Angie's Art Tip of the Week

[StarSock64]

tl;dr: If you don't feel like reading what I have to say, then just pay attention to the links/spoilers. But, really, if you want to learn art, then you should learn how to read about it!

Hey everyone. Some people sound kind of lost about how to learn art, and nobody seems to be talking about it much anymore
so let's talk about art!

See, I have this gigantic pile of art bookmarks that I keep adding to.
You can download it here if you're curious:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/81193440/bookmarks.docx

Maybe you should keep some too! It's good to keep learning and have stuff to refer back to. But sifting through so many bookmarks is overwhelming. We should talk about something in focus for now.

Today we're gonna talk about

~BEGINNING FIGURE DRAWING~

Why do figure drawing?

Figure drawing is really hard! It's something you should practice a lot all the time. Don't worry about completely mastering it, and don't feel bad if it makes your art actually worse for a time period. But once you learn it well enough, it's such a helpful tool.

Figure drawing is great because it helps you get a lot of structure, feeling of movement, placement, shapes, perspective, varied poses etc etc out of the stuff you do! It'll help you see things better and more thoroughly, helping you be more accurate. Basically, it's good for a lot, so it's important! It's useful for both drawing and pixel art. I suggest learning it thoroughly in drawing, because you should learn more accurate anatomy/figures before doing the sort of stylized anatomy/figures you do in pixel art. That way, you actually know what you're doing instead of mimicking the same set of pixel placements over and over again.

Resources for Figure Drawing (and commentary)

Lots of artists do figure drawing lots of different ways, so you should find a way that works for you. Be as complicated or simplified as you need to be for the piece you're working on. Work with shapes that make sense for you.

This right here:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/2080605/Figure-Drawing-Basics
gives a lot of helpful steps and tips along the way to learning figure drawing. But that whole, "adding the third dimension" stuff? The boxes and circles and what have you? That's great for getting your structures right, but by golly is it hard if you haven't learned your basic anatomy yet (which is something you should really do, if you're going to attempt figure drawing). I think part of my issue was that I tried getting into that stuff too fast. If I were you, I'd pay attention to the stick figure stuff and lines of action first!

Why?
You do NOT want your figure drawings to be stiff. Movement and personality first, then structure. It's hard to balance good anatomy with flowy figures when you're starting out, but that should be your goal. I warn this because I have a tendency to pay attention to anatomical accuracies and not whether or not my pose is boring, even though I know better. It's hard to get yourself out of these habits once you're in them, so it's better to avoid getting in them altogether.

NSFW WARNING:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/255814/Andrew-...re-Drawing
I don't want the younger members to be walked in on...
There's naked women in this one! But, it's an art thing, not a weird sexual thing. You should be able to handle that, as an artist. If you don't think your parents will understand, though, well
that's unfortunate
because Loomis is totally the most helpful thing ever!

He figure draws like nobody I've ever seen before. His shapes make so much more sense to me while helping me keep a flow like none of the other bunches of complicated figure drawing methods I've seen. I don't figure draw quite like he does, but just seeing how he does it gave me a lot of insight.
If you can't click on the link, then I'll just show you a few examples.
These ones are SAFE:

Spoiler

Cool, right? He shows you how to add depth and mass later (and that's something you should look into). But before that, in these simplified versions, you can really feel the life behind the poses. Human bodies are so complicated. Start simple, then work your way up.

Speaking of which, remember that you're trying to draw a human being (or an animal, if you're animal figure drawing...). Don't focus on the shapes for the sake of, remember that these shapes are meant to follow the form of a body. I find it helpful to look at stuff like this: http://alexds1.deviantart.com/art/Pose-t...l-72010406
or say, Bruce Timm drawings, to remind myself that these simplified shapes are supposed to be helping my understanding of the body.

Lost on how to practice figure drawing?

That first link talks about drawing stick figures and stuff. That's cute and all, but you can only draw so many before you start to blank out, right?

You can figure draw real people/models. Start paying attention to people in real life, how they pose, how their weight is distributed, etc. Sometimes I would draw teachers in the middle of class. You shouldn't do that because you should be listening to their lecture. But one of my teachers, see, he had this tendency to lean up against this thing...

Anyway, that can be a bit hard because people move around a lot and might not be willing to pose for you, so photographs should be okay. Sometimes I like to open photos in a program, then do figure drawings over them in another layer. Or you could just do it on paper and do a general sketch of what you see.

NSFW WARNING:
This has 3D models of people made of muscles and fat. You don't really see privates, but, well, there's breasts. With no skin. If for some reason that'll bother your parents, then, well...
http://www.posemaniacs.com/
You can use the 3D models on this site to try figure drawing. Plus, there's a 30 second drawing and negative space drawing tool. I used to like to do the 30 second drawing one. You can try doing 10 a day for practice, and that'll take no time at all! There's example videos and tips so you can get an idea of how other people manage to finish so quickly. It explains what's helpful about that exercise, so I'll refrain from doing so myself.

Of course, you should try your own original figures now and then too. There's not much good in learning if you don't challenge yourself to apply it.

I'll probably have to do a section on anatomy and proportion, because without knowing about those, figure drawing...isn't gonna go so well. I just started here because it was easy enough for me to talk about. If you're not ready for intensive figure drawing, you can always refer back to this later.

Closing

Wow, I sure typed a lot! Maybe I should make it monthly. Hehehe.
I wonder how many people tl;dr'd as soon as the page opened...

If anyone has any suggestions, feel free to join in! I know there's much better artists than me in here; I'm no art student, and generally lack confidence in what I'm even talking about. But, if I don't talk about this stuff, who will? I figured I should have some initiative. So please, correct me or elaborate or add on where necessary!

Until next time! Study hard!