Category: Skill learning

This was written March 01, 2024 as part of the 2024 Learning to Draw People Challenge

Introduction

Hello everyone and happy March! Today marks the end of my first week back (Reminder that I’m only planning to draw Monday through Friday now, as explained here). Unfortunately, today was a bit underwhelming. I started my session while extremely tired and under the weather, yet decided to undertake something challenging…while also cutting some corners. Definitely not a recipe for success. Thus, today will be a quick one.

Exercises

Nothing much to say about the exercises, other than I somewhat rushed through them. Still a good warm up, but not the best of results. All the same, they took me about 6m30s, which is shorter than usual. Here they are if you want to see them:

Drawing

Today, I decided to go for an angled profile. I started by drawing the contour with some guidelines. However, I also cut corners and skipped a few of the guidelines, along with the neck’s cross-section.

Once that was done, I placed some eye holes, eyebrows, a nose and a mouth. Unfortunately, I believe that my eyes are a little too low here. Also, the eye on the left should be at a different angle, to account for the face’s angle.

Next, I took the first step to refine the eyes, and redrew the cranium, to try to account for poor placement of the eyes.

For the next step, I added an ear with some detail, and also opted to modify the placement of the nose and mouth. Overall, I’m not too disappointed by the ear, I think it might be the best aspect of this drawing.

As my last step for the face today, I refined the eyes further, and added a blush. There was a lot of erasing and redrawing for the eyes, especially the one on the left. And even then, I’m still unhappy with them. Their placement and proportions feel a little off. I definitely need to spend more time working on this in the future. This different angle is something I need to better understand.

Finally, I added outlines for the hair. Here is the final result.

Conclusion

Overall, I think it’s a disappointing result, likely due to a combination of my tired state and rushing through things (i.e.: cutting corners), while working on a more complex task than usual. This kind of angle is definitely less intuitive, and something I need to better study.

Beyond that, I’m glad I still managed to put something out today. Overall, this means I successfully drew and wrote a blog post every day this week, which has been the primary goal here. Thus, even though the week may have ended in a whimper, it was still successful, so I’ll take that as a victory! On that note, I hope you all have a lovely weekend, and a great month of March. See you next week.

This post is followed by Learning to Draw People Challenge – Interlude

This was written February 29, 2024 as part of the 2024 Learning to Draw People Challenge

Introduction

Happy end of the month everyone, with the elusive February the 29th. Today, as stated in yesterday’s post, was a long day since I went on a field trip. Thus, I started drawing fairly late, while also exhausted. But I still went through with it, and am also writing this post!

Before getting into it, a silly note. While on the bus, I decided to try to read/translate a few lines from the (Chinese) drawing book I’m using as a reference…and there’s definitely a lot of value I’m losing by following visually and not reading. I will need to spend some time reading it.

Exercises

For the exercises, there isn’t much to say. Mainly two realizations:

• When drawing multiple strokes in a row, I tend to leave my hand in place, only changing my wrist’s position slightly. This means I often end up in a very cramped position. After realizing this, I decided to try to move my arm after most strokes, and I think this was a little better. My hand wasn’t feeling as cramped as usual after the exercises.
• While handling the wavy lines, I also realized I could move my whole arm, instead of just my wrist and my forearm. This means I raised my hand and arm, and let the stylus glide over the tablet. I suspect that might be what I did yesterday which led to that motion that felt so fluent. I also opted to use that technique for some of the larger circles, and tried it with a few strokes in the actual drawing. I think this has potential, though I might also need to explore it with different grips.

Beyond that, I still think these exercises are a great warm up, and I think there are a few areas in which I’m improving. It might be worth eventually looking back and comparing the progress here. Overall, it took me roughly 10 minutes to complete the exercises. Here are the results:

Drawing

Today, I opted to revisit the profile angle. I started with some guidelines, as usual:

Once this was done, I continued with the front of the profile (nose, mouth and jaw). I also added a neck and redrew the “cranium”, following the guideline. It has a few flaws, but I think it’s not so bad. Plus, it’s just a temporary fixture. There two components I struggled with the most. First, the bridge of the nose (roughly where the eye sockets should be), often making it too deep. Then there’s also the chin, which I often draw too blocky. You can see the result so far with and without guidelines:

Next up, I added some guidelines for the eye. I drew a line from the neck to roughly where the eye should be, and added a circle for the eye. (No, it is not a monocle)

Once the guidelines were ready, I drew the eye’s outline, making sure to align it with the top of the nose this time. I also added an eyebrow and a smile. Being unhappy with the chin, I redrew it along with the jaw before adding the ear’s outline (since I wanted them to align properly). Here it is with and without the guidelines.

The next step was to add in the inner outline for the ear, and some details for the eye. I once again struggled with the ear.

Finally, the last details for the face were added: some highlights around the eye, a thicker eyebrow, and a more detailed ear. Also some plastic surgery, redrawing the jawline and the nose. I’m fairly happy with the image at this point, I also think it might be my best ear so far.

If we compare this to the drawing I had on Monday (Day 08), I think it’s much better:

Next, there were a few steps to handle for the hair, which I opted to draw this time. First, a general outline:

Once that was done, I tried to add details for the hair, with different strands here and there. Though I once again struggled with the hair conceptually: what should be drawn where and in which orientation?

I then removed the cranium line and started trying to modify the hair a little. I noticed that the book, for some reason, removed some hair at this stage. I definitely struggled to better understand that. Here’s an intermediate stage I had, before refining it some more. Note that the back of the head was changed a bit, since I wasn’t convinced with its shape. The shape definitely appears smoother.

Ultimately, I learned a few things about drawing hair today:

• Less is more. Having less detail and focusing on specific areas lends itself to better results.
• Working on hair orientation is definitely important. Trying to make it flow “naturally” goes a long way, although I haven’t mastered this yet.
• Having smooth strokes seems especially important for hair.

The drawing is not perfect by any means, but I think it’s my best so far, and I’m really happy with my progress. Here it is:

Conclusion

Overall, I think I’ve definitely made observable progress, and I’m ecstatic about it! I’m also glad that I’ve managed for the past two days to both draw and write my posts, despite being tired and exhausted. I think that’s the extremely valuable if I want to make this a long-term habit. As for the time spent on this, I spent around 90 minutes on drawing (10 minutes of exercises and one hour of drawing). Writing this post took me roughly 50 minutes, and reviewing it took about 25 minutes (a 2:1 ratio, definitely better than yesterday in terms of proportions). Overall, this is a huge time commitment at a total of 2h45mins (And that’s just drawing and writing, it doesn’t include transferring files, publishing the post and relevant updates, etc…). I’ll need to find a way to shorten it a bit by the time classes resume next week. But one step at a time.

I hope you enjoyed today’s post. Thank you for joining me and following my progress. Stay tuned to see how far I can get, and what other things I learn along the way!

This post is followed by Learning to Draw People Challenge – Day 12 (2024/03/01)

This was written February 28, 2024 as part of the 2024 Learning to Draw People Challenge

Introduction

Since I got home a little late, and tomorrow I’ll be leaving early to go on a field trip, I opted for a shorter session. This time, I decided to pick things up where I dropped the ball last time, practicing eyes. Thus, I prepared my book and tablet, got a mug of water, and started to play some music.

Exercises

For the line exercise, I ended up realizing that for the “overhand” technique, the hand obscures what’s above (in retrospect, this is obvious), which means it can mess up spacing and flow. Otherwise, an unexpected result is that the “overhand” technique seems to result (for me) in thinner lines. The results of this exercise are soso, but still serve as a good primer.

For the wavy line exercise, I opted to go more slowly for the first line, and it seems to have been a little better. I then opted to go a little more slowly generally, and think I felt a more natural “flow” of the stylus against the tablet, almost as if the stylus were guiding me. Unfortunately, it’s hard to properly explain, but I think it helped a bit. Overall, the results are soso, but I think they’re still superior to previous days.

Finally, for the circles exercise I decided to try to go a little more slowly at first, but I’m not sure how much it helped. I also decided to go for a new type of exercise, where I increased the size of the circle with each new row. I think this could be useful, since it makes me practice different kinds of arcs, making this exercise more versatile.

Overall the exercises took 10 minutes, which ate a significant chunk of the 30 minutes I ended up being able to use.

Drawing

For the drawing, I ended up only using 20 minutes. I would have preferred to use more time, and sketch multiple sets of eyes, but ended up being short on time.

I flipped through the pages until I found the section on eyes. Once found, I decided to follow the steps highlighted there. It went as follows:

1. Sketch a rough outline of the eyebrows, eye and iris. In retrospect, I really should have changed my pen mode to a thinner one. The lines I made here were way too thick. I also ended up erasing and redrawing the eye outline multiple times, not so much because I was struggling with drawing “satisfactory” circles (I feel like I definitely improved on that front), but because the symmetry kept being way off. The result I kept is still a little off, mostly unaligned along the vertical axis.



2. Once this was done, it was time to add eye lashes and volume in that area.



3. The next step was to add some details with the iris and light reflection.



4. Next up was removing part of the outline and changing the bottom of the eyes a little bit.



5. Afterwards, in a blink and you’ll miss it moment, I added a fold above each eye.



6. Finally, I thickened the eyebrows and added shading to the eye. With this portion, I learned that using an e-ink tablet can be very annoying, since what I see can stop reflecting the actual results (E.g.: seeing blank spots when there should be ink, or vice versa), requiring a refresh (This is because the pen can physically pull e-ink in either direction, without it being reflected in software). The other thing I found out was a purpose for different stroke orientations. When it comes to the shading, I find it that the right orientation can help stay within the outline’s borders.

For the final result, I was annoyed with the misalignment of the eyes, so I took a lasso tool and repositioned one of the eyes a bit (Though it’s still not perfectly aligned). I think it helped a bit. Overall, the result is ok. Not amazing, but not awful either. However, I would have liked to do a few more sketches. Here is the result: (Unlike previous days, I chose to crop this one, since otherwise it would just be a lonely set of eyes in the corner of the canvas).

Conclusion

Overall, I’m a little underwhelmed with this day, mostly because I was lacking in time. But at least I did draw today, and wrote this blog post.

One helpful note about drawing, I find that reorienting the canvas (my tablet) can help with some strokes (Although it’s not the first time I realize this). It makes some of them feel a little more natural. p>

As for the time spent, I spent just over 30 minutes on drawing. As for writing the post, the first draft took 40 minutes, and the revision roughly 25 minutes. This means that writing the post took roughly twice as long as drawing. It also took more time than yesterday, though admittedly I was particularly tired throughout the process. I will definitely need to figure how to write posts more quickly. (Though hopefully practice will help)

As stated in the introduction, tomorrow I will be going on a field trip. I know I’m leaving early, and am unsure how late I’ll be get back. I’ll do my best to draw and post about it, but there is no guarantee I’ll manage to after getting back. Though maybe I’ll just manage to do it all while on a bus, with underwhelming results, hahaha. Stay tuned for more updates!

This post is followed by Learning to Draw People Challenge – Day 11 (2024/02/29)

This was written February 27, 2024 as part of the 2024 Learning to Draw People Challenge

Introduction

Today was a fairly short day. Unfortunately I was both tired and fairly busy. However, I still went to a Cafe, put my head down, and started to draw, albeit for a shorter period than usual. As for writing this article, it was done in a separate session, but on the same day (Which means progress!). Let’s get into it!

Exercises

There isn’t a lot to say about the exercises. While going through the exercises, I was a little more stressed than usual and tried to rush a little, which definitely negatively affected the results. For the line exercise, I once again tried to practice different orientations (Although I almost forgot some of them). I also decided to practice both “overhand” and “underhand” for the horizontal line. You can additionally notice that I started annotating the exercises (Including UH and OH for underhand and overhand respectively).

For the wavy lines exercise, I realized that I don’t approach “peaks” and “valleys” in the same way, which causes undesired asymmetry that gets in the way of the results. Sometimes, one of them doesn’t even form what I would call a curve. For this exercise, I will definitely need to go back to the drawing board (so to speak). I may try to rewatch the video these exercises come from for inspiration. One thing I’ll definitely want to try to do is to take the first wavy line slowly to start it off neatly.

For the circle exercise, I decided to go for a smaller quantity than usual. Also, as noted on the sheet, the clockwise orientation definitely felt unnatural to me. Some of them also look more like “2”s than circles.

Overall, I spent roughly 8 minutes and a half on the exercises.

Drawing

Following the previous day, I figured I might want to practice drawing ears. Thus, I looked through my reference book for the section on ears, and decided to practice it. The process contains five steps, which I’ll illustrate with what I consider my best overall attempt:

1. Draw the general shape of the ear



2. Draw the ear hole



3. Draw the inner contour of the ear (Yes, I redrew the ear hole here)



4. Connect the ear hole section to the inner contour



5. Loop back the inner contour to connect with the last draw segment

A few things to note:

• I struggle with drawing an ear’s contour and will definitely have to practice this more.
• I have difficulties with the ear hole portion. I find it difficult to gauge the orientation, proportions and the position of this component. This definitely deserves more practice.

Overall, I spent roughly 25 minutes on the ear sketches. Here are all four sketches I drew today. My favorite one is the second one, due to its ear hole’s position seeming more natural than for the other ones, even though some of my lines have confidence, thickness and consistency issues. Ears are definitely something I will need to revisit in the future. One other thing I might want to explore is how to give these lines more of a depth effect, with some segments seeming to be behind others. Right now it seems to lack any depth. I suspect it is based off of thickness of lines and some other tricks, and will require some experimentation.

Conclusion

Overall, the results are not spectacular, but I think it’s still worthwhile to zoom in once in a while to better understand some of the components. And this dive was definitely not sufficient. However, one step at a time for now, which involved getting into the habit of both drawing and writing the blog posts. Speaking of, writing this blog post took me roughly 48 minutes, including reviewing it, which took around 20 minutes. (Overall, I spent a lot more time on this post than on drawing).

Thanks for joining me, and I hope you found this interesting. Have a nice one everyone!

This post is followed by Learning to Draw People Challenge – Day 10 (2024/02/28)

This was written February 26, 2024 as part of the 2024 Learning to Draw People Challenge

Introduction

Hello everyone and thank you for your patience. I’m finally back with the drawing challenge (with a revenge!). But although today was my first day back and I should have felt energized, I did struggle with motivation due to some other personal issues. Nonetheless, I pushed myself to start and once I got started, things flew reasonably well. I did end “early” because I saw that I was going to spend a lot of extra time on the next phase of drawing, but not because I had exhausted my drive.

A few notes before diving into my drawing session. First, since I had been having some issues with my tablet’s stylus (the tip would quickly degrade and make it harder to draw), I recently purchased a new stylus to use exclusively for drawing, the wacom one pen (I did a small research and this felt like a good compromise between people’s recommendations, and cost). Under my current circumstances, the cost felt steep for a stylus, and I would prefer to avoid such expenses. However, I’m hoping this purchase encourages me to draw through the sunk-cost fallacy.

A few things about the process itself I would like to highlight today:

• In order to limit annoyances with my palm touching the tablet, I attempted to use a light glove. However, the result was too annoying, so I abandoned it quickly and disabled hand motion on the tablet instead. I may have to try using a “drawing glove” such as this one, although this would once again be a purchase.
• While the new stylus has a fairly nice grip, and has a button with an erase functionality, I should have realized I would encounter an issue. The button on the side is placed in such a location that I often hit it with my middle finger while drawing. I’d already encountered this issue a long time ago while playing rhythm games such as “osu!”, and I should have remembered it. Hopefully, I will get accustomed to it. It might also serve as a motive to try different grips, such as suggested in this video. (As an aside, I think exploring other grips could also be useful for drawing Chinese characters)
• I have a few regrets about using a Chinese book while still not fluent in the language, since I’m discouraged from reading everything and fully understanding. While it’s an interesting approach to learning the language, it puts both goals at odds, instead of building synergy between them.

Exercises

As usual, I started with the exercises. Today, they took almost 12 minutes. For some reason, the line exercises were particularly slow, at around 6 minutes and a half on their own. A few small things about the exercises:

• I realized that for diagonal lines in this orientation: “/”, I feel more comfortable starting from the bottom than from the top. This seemed odd at first, but I believe this is actually a consequence of my handwriting. When writing, I tend to prioritize going from left to right. Thus, my forward slash goes from the bottom-left to the top-right. (For this same reason, I have a non-standard way of writing the letter S, also going from the bottom-left to the top-right). I hadn’t quite realized how much of an influence writing had on drawing, though it makes intuitive sense. (Related video about the relationship between writing and drawing: How your handwriting is the key to drawing better )
• As noted in my exercise’s notes, I realized that horizontal lines could be drawn with either your hand above or below the line, using two distinct wrist rotations. This seems to only really apply to horizontal lines, likely because they’re at roughly a 90° angle with your hand’s natural position. It also seems like having my hand under gave me better results.
• I struggled with keeping the diagonal lines aligned horizontally. It seems like their skewed nature made me want to skew their row as well. I will have to pay attention to this in the future.
• At this point, I struggle tremendously with the wavy line exercise. However, one issue with it is that it’s biased towards the earlier lines being drawn properly. Whenever one of them is drawn poorly, it makes the subsequent ones either harder, or pointless as an exercise.
• For the circles exercise, I still struggle with consistency of placement and size. But being more aware of it seems to have helped a bit this time.
• It is clear how unnatural the clockwise circles were to me. I will definitely need to practice those a bit more. In some cases, they didn’t really look like circles.

Here are the pictures of the exercises:

Drawing

Today, I opted for a different kind of drawing, going for a profile shot. I started by drawing guidelines and then used the circle tool to add a guideline for the shape of the head (After multiple failed attempts of drawing it by hand). I then added some guidelines for the jaw, as per the book. Here is what the guidelines looked like at this stage:

Once this was done, I sketched the silhouette. I decided to redraw the head’s circle by hand, following the existing “guideline”. I struggled a bit with the nose portion of it, and also with the mouth portion. Overall, I think it’s not too bad at this stage.

Once this was done, I added a circular guideline for the eye, and started sketching the eye, eyebrows, a smile, an extended jawline, and a rough ear. Here, I actually struggled with the smile, and had to redraw the mouth portion of the silhouette multiple times to get something I was more satisfied with. Unfortunately, I think the eye was poorly placed. They’re a little too low, which means two things: It isn’t aligne with where the eye socket should be (top of the nose bridge), and it makes the top of the head look a little too big.

Once this was done, it was time to add a little bit of detail to the eye and ear. The eye wasn’t too bad in this case, though I’m not sure about the lines placed right in front of it. The ear, however, was extremely challenging for me. First, the book shows the outer portion as becoming a little more block-y. I actually tried to redraw that portion many times, and eventually just decided to go back to the previous form because I thought I wasn’t making any progress. The inner portion is also something I struggled a lot with and made many changed to. I will have to approach it more carefully in the future and focus more on drawing ears to try to improve that skill. Right now, I struggle with properly understanding them and their different elements. It might be worthwhile to look at a real ear’s anatomy to better analyze this. Overall, I spent roughly 20 minutes on the ear, and most of it was undone.

Once this phase was completed, I got ready to draw the hair, but realized it would take me a while, and so opted to call it a day and start writing the blog post.

Here is the final result. Overall, there’s definitely improvements to be made, but I think compared with what I was able to do on the first day, it still feels like I’ve improved, despite not drawing in a month and a half. I was really worried I’d have lost a lot more than I did. And while this drawing has issues, I am aware of what to focus on and try to improve in the future.

Conclusion

Well, the first day back wasn’t too bad, and I managed to also write my blog post on the same day. However, it did take me quite a bit of time to write it (I believe roughly 2 hours), so I’ll probably have to figure out a solution for this. Although, some of that time was spent on generic insights or notes that might not be recurring in the future (e.g.: everything in the introduction, and a lot of notes related to the exercises). Still, I might want to use a stopwatch to time how long I spend on the writing process and evaluate how I could improve it/make it more efficient.

Finally, as a miscellaneous note, I realized how much I rely on looking at the samples for drawing. While this is normal for a day like today, where I’m learning a new type of drawing, I think I will have to learn to move away from this in the future. Thus, I think I’ll want some days where I try to draw without the book, and then evaluate how things turned out, comparing with the book to see what I may have missed or forgotten.

On that note, I hope you all have a lovely day and that you found this post interesting. Stay tuned for the next ones!

This post is followed by Learning to Draw People Challenge – Day 09 (2024/02/27)

This was written February 23, 2024 as part of the 2024 Learning to Draw People Challenge

So, I’ve tried my challenge, held it for roughly a week, then had to abandon it. Moreover, I took over a month before documenting it and getting back to it. All the same, I don’t think this was a failure, since I believe I’ve learned from this. But now what? Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about that first attempt, what caused me to stop, what the main friction points were, and what could be improved. Here are my thoughts:

First of all, not writing the posts right away and lagging behind really dragged me down and caused a lot of stress. I felt like I was lagging behind and couldn’t catch up (Incidentally, this also what happened with my photography challenge). I think this is the first thing I need to address: I need to change my “definition of done” for a day’s work to not only encompass drawing, but also documenting the process through a blog post. I expect this to have two consequences:

• In order to not overwork myself, I’ll have to limit the “reviewing process”. In the past, I would write a post, and review it at a later time before publishing it. I don’t think this will be viable here. I’ll have to review as the final step of my writing session instead.
• Since writing the blog post itself is also time consuming (including not only writing, but also transferring files and sifting through a recording), I may have to shorten length of my drawing sessions.

The second issue I’ve struggled with is the daily and inflexible nature of the challenge, which partially gets in my way and adds some counter-productive stress. The last two days I drew had some motivational issues because I was traveling, and didn’t have any leeway (The consequences are especially apparent with my last day). Similarly, my Chinese classes also have some more intensive periods, such as around exams. For this reason, I thought I could approach this a little more like work. Accordingly, my new goal is to draw from Monday to Friday, instead of every single day. However, I will also allow myself to draw on the weekend in exchange for a “credit”, allowing me on a future date to take a day off. Thus, if I know I have upcoming engagements during the week, I can prepare during the weekend accordingly. Similarly, if I plan to go on a vacation, I could prepare some extra credit days accordingly. The one caveat is that I need to be careful to avoid using those credits when I’m “lazy” and feeling unmotivated. Usually, those feelings clear up when I get started, and I believe pushing through during those days is critical to building habits.

For clarity, here’s how I plan to approach those. I plan to release blog posts in sequential order. I also plan to only release them from Monday to Friday (Unless I know I will be physically unable to handle that, since I currently do all of this manually). Therefore, if during my first week I were to draw on Saturday (but not on Sunday), I would only release the associated post on Monday. Meanwhile, Monday’s drawing post would be shifted to Tuesday and so forth. Friday’s in turn would be shifted to the following week’s Monday. However, the post would still specify on which day I had drawn it, so you would be able to see if something was done during a weekend as opposed to a weekday.

With this, I plan to start the next phase this upcoming Monday, February 26, 2024. Once again, I also plan to evaluate how this went and see whether I should make any adjustments at the end of the first week.

One final note before I leave, which I wasn’t sure where to plug. One thing that’s happened during the first week (and also since then) is that I’ve been watching more (YouTube) videos about drawing. I think it helps me think more about the process, what to try out, and what to consider. Ultimately, it also feels like it helps integrate it as part of my life. While not perfect, I think it could serve as a proxy for being part of a club or enrolling in classes, where you have a lot of peers that share your interests and with whom you can strive towards a common goal, which seems to be a valuable part of building habits, and improving skills.

Thank you for following me, and wish me success with this new attempt!

This post is followed by Learning to Draw People Challenge – Day 08 (2024/02/26) – Time Skip

This was written February 09, 2024 as part of the 2024 Learning to Draw People Challenge

Exercises

Ah, the final day of my week. Unfortunately this was a bad day for drawing. I was traveling and felt a little pressed on time, so I ended up handling this in a restaurant while waiting for them to take my order, and waiting for the food.

I ended up spending more time on the exercises than usual. I also realized that I should also practice other orientations, for example starting from the bottom instead of the top on certain strokes. This would allow me to train a wider variety of movements, and I figure there are likely scenarios where such strokes could be useful. I also tried drawing circles in both directions (clockwise and counter-clockwise). Here are the results, I definitely am not quite used to some of these movements yet:

Drawing

As for drawing, I opted to start trying to draw eyes, but ended up having to stop pretty quickly, so the result is fairly underwhelming. Overall, not a great day.

This is how my initial trial week ended, on a soul-crushingly disappointing note, followed by a long hiatus. However, now that my semester is almost over and I’m getting a little more control over things, I’m planning to get back into it, although tweaking some of the parameters of this challenge. Stay tuned for an update on this. Also, if you missed my initial evaluation of how this week went, you can find it here: Learning to Draw People Challenge – Week One Evaluation (Pause Announcement)

This post is followed by Learning to Draw People Challenge – Take Two

This was initially written February 21, 2024 as part of the 2024 Learning to Draw People Challenge

Exercises

As with other days, I decided to start with the line confidence exercises. Overall, it took me roughly 10 mins. I also came to two realizations:

• I could practice drawing my lines and circles in both orientations, not just the one that feels most natural.
• I might as well use this time to fulfill other goals. Since I’m currently learning Chinese, I started counting my lines/circles in Chinese. (Combining different goals and synergizing them seems like it could be useful generally)

On this day, I think my straight lines aren’t that great: their lengths vary too much, there’s a lot of them that aren’t parallel to the others, and quite a few of them hook at the end.

The wavy lines exercise was ok. At least the overall direction remains similar from one to the next, though I still think I should start by focus on the line shape before trying to vary line thickness (pen pressure).

The circles exercise was not so great. Some of the circles are not that round, and they’re also all over the place. I wasn’t that consistent with spacing and size.

Drawing

On this day, I decided I wanted to move on to a different exercise and try something else. I opted for a view from an angle. Do note that on this day, I couldn’t find my ruler, so everything was done by hand. I started by drawing the head’s outline with some guidelines (In this case, all on the same layer).

Once that was done, I tried to add a neck, but struggled quite a bit. I eventually ended up updating the head’s outline a bit to account for the jaw, before adding a neck and a plane for where the neck intersects with the head. Finally, I updated some of my guidelines according to the new information on the drawing. Since this is a new type of drawing from a new angle with new techniques, I definitely struggled quite a bit here, and had to erase and redraw lines quite a few times. I still have to build my intuition for this kind of perspective, which will require practice.

Once this was done, I added some thickness to the top guidelines as per the book (As of yet, I do not know its purpose, but it’ll come as I continue to learn). I also added some face elements.

Finally, I refined the jawline, and added some eyes and eyebrows to the drawing before calling it a day.

Overall, it makes for an interesting exercise and I’ll definitely need to work on different angles and perspectives. The result is not mind blowing, but for a first attempt, it seems reasonable. Obviously, I didn’t add in any details, so this lack of refinement is definitely noticeable, but that’s not the point of a sketch at this level. I must say, one of the most challenging things for me about this kind of exercise is the lack of the usual symmetry. For example, the eyes are at different “distances” from the canvas, and thus they’re not the same size, nor are they the same distance from their “midpoint” on the guideline. I’ve also been struggling with placement of the guidelines, including the neck. This will definitely require more training (and investigation).

This post is followed by Learning to Draw People Challenge – Day 07 (2024/01/14)

This was initially written February 20, 2024 as part of the 2024 Learning to Draw People Challenge

Exercises

First and foremost, I started with the line confidence exercises. Overall, it took me just over 6 minutes. As noted in the final sheet itself, my hands felt cramped by the end of it.

First in line is the straight line exercise (pun intended). The main things to note here is that I need to improve consistency of spacing and lengths, along with my angles. For example, some of my “vertical lines” are definitely slanted. And my diagonal lines are definitely not parallel all the way through. Moreover, some of my “straight lines” end in a curve or hook. I don’t think it’s that bad of an issue, but it’s still something to note and be mindful of in future exercises.

The wavy lines exercise is definitely the one I struggle with the most. I’ll have to spend more practice on it in the future. One thing to consider might be to focus on the accuracy of the wavy lines before trying to vary the thickness.

Then, there’s the circles exercise. I don’t think it’s that bad, but I need to improve consistency of the size and spacing. And while the circles themselves don’t improve in terms of their shape, I do think the line confidence itself somewhat improved throughout the exercise, and made with a more “continuous” stroke.

Drawing

The first step of the drawing was to sketch the general shape of the head, including the jaw. This time, I didn’t use specific measurements in order to build my intuition a bit, only using guidelines for separation. (I may have used my ruler on the tablet without marking it, but unfortunately cannot recall). I did struggle a bit with some of those strokes, in particular the bottom half of the face and the jaw. We can see some asymmetry present, with the both sides having strokes starting at different points.

Once the general outline was ready, it was time to place elements on the face: the eyes, the nose and the mouth. Unfortunately, I did struggle a bit with my guidelines. We can see here they’re not quite parallel.

I still moved on with the eyes, nose and mouth. I struggled a lot with the eyes placement and getting the general shape I wanted. Especially at such an angle, it doesn’t feel like a super natural shape to draw yet, especially if I have to replicate it symmetrically. But fortunately, there aren’t constraints on the number of times I can redraw components, especially since it’s a digital drawing.

Indeed, it is fortunate that I can just redraw components. After the eyes were in place, the nose and mouth felt off, so I opted to redraw them, along with eyebrows, a neck and shoulders. For now, I do struggle quite a bit with the neck and shoulders, but it’s not the main focus here, so it’s ok, especially at this stage.

Once this was done, I refined the eyes. This meant adding eyelashes and detail within the eye (pupil, iris, reflection, etc), skipping the intermediary stepp I’d previously followed. I feel like I struggled quite a bit with where to place the reflection on both eyes for consistency. I also added some details to the ears, along with redrawing the mouth one more time. Here’s the result, I’m generally happy with the eyes at this stage, though I do see some improvements that could be made. For example, the bottom white part of the eye on the left could be reshaped a bit for consistency.

Once that was done, it was time to move on to the hair, which I dreaded. First in line, was the general hair outline.

Once that was done, I added some detail to the hair. I think this worked out better than on the previous days, though I’m not sure why. I was curious and decided to check how long this step took me. Overall, roughly 12 minutes.

Finally, once this was completed, I decided to fix a few details, such as the jaw and the upper body. Note that I decided to try to “correct” some issues with some lines along the jaw by making them thicker, which is definitely not professional, but helped me with my confidence in this instance, and helped a bit. Overall, I’m fairly happy with the result, especially with this only being my 5th day at it. There are definitely some issues here and there, but I think it’s not too shabby.

This post is followed by Learning to Draw People Challenge – Day 06 (2024/01/13)

Day 04 – 2024/01/11

This was written February 09, 2024 as part of the 2024 Learning to Draw People Challenge

On this day, I had a few technical issues. The canvas ended up in the wrong orientation, and unfortunately, I didn’t manage to record the process. Since it was over a month ago at the time of writing, I do not remember a lot, so let’s keep it short.

First of all, at this point, I had started to watch videos related to drawing, and stumbled upon this video about line confidence. If you’re interested, I recommend giving it a watch. Following this, I opted to start with some of the recommended exercises. As noted on the final one, overall it took me roughly 8 minutes, which isn’t too bad. Here are the results of the exercises:

Let’s now consider the drawing session. Overall, I spent roughly 70 minutes (including 8mins of exercises). I also felt a little more confident with my lines (according to a note I left myself). However, I’m not sure whether this is related to starting the exercises, or having a little more experience following the previous three days. However, the result is still questionable. I think the hair turned out better than on day 03, but I think there are definitely some spatial issues with the overall proportions and the placement of some elements, in particular the eyes. (Although this could probably be fixed quickly with some editing tools). And despite the increased line confidence, some of the lines have issues, such as with the jaw line. But overall, it’s not too bad, especially compared to day 01. Here is the drawing:

This post is followed by Learning to Draw People Challenge – Day 05 (2024/01/12)