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Here's a Cubist style Omanyte that i've been working on for the past week and a half in Art Class.

You have noticeably improved since I last checked the thread. Good work!

Great work on all those gradients on the Omanyte picture.

Doing a lot of those is sure to improve your pencil pressure control.

I've been thinking about getting a book on figure drawing lately, particularly Drawing the Head and Figure and Figure Drawing for All It's Worth to help me with anatomy, which has been my focus at home.

Art class has helped some, but my intrigue varies with the project we are working on at the time and many, many people in the room care more about making a ruckus than working. I have little time with the teacher because she's often preoccupied with keeping the other students in check and passing out work. To give you an idea on how hectic my art class is, last friday someone somehow got their hands on a carpenter's hammer and was banging it on the tables and yelling. The teacher won't let me listen to music to block out the noise anymore because she suspended the privilege to everyone because certain people played their music too loudly. This is a high school class.

Oh yeah, and I learned that I can draw circles better if I use my shoulder instead of my wrist.

Given the time I spend each day browsing KYM, to encourage myself to practice my drawing (and to help me focus on other important work) I will be withholding browsing KYM from myself each day I don't practice a considerable amount (art class won't count). If I don't practice enough on a given day, I won't let myself use KYM. This is to help condition myself to practice more. I'll start tomorrow. I will still use lessons and references I find on the internet.

I am currently working on a drawing of a car buried in snow. It's actually coming out rather nice.

Here's a drawing for school that I finished at home. It's a car parked car buried in a snow drift. I was supposed to use markers but I had a limited pallet so I turned to pencils (also limited) and some pastels.

Edit Pro Tip: The brown spikes are the top of a picket fence.

Damn.
Thats pretty good.

http://www.amazon.com/Artists-Complete-Guide-Facial-Expression/dp/0823004325
The Artist's Complete Guide to Facial Expression by Gary Faigin is the single greatest book on drawing realistic humans that I have ever read in my life. I have read many such books. Of course, if realistic humans aren't your interest, utterly disregard my helpful statement in its entirety.

@Derpy
I draw horses and I can confirm that this is the correct way of doing it.

We were supposed to draw a scene representing a season, I did summer. I think I messed up with the violet at the the top of the drawing.

Looking very good with the shapes and colors. If you have gotten this far I think Depth might be something that's next for you.

I'm currently trying to learn how to foreshorten (Forced perspective on something you are basically sitting too far away from to actually see the perspective), and… it's pretty difficult. It might take me a few semesters just to master it, but I've got the Winter Term to brush up on it since Art will suddenly be a thing I do for fun and not a thing I do for school again.

I was thinking about Digital art and I was wondering if it's possible my skills would develop more with a drawing pad. I looked on Amazon and they have some popular drawing pads for sale under $100. Would a drawing pad be a worthwhile investment or should i wait until my skills with traditional art develop more?

So I asked my Art teacher about graphics tablets and she walked away and just straight up gave me a 12×9 version of one of these

The problem is that my teacher didn't have the stylus that went with it but I was told by several people that I could probably purchase a stylus at a dollar store. I also don't know if the thing will even work because my teacher told me she never used it and that it's been sitting on the same filing cabinet for maybe two years, so i'm not going to stop looking at newer tablets just yet.

You need a specially made stylus to use most drawing tablets. You can't just use a plain all-purpose one.

That said, maybe you can find the right on on ebay or something…

Good news! I got A Huion Pro for christmas an i'm using it in place of my mouse to help me get used to it.

Bad news: While fiddling with GIMP to try to find a way to configure it with my tablet I deleted one of the windows and it no longer appears when I start GIMP.

You can go to Edit > Preferences and click on the Window Management section and reset it to default.

Thanks, I got the window back.

Now I'm trying to get pressure sensitivity to work on gimp. Everything online tells me to make sure by tablet is enabled (preferences>input devices>quartz pen) which i've already done but pressure still doesn't seem to have an effect on my lines.

I did this a little after christmas time for a class and recently got it back. It's supposed to be Leonidas mortally wounded. This is my first major attempt at a detailed full body drawing and I think it shows. One of my biggest problems i had was getting the foreshortening on the legs to work. Furthermore, this is the first, and last time I will ever use Prismacolor pencils on a school project because I do not believe I used them effectively.

Youtube

We were doing grid portraits in class so I did mine on some random old guy I found on google images.

http://i47.tinypic.com/k1ckrl.jpg

Tell me where I can improve highlighting and whatnot.

I've been working on a sketch of an old wooden wench that sits in a pond near my house. The scale of the sketch and the photograph is 1:1 and i'm struggling to get the measurements right. If it doesn't work i'll either scrap it entirely or try with a different scale.

The reference I used was a photo taken by my mother. Next time i'll try to use colors instead of lines to create detail.

Does anyone know of a certain brand of mechanical pencils they would recommend? I'm quickly using up the B2 pencils I own and I like that I can smoothly move a mechanical pencil across paper without having to sharpen it.

Conman wrote:

Does anyone know of a certain brand of mechanical pencils they would recommend?

I'd say just about any mechanical would do. It's more about the width and softness of the leads you get for your pencils.

Personally I use some random Pilot Super Grip with a 0,5 HB lead, so it's pretty basic. You don't need to get anything fancy in my opinion, but it might be a good idea to look for one with a rubber grip for your fingers. That's pretty much all I can say.

Maybe you should try going for two mechanical pencils? One that uses 0,5 and another that uses 0,7 leads? Maybe try out B2, HB, and H2 leads for both pencils, and then stick to those you feel are the most comfortable to draw with.

The trick to learning new art skills is really paying attention to what you put on the paper. I've become super conscience of everything I do since my art supplies are limited to some HB and H2 pencils I "borrowed", and an eraser more used than the NSFW tag.

Oh, and surround yourself with other artists. We're actually really lonely people and are usually okay with sharing advice or what we're working on as long as it's not ugly or smut.

Last week I started gesture drawing hoping it would help me get better at drawing people. Gesture drawing is essentially drawing something from a visual reference (usually a person) within a small time limit (30 seconds to 2 minutes) while capturing it's "essence". The top two were from last week using people I saw at lunch as references and the other three were referenced from this week while using a model generator on Pixelovey and a wooden posing doll (mostly the latter)l. If anyone has any experience with this type of sketch i'd appreciate some protips and advice.

Here's my first complete attempt at a self portrait. There's marks to next to the nose and lip that don't erase. I'll have to remove them digitally if I want them gone.

Personally, I think my cheeks look a bit off on this.

Getting better, don't stop.

Okay, here's the tutorial that you requested.

I want to emphasize the part that it's how I do things, so my thing might not suit you. I can offer some general pointers, but you have to learn what looks good yourself. I did the whole thing quickly, so some feature placements are all over the place in this tutorial too. But I'm sure I at least get the point across.

Click here for the full image, or just open it.

Dayum, you're getting better.

Gesture drawing? Now that you mention it, I incorporate some of what you said in how I start with poses.

Here's a (dated) diagram of how I go about posture, poses, etc.:
(Possible nudity => NSFW => Posting a link instead)

Link

If you're doing figure sketching, I personally prefer using a charcoal pencil – I feel the line it gives just works better. I also break up my drawings into 1 minute and 5 minute warmups and end off on a 20 minute.

I also noticed you're using a picture plane, kudos.

Here's a big dump of stuff I sketched this week because of extra free time in school. Most of them are gesture drawings, trying to get the human form right but on friday I did lots of hands. Maybe i'll go back to some of them with pen and pencil to flesh them out.

mmmm with a figure sketch you're looking more for the shape of the figure. Those are very good but they're something I would do in the span of a minute, for longer sketches you're looking for something that focuses less on the structure and more on the shape.

I couldn't scan in one of mine but I'll be back Monday to put one here but for now here's a decent one.

or for a longer one



Personally I do figure sketches with a charcoal pencil but that's purely out of my own personal preference – I feel the line you get from it is just preferable.

^ Could you please make a distinction between structure and shape? Do you mean I need to focus less on the location of joints and more on the outline?

The second image I posted wasn't a great example, the first image though is better. But yeah you're looking more for defining the outline. You can use what you've been doing up till now to get the basic pose correct and then just thicken it out.

With drawing you're not trying to draw what something looks like – you're looking at the shape of the line. Drawings mainly about shapes and a good way to get used to that is to take a picture and draw that picture upside down, as for getting used to identifying lines you can always try using a picture plane, they're very easy to make.

I tried to follow Nima's advice on focusing more on the shape of the figure. I'd very much appreciate any critique on what I need to change, what I'm doing wrong, what I'm doing right, and what techniques I should try out. I didn't use a photo reference for these (or the earlier images) so that's something I'll have to start doing to get used to certain poses and finding shapes in everyday life.

Mixing it up a bit with some digital art. Lots of free time at school this week so i've been bringing a laptop and tablet for drawing. I haven't practiced digital art very much until now.

Looking better.

Take a look at this link

It has a lot of tips for beginners and includes some good books.

What tool are you using for digital art?

I am using a Huion Pro tablet (the one with buttons) and Fire Alpaca for the software (It was free and has pressure sensitivity, which I couldn't get to work on Gimp).

Thank you for the link.

I use an Intuos Pen and Touch w/ Paint Tool SAI.

Oh by the way, forgot about this. Krita – It's free software and it's got a pretty clean UI.

Screwing on FireAlpaca around eventually led to me making this.

I would like to apologize for being negligent in my drawing practice and in updating this thread. I can't expect to be better if I don't practice everyday.

Looking at it now the foot of the hind leg in the foreground should be flat like the one on the opposite side of the beast and I should have drawn additional details to necessitate the positions of the forelimbs.

I got this from a tutorial in the link below. The second rabbit (2) was done without looking at the guide. there were others but they were misplaced.
http://www.deviantart.com/art/Tutorial-Rabbit-68528792

I tried to use an artist's work as reference for the next two sketches. The 1st one was left uncompleted when it took me far too long to replicate the arm across the head, while 2nd one I know realize lacks much of the "slant" of the character's posture.

Ref

Ref

there were other sketches but I don't believe they were worth putting here.

Again, I am sorry for slacking on my practice and my updates. If I do not do a better job sketching or drawing in the next 30 days I will not update this thread and I will let it lock itself.

I wanted to draw a person today so I thought the best way to go about it at this time was via grid drawing.

http://sta.sh/0jm0ntsxgj6

Original pic.

I think you should use nude models for practicing figure sketches. If you'd like I can upload stills that I recieved from my Uni.

I'd appreciate that, though I think you'd have PM a link or something like that because i'm afraid that pics of or links to nude models, even for strictly artistic purposes, would be against forum rules.

I'll PM the link once it's all up. What you should do with them is everyday or so do;

- Eight 1 minute figure sketches.
- Six 5 minute figure sketches.
- One or Two 20 minute figure sketches to finish off.

And after that post the 20 minutes here for others to see.

Here's the 20 minute sketches I have so far, there's also dozens of 1 and 5 minute sketches not shown here.

A big thanks to Mima for the collection of model photos.