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Help, a few questions
nomadikk \| 07/18/2008 @048 \| edit post

So I sat myself down at a local cafe for close to an hour today to draw a friend's character my own way. By actually noting start and end times for the drawing session, I realized I am the sloth of illustration. This is what I came up with:

I think a lot of it has to do with confidence with pencil strokes and the capability to move on.. I spend a lot of time loosely sketching, erasing, redrawing, erasing, redrawing.. I also noticed certain things I hate to draw, namely foreshortened limbs (the hand and arm coming up front), bars of a bird cage (I think in part because I had no reference to a bird cage), and female clothing. I think I grew too comfortable with comic book women who just wear lycra.

How does one speed up their drawing? Is it by just drawing religiously, or forcing to move faster? Can anyone give me suggestions to fix my troubled areas?

Re: Help, a few questions
Indigo \| 10/28/2008 @789 \| edit post

I think you just need to limit yourself. Make big bold fast strokes and do it a little more unconsciously, and lay off the eraser. You don't need to be ashamed of gesture marks, leave them in, erasing them is pointless for a sketch and anything less than a refined drawing and will only slow you up. I would also practice gesture drawing. Just do 10 second sketches of people or things. Do thousands of them over and over and over.

Re: Help, a few questions
Crow \| 10/28/2008 @854 \| edit post

don't worry about them being super perfect. Judge them by thinking: "does this get across what I'm trying to show", the drawing has to be just good enough. Strive for good expression, gesture and pose. I think Norman Rockwell said: "If you draw the head and hands right, they will forgive you for everything else", that's it for expression. Pose and gesture you can practice with stick figures too, it's just spine and balance and placing the limbs in correct positions. If you think about that, you worry less about little mistakes and instead focus on big things like "does this have a lot of character". I think they also say that you learn to draw correctly (technical side) by spending a mile of paper for drawing, but you won't learn to put emotion to it by just droning work like that. And that's the real skill, so better work on it!

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