This was written March 06, 2024 as part of the 2024 Learning to Draw People Challenge
Credits: 1
Introduction
And onwards with day 16. Today, I didn’t need to “catch up” with my drawings, so it definitely felt better (Although due to trying Archery with friends, my review was on the next day. And yes, Archery was a blast!).
This time, I started at 3:30pm and drew in a library. I also evaluated my tiredness to be a 6/10. Not super tired, but surprisingly weary for the time.
Exercises
This time, the exercises took me roughly 6mins45s to complete. Not too bad. Once again, my horizontal lines we relatively contained, which is good. However, I definitely struggled with multiple lines, especially the diagonal ones. Meanwhile, the wavy lines were, as usual, a disaster. I seem unable to maintain continuity between waves, focusing on the movement, but not respecting the distance. This means gradual degeneration. But I’ll keep on practicing. As for the circles, they were soso. Spacing wasn’t great, and their shapes weren’t amazing.
Drawing
Now, for the pièce de résistance, the drawing. On this day, I opted to try a full-body sketch from the side. The step-by-step reference model was female, and it took me roughly 50 minutes to draw it. Here’s how it went.
I started with the guidelines used for dimensions and measurements (Unfortunately, they don’t look that straight). I then added a head and marks for the feet. While a very early step, I truly struggled with this angled head. First with gauging its size (its horizontal span), then the angle of curvature from the bottom of the jaw to the back of the head, and finally where the face should start curving towards the top. I redrew it a few times, and even tried to fix it later on. But as with many other things, I expect this will come with practice and experience…in other words, I’ll need to keep making such drawings.
Once this was done, I drew a rough spine guideline, the purpose of which is to help align the torso and the hips. I also found this difficult, redrawing it a few times. The spines I drew tended to be too curved. For reference, I have an example with torso and hips where I thought the spine was too curved.
As foreshadowed, next up came the torso and hips. In order to properly align them, extra guidelines extending down from the front and back of the head were added. Here, I mainly struggled with the torso. But I eventually realized the root of this was I wasn’t aligning the torso with the spine. I then knew to focus on this alignment, which helped a lot.
And thus, the guidelines are done. Time to work on the silhouette! Accordingly, I followed the contour of the guidelines, such as the torso and hips. I also added simple elements to the head/face. Nothing too complex, since the goal here is to focus on the body itself.
I did have some issues, but nothing major. The portions connecting the torso and the hips were redrawn a few times, but nothing dramatic. And once again, I found the legs challenging (although maybe less than on previous days). In particular, I still consider the knees and the thighs unintuitive.
For the next phase, I first added an arm. I then sketched a few details; refining muscles, limb intersections and the rib cage. There isn’t much worth mentioning here. I think things were fairly straightforward for me. The main thing that comes to mind is how the arm obscures part of the back, meaning some erasure.
Finally, the last phase consisted in deleting details from the previous phase, before adding clothes (and refining the feet). However, this time I appreciated the strokes added in the previous phase, since they helped guide the new elements.
Unfortunately, I struggled a bit with the foot, leading to a disappointing the result. Beyond that, the element that gave me the most trouble were the bottom underwear. Somehow, I struggled with getting the right curves, and connecting the leg and the belly. Here’s the final result:
Conclusion
This was definitely a new kind of challenge. And while there are definitely some elements I could improve, I think the result is reasonable and am generally happy with the proportions and angles, along with how different elements are connected. And while I’ll definitely want to keep practicing, I think this is a reasonable start.
Moreover, I believe I better understand how the joints and muscles function in such drawings. Unfortunately, it’s hard to properly describe in words, since it’s partially intuition. And despite my wishes, intuition tends to be hard to describe, needing to be built gradually (and personally), with practice and exposure as its foundations. And while, initially, intuition for creation might be missing, I believe the intuition for what looks correct or not tends to already be present, which can serve as an initial guiding star.
The drawing session lasted 56 mins. Meanwhile, my writing session was around 40 mins, with a review process of 45mins (split into two sessions, the first of about 10 minutes). This means a total of around 140mins, 85mins of which spent on the blog post. This means a ratio of about 2:3 of drawing to blog post, and just a little more time spent on reviewing vs writing. The last one in part due to postponing some decisions from the writing stage to the reviewing stage (vocabulary, phrasing, etc…). Overall, not too bad, just under 2h30mins, instead of 3h, which is more manageable.
And so, another session comes to a close. Thanks for joining and take care!
This post is followed by Learning to Draw People Challenge – Day 17 (2024/03/07)