This was drawn March 04 (I started right before midnight, so it counts!), but written March 05, 2024 as part of the 2024 Learning to Draw People Challenge
Credits: 1
Introduction
Hello there, and thanks for coming along. To start with, I once again ended up drawing and writing on different days (thus, I technically only save up half a credit, haha), due to classes resuming, and having fairly busy day (it also looks like it’ll be a busy week). But here I am writing this article in a coffee shop, while listening to music with a tea pot next to me. Without further ado, here’s how my 14th day went.
Exercises
As always, we start with the exercises. Once again, those went fairly quickly, clocking at just under 7 minutes, seemingly the new norm. For a normal session, that’s pretty good (although for a shorter session of around 30 minutes, it would consume a good chunk of the available time).
This once, I struggled a bit more than usual with my strokes. I’m left to wonder if there might be a correlation with my alertness, since I was rather exhausted at this point. In particular, the wavy lines were rough, some of them looking less like sinusoidal waves and more like cycloids. I’m left wondering if I should track how tired I am each session to see its impact, possibly by recording the time at which I start and an estimate from 1-10 of how tired I feel. But definitely not a priority.
Generally, I had a “global alignment” issue. For example, in the lines exercise, individual strokes might be generally fine, but the rows themselves are definitely slanted. Regardless, here are the results:
Drawing
As promised, I opted to try to draw the full-body male reference model. As on the previous day, this started with a wire-frame. To avoid confusion between guidelines and drawing, I opted for a different guideline color. But while it looked reasonable on my tablet… I think it looks a bit aggressive on the computer.
The first thing I did was to draw 8 equally spaced horizontal line. Then I added a rough head shape, along with hips. Remember the warning I gave the previous day about errors doubling if you count each side separately? Well, I almost fell for a similar issue, where the hips would have been twice as long as intended (Counting the required distance on each side, as opposed to total). Luckily, I noticed it and fixed it right away.
I then added the shoulders and connected them to the hips to complete the torso. I did mention yesterday I would get back to this: the male and female torsos differ noticeably. The female torso is rectangular, with hips the same length as the shoulder. Meanwhile, the male torso is a trapezoid, with shoulders slightly wider than the hips. Here is the wire-frame at this stage:
Next came the arms and legs. For the arms, I tried to make their angle the same as that of the torso (i.e.: incrementing the horizontal distance by the same amount). Meanwhile, the knees are slightly closer to the center, with the feet directly below them.
Next up were the finishing touches for the wire-frame, mainly adding guidelines for the chest and hips. For some reasons, I struggled with the chest guidelines. First, my two lines were initially noticeably asymmetric, messing up the proportions and alignments. But even once that was fixed, I had difficulties with the semi-circle portion. I both struggled with properly placing its apex, and drawing a proper circular shape, often drawing shaky lines (Likely due to how late I drew).
Here’s the completed wire-frame. Overall, the full wire-frame took me about 13 minutes. Not bad at all.
At this point, it was time to start the actual drawing. The first step was to draw the outline by adding limbs around the nodes and guidelines: A head and neck, two arms, two legs, and a torso (including a crotch outline). But I didn’t simply draw them out-of-order and disconnected. Instead, I “continuously” drew the outline counter-clockwise, starting top-left, continuing in the bottom, and finishing top-right.
Once again, I really struggled with legs, redrawing them multiple times. Moreover, the hips are a little off at this point. However, I did end up fixing some issues later on. Meanwhile, while it might be a bit silly (especially when following reference drawings), I was really happy and almost proud with how part of the arm on the left came out. In particular, I’m really happy with the section between the bicep and the shoulder, where it looks like the outline of the muscle is present.
Now, to add some initial details. I started with the face and the hair, before moving on to muscles and other strokes on the skin. I also took this opportunity to readjust a few things I was unhappy with, generally from top to bottom. Thus, I reworked the neck and shoulders a bit before adding strokes in the chest area.
Speaking of the chest, I struggled a bit with the pectoral muscles, sometimes making them look more like breasts. There are two culprits here:
- I initially had issues gauging the stroke on the outer-part of the chest, sometimes connecting it to the armpit, instead of being more parallel to the body.
- The bottom of it was sometimes too curved, or at a wrong angle.
I then added the abdominal muscles and refined the crotch a little bit. This area was also a bit rough for me initially, trying not to make it look like a “beer belly”. But I think it’s about the orientation of the curves, which I initially made curve too much towards the outside.
I also added some strokes to the arms, before moving on to the legs. Here, I truly struggled. There’s just something about legs (including feet) at this angle that I find unintuitive. At this point, I spent a good 15 minutes just on the legs and feet, redrawing them many times. However, I did figure some stuff out, which I’ll need to work on. With the knee lines in place, and actively being conscious about it, I realized the leg should ever so slightly curve around the knee (However, this is not properly applied here). I also started to better understand how the calves actually curve on the leg, which is a little tricky.
Ultimately, I believe most of my issues issues here revolve around needing to think more about the anatomy, as opposed to considering the leg as a whole and thinking in terms of strokes.
Here is what things looked like once this phase was complete:
Finally, I was ready for the final phase: improving the hair and face, removing a lot of the muscles/joints strokes, to be replaced by sparser and finer ones, and adding underwear. I also fixed a few sections. And while I struggled a bit with the nose, I came to a realization. While I envisioned it as vertical line with a “spot” for the tip of the nose, I eventually realized the tip should instead be separate stroke at a different angle, with thickness representing the shading. I also tried to fix the hands a bit, before realizing I’d been drawing for nearly 90 minutes and should probably head to bed (It was close to 1:30am). But I was so focused that I didn’t see time pass by. And I must say, this is something I enjoy about such projects, being able to fully devote myself to something, completely losing myself to a task, oblivious to the passing of time.
And so, here is the final result:
Conclusion
I must say, I’m really happy with this drawing. It definitely has its flaws, but I think it’s already a significant improvement over the previous day. Moreover, I’ve gained a better understanding of some necessary concepts, along with a clearer notion of what to focus on. I consider this a successful day!
As for the statistics, I spent about 85 minutes drawing, roughly 75 minutes to write and 55 minutes reviewing, split up into two parts, 37mins and 18mins. This means a total of 130 minutes devoted to writing the article, and 215 minutes of total time. The drawing to article ratio is close to 1:2, and the writing to review ratio is 15:11 (roughly 3:2).
Once again, I really regret drawing and writing on different days, since it really feels like I’m continuously lagging behind. Which is especially painful when also having to keep up with other stuff. Thus, for my next day, I plan to spend less time drawing (maybe timeboxing to 30-45 minutes) and then writing right away. I’ll let you know tomorrow how that went.
Thank you for joining, and I hope you appreciated this post. Have a wonderful day!
This post is followed by Learning to Draw People Challenge – Day 15 (2024/03/05)