those bears make me think of Glen Keane, and he has a lot of excellent advice. I’ll dig some up and post it. Princess Diana reminds me, somewhat, of @annmarcellino -- so if you’re thinking of doing more with that flat-and-textured vibe, she’s someone to peek at.

Exercises:

1. Proportions. Sometimes, like with Princess Di, you’re manipulating proportions on purpose, and it’s great! But you’ve also got some persistent distortions showing up over an over again, that I don’t think are on purpose. The biggest one is shoulder-width. 

Those shoulders are VERY NARROW, even for a 3/4 view. And so are almost all your shoulders. So exercise 1 is to do the Canon of Proportions exercise from a few weeks ago. 

2. Foreshortening. Grab a friend, and take some reference photos with STRONG foreshortening BUT NOT strong scale perspective! This means you’re going to stand back a few paces, and zoom in on them, rather than standing up close. Now draw some character studies based on those poses. Struggle with the problem of conveying the true length of arms, legs, and shoulders even when they’re pointing at the camera. It sometimes helps to imagine the arcs that each limb makes as it swings around; even if a limb is too foreshortened to compare to a canon directly, sketching in an arc can give you the ruler you need. 

(from Loomis)

3. Communicating character. Come up with a character and give them a full, rich backstory: who they are, where they come from, how they feel about other people, about the world. Their hopes and dreams and emotional stance and everything else that makes a character.

Now draw them, and try and hint at as much of that backstory as you can. DON’T be symbolic, there’s no need to be cute about it. Instead, pretend you’re doing a marketing photoshoot. We humans are very good at reading one another instinctively -- by posture, by clothing, by expression. And we read lots into lighting and context. If you make use of our instincts, you can tell us *volumes* about a character with a single image, in a single glance.

Good luck!

Building your own Canon of Proportion

It’s very common to draw a figure, and know that something looks... wrong, but not be able to tell *what*. Having a juicy set of “ideal” proportions can help you course-correct when your instincts lead you astray. Beginners can use ready-made sets of rules, but as you become more attuned to exactly how you want your figures to look, it can be helpful to generate your own. 

Step 1: Learn a few existing canons of proportion. Try using them to measure real people, to measure art you like, and to measure your own art. See what happens if you take one of your own drawings, and adjust it to match the system you’re studying. See what rules make sense, and are easy to use, and which rules are confusing, or hard to see.

Proko has a couple great videos on different systems of proportion; here’s one system I think is particularly effective (but lots and lots of people use Loomis’ system and other skull-to-chin systems to great effect):

Step 2: Gather a number of references of figures whose proportions you like. If you want realism, you should use photos. If you want to make superhero comics, find panels that especially speak to you, instead. Ditto anime, Egyptian sculpture, whatever. If you’d like to draw people who are fat, or exceptionally tall, or very muscular, be sure to add them to the mix. We’re trying to capture your artistic ideals, not anyone else’s. You’re looking for two kids of figures: first, neutral figures, standing up straight, facing forward or directly to the side, with arms out of the way. These figures make it easy to see the proportions. Second, you’re looking for dynamic poses. These figures will help you test if your canon is useful. Step 3: Start looking for shapes and distances that are easy to identify. Classic examples are the distance from top of the head to the chin, from the base of the hand to the elbow, the width of the hips. However, it can be extremely helpful to take a page from Robert Beverly Hale’s book, and use volumes instead of lines when you measure. Use the cube that contains various parts of the body -- like Hale uses the cranial mass. You could also use a clenched fist, or the volume of the hips.

Step 4: Start looking for relationships. Move your chosen measures around each of your neutral reference figures, looking for structural points in the figure that are simple, whole-number ratios of your measurement. When you think you’ve found a good match (“the width of the rib cage is the length of the forearm”), start testing it out on the dynamic poses. Still seems reasonable? Great! Be sure to make note of when the measurement is a little too big, or a little too small, and see what effect that has on the way the figure looks.

A canon is just a big collection of these rules. So make it as simple or as complex as you feel comfortable with! Feel free to get creative with your comparisons, too. IIRC, Polyklietos mentions that if you draw a square with each side being the length of the hand, the diagonal of that square is the length of the forearm (from pit of elbow to base of palm). Any relationship that’s easy to see and to measure is fair game -- find what works for you. Mine existing canons for good rules, but test them. Don’t blindly believe anything -- there are plenty that won’t quite suit your tastes. Pay specific. attention to areas you struggle with the most! I tend to draw people’s hands much too small -- so I keep a number of rules around that I can use to verify when I’ve done it right. Step 5: Draw it out. This is the fun part, because you get to play at being Da Vinci. Draw a good, clean, neutral figure, and note out all the relationships you discovered. If you can, find geometric, visual ways to show the relationship off (like the stacked squares in the video above, or like the Vitruvian Man’s circle-in-a-square). That will make it easier to remember.

It will probably take you several tries to draw out a figure that *you* think looks right *and* that has measurements that are easy to remember -- so don’t fall too much in love with your first attempt. In the worst case, you’ll spend a few hours studying the figure, improving your instincts. In the best case, artists of the future will busy themselves trying to learn the secrets of YOUR system of proportion. If you do this exercise, post your results! Knowledge shared is knowledge multiplied!

@4328fox!

You’re on your way! You’re thinking about what your art communicates, and how it communicates. You’re making headway with facial expressions and with proportions. Like @digittleartnix, you’ve successfully made it over the hump that all artists face when they start having expectations and judgement beyond the free and joyous markmaking of childhood.  

I can clearly read the story, here -- all three actors have clear feelings about the event. It’s well staged: the composition is balanced while keeping everyone’s role clear. 

Most of your work makes me feel a bit pushed along. The bones of who, what, how are there, but my eyes rush over one drawing and then on to the next. There’s nowhere to rest and appreciate the care taken with a color, or a line.

So I’m going to recommend some exercises to help you slow yourself down, eke the most out of your references, and lavish some love on the humble line. This doesn’t mean laboring for hours over every mark -- but it does mean being mindful of every mark, and its function, just as you are mindful of every object in the scene.

Artists to look at

Just gorge yourself on art. Gulp it down gluttonously. Overindulge. If you have the opportunity to hit an art museum, do it. 

Exercises

1. Blind contour drawing. This is an hand/eye training exercise. Do it with pencil or pen and paper, not digitally. Pick a complex, organic object; your non-drawing hand is a common choice; so is a crumpled paper ball. You’re going to draw that object without ever looking at your drawing. Just trace your eyes around the edges of the object, slowly, deliberately, really looking -- and at the same pace, move your hand across the page, attempting to record what your eye is seeing.   The result is going to look truly bizarre. Exercises aren’t about making good art, they’re about getting stronger so you can make the art you want to. Every day is a good day to make some really awful drawings! What we’re aiming for is to train your hand and your eye to work together instinctively, so that you can gain the most from your reference material.

2. Upside-down drawing. This is a simple and rewarding exercise (stolen, as is the previous exercise, from Betty Edwards) in which you take a fairly detailed line drawing by an artist you admire, and turn it upside down. Now copy he upside down drawing, line-by-line. You are allowed to look at your drawing, but use the same skills you practiced above -- move your eye slowly along the lines of the original drawing, and copy as carefully as you can. We’re stripping away all the context of what it’s a drawing *of* and concentrating on training your eye to see and your hand to draw.

3. Loomis’ Drawing the Head and Hands. Read it, try it, and then get frustrated and forget it -- that’s what I did. Just like that sand-pit-thing in Star Wars, it takes a while for your brain to digest new ways of thinking. Months after giving up on it, you may find you’re gradually becoming able to use the tools Loomis gave you. Further up and further in, @4328fox!

Yo, @digittleartnix!

You’ve gotten over the hump! Lots of people give up on drawing before they’re ever able to draw the things they want to. You’re doing it, and you’re putting yourself out there selling commissions and prints. That speaks volumes to your confidence, and how much you’ve grown since you started. You’re making some jazzy color choices, funny doodles, and you can produce some fine clean linework when the finished piece requires it.

Let’s talk about your most recent work.

I wanna start with the weirdest thing that happened to me while looking at this: I didn’t recognize that this was a slash image until I read the tags. I fell into the gal-pal trap! I spent a good deal of time trying to work out why it is that only yesterday, when I saw two cuties holding hands I immediately understood, but today I saw two cuties holding hands and it didn’t click. 

I think the answer is in their poses. These two are ever so graceful and lithe, and they are looking at one another. Their bodies, though, from shoulder to toes, are very much pointed in opposite directions. If they weren’t holding hands, it would read that they were walking away from each other. Chibiusa’s finger points out into the night.

The city and the moon read well. You’ve chosen an interesting, dramatic lighting set up, and recognized the opportunity for cool shadows. The cutouts around the edges are pretty, but I don’t know how to interpret them. (As usual, I’m a dolt when it comes to pop culture, so if this is an obvious Sailor Moon thing, I apologize.)

Artists to look at:

I had an art history professor who iterated and reiterated: “Information in, information out.” Looking at an artist, you can see what they’ve been looking at. So try and expand the visual information you take in. Take the list of artists who do things you like, and find out what else they’ve done, who influenced *them*.

Grab the list of Steven Universe art directors, and start googling their other work. It’s fascinating!

Look backwards, too. Spend a few hours looking at Japanese woodcuts, or at scribes’ doodles in illuminated manuscripts, or at cave paintings, and see what you can bring back to your own work.

Exercises: 

1. Thumbnails from movies/TV you admire. This is essentially gesture drawing AND composition studies, rolled into one. Before you start watching, lay out a grid of TV-shaped squares. They should be small: 4-5cm. Then, at any interesting or especially communicative moment, jot down the poses on-frame, and any important contrast cues. 

2. “One figure to the pose of another” This is one of my favorite ways to study great artists! You’re going to find a photo reference of a (preferably nude) model in an interesting pose. Use a real photo -- don’t use art or CG.

Do a gesture study of the pose.

Now you’re going to pick out a figure drawn or painted by an artist you want to learn from. It should be in a totally different pose. This works with anything, but start with some that are pretty fully rendered, not just line work. Now you’re going to reproduce the painted figure, in the same style, the same lighting, as close as you can to the real thing -- but in the pose from the photo reference. Come as close as you can to creating a convincing fake -- think out the lighting and the fabric like you were the original artist, as though this was another pose the artist had considered.

3. Go one month without using a brush at anything other than 100% opacity. Let pressure and velocity control size; but use a hard-edged, full-opacity brush. This is going to change two things: first, the way you draw lines. You won’t be able to stack up a dozen attempts at a single line, and let the transparency average them out; and second, you’ll have to make conscious choices about when the edge between light and shadow is hard, and when it is soft. No airbrushing for a whole month!

You’re doin’ great, @digittleartnix, and you’re only going to keep doin’ greater-er! Get out there are keep growing stronger.

@mokibun!

Your work is 100% adorable, and you should be very proud of it! It’s very consistent, and you’re clearly having a good time making it, because that joy comes through. You’re making lovely color harmonies, you’re using detail judiciously, you’re using texture to tie everything together. Compared to where you were this time last year, your work is so much more confident. 

Your shapes, colors, and textures all feel very on-purpose. You’re clearly using references when appropriate for hair, costuming and so on. 

Let’s talk about these two, ‘cause they’re cute.

“Friends or... ooh, holding hands! Friends and! Clever how the gesturing right hand, and the pocket line, guide my eye there. 

“The clothes feel real, and consistent. I know it’s a cool day, and along with the colors I feel like it’s autumn. They’re telling me about the characters, too -- jacket buttoned up, t-shirt tucked in and belted -- these folks are on the adorkable spectrum. 

“Trying to pick up on what the circle in the background is telling me, in the way the clothes and the poses do, but it seems like it’s solving a composition problem without adding anything new. Would love to have gotten a where to go with the who and the when.”

It’s strong work. You are petting your lines, which is a dangerous habit to be in. Your charming style and the way you’re coloring lets you get away with it for the most part, but it still leaves evidence of which parts of the drawing went smoothly, and which (like the feet) may have fought back a little.

Artists to look at:

There’s a repeating parallel mark you use in your coloring that reminds me of J C Leyendecker. He takes it to an extreme, of course, but it might give you some ideas.

Exercises:

1. Draw characters in your usual style, but use a sharpie. Little to no pencil-work first. Your goal is to lay out your line-work in long, smooth, single strokes, without erasing or going back over. This exercise can be done digitally, but it takes great moral strength to do it without undo or erasing. Much easier to use a permanent marker. 

I suspect you’ll find it will look too slick and clean to fit in with your work generally -- but it can be very useful to be able to make rough lines on purpose and not just as a result of uncertainty.

2. The Bargue plates of feet. Same as @katiedrawsstuff . Get really comfortable with feet *in motion* and then you can start really conquering shoes.

3. This is the tricky one, but you can do it! Take a deep breath, remember that no one is ever completely satisfied with their art, and...

... make this number go up! 

As with all stock photography sites, there’s a fair bit of of silliness, but there’s some great stuff in there, too.

@katiedrawsstuff​!

You’re rockin’ it. You’ve got serious gesture chops, and you can lay down a real pretty line -- I wasn’t at all shocked to hear you’re studying animation and production. You’re also pushing your own boundaries stylistically, and purposefully practicing things you want to improve: you’re only going to continue to get stronger!

I wanna start with the Sartorialist studies. First of all, brilliant exercise. Everyone else reading this: go to http://www.thesartorialist.com/ and draw people! There are lots of different kinds of people, in lots of different kinds of clothes, all looking cool as heck.

Inner dialogue: “Basketball player draws my eye immediately -- probably just because of the action, but there’s also an interesting line-doubling thing going on. Gives some serious thrust to his right arm. His expression reads like it’s mid-story -- he’s just seen the planned play fall apart, and they’re going to go off-book.   “Next most eye catching is maybe the person wearing headphones, in the middle? Ultra-upright posture. Daring to use an almost-ruler-straight line in the back, but since it is clearly cloth not flesh, it works really well, ends up ramrod straight but not unbalanced or inhumanly stiff.  “I wonder where the knee-knock pose originated. It’s used for hip-but-unselfconscious-girl drawings all the time, and it works, but I almost never see anybody actually stand like that. Love her hair, though. “I wanna see a sesame-street for grownups featuring this cast. They all seem like they have inner lives, plans, motivations.” Your anatomy and proportions are mostly really confident and fun to look at. One thing I’m noticing across the board, in this image and others all the way back to 2014, are three areas that are a little less certain. Hands and feet are the ones everyone struggles with, but I get a sense of discomfort about the elbow, too? (Sometimes this feels a little like doing a cold reading.) Artists to look at:

Your line work is really strong, you’ve got control of the straight/c-curve/s-curve trifecta. It’s probably time to start looking for opportunities for Advanced Line Studies. Check out Moebius, if you haven’t. Even without varying line *weight* at all, he could put a dozen different line qualities into a drawing, smooth and jagged and broken and implied and vanishing entirely:

You might also check out Jeremy Bastian, of Cursed Pirate Girl. Note that both of these artists include lots more detail than you do, but that is NOT what I’m suggesting you look at, so much as the *variety* of lines and forms they use, and the way they make them all coexist so beautifully.

And when you figure it out, tell me, because I’m dying to know. Exercises:

1. Do the Bargue plates of feet. There are only six or so, but they’re good practice and cover some really useful poses. 2. Do some anatomical drawings of the muscles of the arm and forearm. Keep your eye on the origins and insertions, *especially* of the Brachioradialis and the Triceps. 3. Find an excuse to use some REALLY DRAMATIC LIGHTING. Cast some really deep shadows. Put the light source close by in the scene, so you have to deal with the inverse-square law, and show the light getting dimmer as things get further from it. If you do this kind of thing too often it gets silly (see the Fijnschilder’s candlelight paintings) but sometimes you need it to convey emotions that would look over-the-top if you tried to show them using posture and expression alone. You got this, @katiedrawsstuff​! Keep pushing yourself to get stronger, make lots of pictures, and make us all proud!

@person3in3progress!

First thing’s first: that can-tab chain mail is spectacular, and you know it. Ditto your crochet work. I mostly concentrate on drawing and painting, because it’s what I know -- but I do a (very) little crochet and hoo-boy that hooded vest is lovely. Visually, you’re already choosing subjects like a great artist. You’re thinking about moments of drama, of heightened emotion, and high concept. I mean, you illustrated Emerson -- not the face of the person, but the thought of the person. That kind of bravery is gonna take you places. 

Let’s talk about your latest, an illustration for Awaken the Stars part I. 

Inner dialogue: “Warm colors, orange light, darkish shadows. Fire? Are those embers in the background, or leaves? Ah, characters are a little dirty, too; call that ash and soot, and they’re near a fire, probably. Speech bubble seems like it was scribbled on; on purpose? There’s no space for it; feels compressed. I guess I’d have to read the story to find out who “they” are.

Her feet have no toes. Skin is reacting to light in the same way that clothes are; eyes aren’t at all. Hard to glean more meaning here without the story alongside. Where are they? In a red place. Did they know each other well before this? How do they feel?”

I’m going to say the same thing I said to @taffytalks: there’s not much art on your art blog! The simplest way to improve is to practice.  Crochet is great, because in one project, you get to practice the same handful of stitches thousands of times. Drawing 1000 of something sounds much more intimidating, but it’s not really any harder -- we just judge ourselves so much more harshly.

Remember, if the worst thing that happens in a day is that you drew 5 bad drawings, then you had an amazing day and you got to draw stuff. Confidence is EVERYTHING in drawing. I can see your concern in the way you build big lines out of lots of little strokes. Artists call that ‘petting’ your lines. Ideally, pet doggos, and draw lines in one smooth, attentive motion. Learning to do that is much easier when you don’t have hours of work tied up in each drawing. The other thing I’ll note is that you might be among the countless artists who have become convinced that using photo reference is somehow cheating. It’s not. It’s 100000% not cheating, it’s what artists do. There are a million silly stock photos out there of dudes holding kids, and lots of bald black men, and so on. You don’t have to use any reference exactly -- pick and choose like you’re at a buffet: a pose from here, a hand from there, head from here, expression from there. Take photos of yourself in the right pose. Whatever you have to do to have some material to observe closely while you work.

Exercises: 1. Gesture drawing. Lots and lots! 2. Learn a canon of human proportions. If you’re feeling frisky, learn 5. A canon of proportions is a set of guidelines of how big each part of the ‘ideal’ body is, relative to each other. Since there’s no single ‘ideal’ body, there are lots of canons out there, some dating back to ancient Greece (Leonardo’s famous ‘Vitruvian Man’ drawing is just him trying to make sense of some dead dude’s canon of proportions with only a written description to guide him).  Here’s Loomis on a few different proportions. You can find his ‘Figure Drawing for All It’s Worth’ for free online, and it goes into more detail.

Of course, different styles of art can have wildly different canons:

(so tall!) So pick ones you like!

WARNING: Canons are NOT a good way to construct a figure from a blank page. I lost years of my artistic life thinking that. You’ll end up with something stiff, emotionless and blegh. Canons ARE a good way to identify and gently correct any wonky proportions in a gesture, before adding mass and detail. (For instance: compare the shoulder-to-elbow of the adult in your painting to the height of his head. That’s easy to correct once you’ve got a canon or two to compare to.)

3. Paint some different materials. Find something chrome, and paint a quick picture of that. Paint something hard plastic. Something fuzzy. Something soft. Something wood. Practice communicating the different way each of those materials has highlight and shadow, how to show soft edges and hard ones. Good luck, Pip! Conceptually, your drawings are on fire -- add gesture, proportion, and confidence, and you’ll be unstoppable.

Gesture Drawing Resources

I’m going to be harping on gesture a LOT as I plow through critiques, and rather than re-explain the why and how each time, here’s a buncha resources.  Gesture drawing has been around a long time. Just about any figure artist whose scraps and sketches survive left some trace of gesture drawing. It’s an exercise to train a specific way of seeing objects; it concentrates on motion and rhythm, rather than contour, mass, or detail.

Kimon Nicolaïdes’s Natural Way to Draw cemented gesture as an important exercise in the modern era (it’s one of the four types of practice he drills over and over and over). Drawing the figure *really fast* is an art school right of passage.

Whenever you see a figure drawing that has a sense of LIFE and MOTION, stretching or folding or slouching or straining, no matter what the style. Loose and doodl-y like Jules Feiffer,

Or as completely rendered as Artemisia Gentileschi,

You’d better believe that these are artists who practiced and practiced until they understood gesture instinctively, without thinking.  There are lots of methods for practicing gesture, but most of them concentrate on drawing the figure (ideally from life) very quickly -- times ranging from 30 seconds to 3 minutes. I think Stan Prokopenko does a brilliant job describing and demonstrating his take on gesture. Here are two videos from his great Figure Drawing series on youtube:

 If you need figures to draw, check out Croquis Cafe, which posts a 30-minute, real-time life drawing session on youtube every week. There are already 233 weeks, so that’s over 100 hours of drawing right there.

http://artists.pixelovely.com/ is well known and has a somewhat limited repertoire of images, but if you’ve exhausted Croquis, it’s another resource. Finally, and best, draw live models! Sit in a park and capture gestures as people pass by. Take a look at this list of Dr. Sketchy’s branches -- Dr Sketchy is a low-pressure, drinking-allowed life-drawing session run by local Burlesque performers all over the world. If there’s a branch in your town, for a couple bucks you can do some gesture drawing and have some laughs. This is all old hat to some of you, though. Are there other great gesture drawing resources I’m missing?

@bananataffy​!

You’re stronger than you were! Look back at your posts from 2011 and from today, your work has more depth and volume, and you’ve really improved your use of color -- which is now formidable! You’re also building and using backgrounds in ways that you weren’t back then.

Thoughts and feelthinks

Looking at the portrait of Johnny, since it’s most recent. I haven’t read the whole comic, so be warned of my ignorance.

My inner dialogue: “Oooh, dramatic lighting! Is this a good guy or a bad guy? This person’s doing the nonchalant-cool-guy-in-front-of-danger stance. Where’s the light coming from? Is it coming from the spirit in the back? Like, out of its joints? Or somewhere else? I can’t tell if they’re glowing or edge-lit. “Is the creature attacking? Or working alongside? I should go find out where in the comic this is coming from. Ooohh, oh, it’s the blacksmith-spirit-thing. Why is it confusing? Johnny’s highlights are brighter than the spirits fire-y bits, so he seems like the source of the light. Is that on purpose, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Watch? “The texture of light on the kid’s shirt keeps catching my eye pleasantly, and so does the sculptural quality of the hair. The monster seems a bit flat and haphazard by comparison. Is that saying something about relative physicality/ethereality of each of them? Or just the time spent, or the references available? Kid’s shoulders are pretty narrow, which makes the hips *very* narrow -- looks unfortunate when both hands are in pockets.”

The line work in your angry Ricks is really captivating -- fluid and confident. He is also super expressive -- you mention that you used reference for at least one expression. Lots of your work has a fairly neutral, milky smile or gentle frown, and his face stands out strongly in contrast.

One thing I definitely I notice is that your output has slowed down. There’s an image or two a month, now -- when a few years ago you were posting images *and* making a comic! The comic died out before any questions got answered -- you’re not alone in letting a comic slowly disappear (I’ve got two of my own in similar condition) but you may have also lost the sense of time pressure that kept you making things.

Some artists to look at:

I love your Alice papercut. Check out Becky Pobst’s paper work. I bet you already know Tracy Butler, but they’re exceptional at giving even resting faces rich expressions. Here’re some notes they made on the subject. 

You already obviously know Zach Morrison, because he draws Paranatural; but set aside the story and study the artwork. There are ways that I think your work is technically stronger than theirs, but take a peek at this panel, and see how contextual color lets the art show both the face AND the sun through the leaves. You get a really strong sense of place from this image. When you look at this, or Rick and Morty, or any comic, think about what *other* questions the art is answering -- about place, time, weather, feelings, etc.

Exercises

1. If you feel like you don’t have as much time or energy to work on art as you used to, try working to a time limit instead of a level of completion. Pick a subject, and set an egg timer (or a phone alarm) for 30 minutes, do what can be done in that time, and post it regardless. Then try 15 minutes. Then 10! 5! 2! 30 seconds! It’s just an exercise, and it’s great fun to push exercises into absurdity. Plus, it gives you a way to excuse yourself if you’re not happy with the result.

2. You’ve got a strong sense of form, when you’re focused on it, but we don’t see it because your scenes are lit very evenly. Try taking one of your old images that you like, and pick a specific light source. Pretend everything in the scene is white, but that light source is the only light in the world. Now now paint over the image in black and white, concentrating only on capturing the way the light is reflected and occluded. Mentally trace each beam of light, letting it get dimmer and dimmer as it bounces. Show off the form and depth of the scene, and don’t worry about line, or color, or expression. Then pick a different way you might light the scene, and do it again. When that exercise gets boring, start trying to do it with colored light, and with colored objects. 3. Gesture drawing.  I know, I know. This is going to be on almost every critique, but gesture drawing never goes away. Unless I go “oh gosh, look at the gesture!” when I look at your work, then I will say “more gesture drawing!” You’re doing great, @taffytalks! Keep it up! [ Want to receive a critique? Reblog this other post over here.]

Reblog for Critiques!

It’s been a while since the last art blog critique here on amazinglyartisticadvice dot tumblr dot com. Let’s start again. Reblog this post from your art blog, or with a link to your art, and receive a critique!

What’s a critique? It’s a thing with four parts!

1. Some super positive encouragement! Making art can be frustrating if you’re not getting the results you want. Having someone rooting for you can help.

2. Phenomenology A careful description, a report of what I think and feel when I look at your work, and/or how it relates to other ideas and other work I’ve seen.

A lot of critique gets caught up in ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and ‘like’ and ‘dislike’. In the right setting, that kind of judgement can be really helpful. At the heart of art critique, though, is just an honest reporting of “here’s what happens to me when I’m looking at it”.  If your work is making me think and feel exactly what you want me to think and feel, then it doesn’t matter if I hate your work -- it’s doing it’s job. (I don’t hate your work!) 3. Artists to look at Some links to artists (you may already know), whose work seems relevant to yours. 4. Exercises If parts of your work seem technically weak, I’ll suggest a few exercises to help strengthen those art-muscles. I’m excited to see what y’all are up to!

[It may take a little while before you receive your critique -- I’m not all-knowing, but I hang out with a lot of clever art-folk every week, so if I’m stumped on what to recommend to you, I might be consulting with them.]