Confused on what to do?

#1

Hey, everyone.

I’ve been in SHSU for a semester now, but didn’t do any drawing at all last semester. This time I visited my bro back home and saw all the cool new character drawings he’d been working on. Every time I go through his sketchbook it makes me want to pick up mine and go. The only problem I had was I didn’t have a comfortable way of laying down a skeleton to flesh it out. Now that I have a… ‘prototype’ if I could say, I’m stuck. I have no idea what to do next. I’ve been telling myself practice anatomy some more, like do a period of heads until you have the basics down then move to chest, arms, pelvis, etc. In my head I summed up if I knew how to draw all the body parts I could put them together, but something is telling me that won’t be right. I had a great burst of energy output to draw at the end of Jan/2 and a half week into Feb, but after that I can’t even sit at my table without getting mind flustered and just dropping my pencil. Would you all be willing to help me? Advice, schedule to mix out with school or something?

#2

Mix it up and rotate between different studies. For example, do anatomy study for a couple of hours, then move on to doing a portrait study from life or a photo, then move on to doing figure sketches of different poses from life or photos, and so on.

You can also do exercises like taking a photo of a person and then draw anatomy studies on another layer on top of it, such as the major muscles and bones, so you can associate them with how they actually look with a layer of fat and skin over them in reality.

Clothed figures are also very important, so study how fabric creases, folds, and drapes, as well as different types of fabric, because how heavy/stiff/thick they are as well as what type of material they’re made of will make them all behave differently. You need to practice drawing them from life and from photos and understand their differences.

Another area you can work on is facial expressions and body language, so your characters can emote effectively. Try to learn to depict different emotions accurately and convincingly, as well as different body language. There’s so much you can express with just body language alone, such as personality type and emotions. Taking lots of your own photo references will help a lot. You can do it alone with a mirror or work with your brother and pose/emote for each other’s photo references.

These are just some of the things you can do–there’s a lot more, but these will be enough to keep you busy for a long time.

#3

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