The best note I heard from Kim Jung Gi on drawing without guides, was that each of his lines are themselves guides for what he needs to do next. The very first line you draw on a face, for instance, tells you where the next line should go, based on what you are aiming to achieve.
That's really interesting and not something I had considered before 🤔 it makes perfect sense as there is really only a limited tolerance for the placement of any line within the perspective framework he is using for it to make sense. I can't say I'm there yet myself but that will be an interesting thing to think about while drawing. Thanks for sharing! 💕
I love to put together art journals, I add everything from things in my own life that inspires me to random images I find on Google images and photos I take. This I find is a great way to build up a library of images and knowledge I can refer to especially when I'm suffering from creators block.
another tip he had was that if you're good at drawing one thing in particular, you can use it as an anchor for the rest of the drawing. Like if you can draw people well, you can base the perspective of accompanying objects off of them
It really was at first, and honestly, it still can be 😅 but I think like anything, it's just a case of practising it. It definitely helps to draw simple box and cylinder figures at first. Makes everything much easier to figure out and plot on the page. Thanks for watching ❤️
I just wanted to mention how kind and nice everyone here in the comments and community is to you and eachover. It takes a good personality to attract other modest people.
Well thank you very much, I am sure it also takes such a person to recognise this in others ❤️ kindness costs nothing, and I genuinely only share how I approach these things to try and help those who resonate with it to improve as well.
I don't know when i subscribed to your channel but I'm really grateful that I did it because it gives me a lot of motivation to see a guy like you slowly becoming very good with a clear goal in mind, don't give up!
Thanks so much! It's certainly a long road but I honestly just enjoy the process and would be doing this even if I wasn't making videos about it. I'm glad you find the content useful and inspiring, and I hope to continue producing videos to help others progress as well. I really appreciate you watching and subscribing ❤️
One way I try and come up with my own ideas is to pick a topic eg: Sci fi or fantasy horror, then put together 5 descriptive words that associations with the topic and brainstorm ideas in as many thumbnails I can.
Incidentally, "Draw a Box" has an exercise that's specifically about drawing shapes INSIDE other shapes, the way you describe how boxes don't necessarily work for anatomy since the parts of the body "bite into" each other. So may be worth looking at that.
I as an begining artist find this video very motivational. Even tho I already had been drawn for past 2 hour I'll probably go and draw even more today. I also liked how author has answered to almost every comment on the video, had a fun time reading all of them!
Haha it takes me a while but I eventually reply to everyone! I do a little every day and like a bucket slowly filling drip by drip, your skill level builds up 💪 I am glad you find the videos useful and I am grateful for your support 💕
i love love love to see this because we always see beautiful paintings and drawings by artists but we almost always never get to see their progression from beginner to advanced
Thank you 😅 I mean I don't know how long it's going to take for me to actually get really good but that's the whole point. Exactly as you say, we never see this, but the methods I use a a bit different to other people and they seemed to work when I played with them before starting this channel, so we'll see what happens I guess. Thanks for watching, and I really am grateful for your support 💗
This is really impressive, you surely have a solid method and some very clever ways to train those fundamentals. I've been drawing my whole life, and working professionally as an artist for more than 15 years. I can already see you do a lot of things better than I do, after only a couple hundred hours of focused practice!
Wow thanks! That's really useful feedback! I have been playing with these things for a few years and across a variety of subjects and when I found it seemed to work for drawing, I wanted to share it to see if others could make it work too. I think that as a learning method in general it's incredibly valuable, and should be more widely seen in society. A lot of medical students use it, but that's about it.
Your gouache discoveries are really really valuable to me, thank you for sharing them! I always wanted to get more in tune with using gouache in art school, but felt like my schedule forbade me from really getting in there and experimenting before a project was due and grades were given. Ironically, less time to explore, more trying to harness one or two main skills and push them as far as possible to hit project objectives was what we got taught. Tough to be a mix of fine artist and graphic designer when you're in a boot camp just for the latter!
Oh wow, yeah, that does sound tough! Ironically, despite being recommended for beginners, I think the flexibility makes gouache harder to learn 🫠 I really struggled in the beginning to make them work how other artists do, but I understand a lot more now. It really is worth just fooling around with them in a no pressure way, just having fun. Glad you found it helpful! 💫👍
@@10.000hrs I'm hunting for a sketchbook that is both cheap and won't get ruined (and is also small enough to tote to the coffee shop, where my brainworms will actually allow me to work more often than at home!) But your progress reports are very inspiring! Keep up the gorgeous work!
The only ones I can think of that are durable like that are probably moleskine but they are expensive 🥲 I found pink pig to be pretty good but they might only be a UK brand.
The density of useful, practical information in this video is amazing. I can't explain how rare it is to get information that is a step beyond "Simple info for first timers" but not "What the pro's do with 10,000 hours experience". (that applies to basically any subject from programming to painting). Anyway, as a fellow "not my first 200 hours trying to draw" artist gritting his teeth and picking up the pencil again, thankyou.
Thanks friend! That means a lot! I just wanted to share something I would be doing anyway really! If it helps even a few people then it's worth it. 💕💫💖
Ive been drawing for about ten years but i started when i was 10 and never took the time to really learn the fundamentals. It’s been humbling going back to “beginner” practice and struggling. Super hard unlearning bad habits after so many years lol. Lovely video and good work
Well, you figured that out a lot quicker than I did 😅 I couldn't figure out how after drawing since a kid I literally couldn't draw anything, when you see kids who are like 15 drawing crazy stuff from imagination. I went right back to square one and started totally from scratch too. It is very humbling indeed ❤️ thanks for sharing your experience!
Great video! When I saw that you hit the 200 hours I opened yt every day to see if you uploaded a new long form vid and here you are! I'm also hyped for the discord server, the new baseline painting and the meta learning vids! Keep up the great practice. it's super inspiring and making me want to draw. Thank you!
You are very welcome! I find that I learn far easier when I work like this. I'm constantly investigating and experimenting the basic aspects of drawing, and this leads me to the next steps. Meta-learning is really learning how to learn, and having this awareness of your studies helps a lot I think. Thanks for watching! ❤️✨️
I also found creating ideas really difficult while working as an artist for a video game studio. But I figured out a way that works for me. I usually start off with a random word, for example crown, and then I abstract that as a silhouette and apply it to whatever I'm creating. These visual images usually trigger my brain into coming up with something interesting, but massively reduces the barrier of entry to coming up with ideas. I'm sure your visual library is actually better than you believe. Finally, I find that I need to empty my head of any ideas that I think of immediately so I can make space for new ones quickly, which I do by writing or sketching. I treat the ideation phase a lot like automatic writing.
That's super interesting! Another viewer also mentioned the power of prompts and words. I love the idea of starting with a silhouette. My initial foray into designing things in the past week has seemed to highlight the importance of starting with the biggest shapes and forms and then getting more detailed. Primary -> seco dary -> tertiary. Your approach seems to encapsulate that nicely! Also fascinating to hear about the 'mind dump'. That's not something I have encountered yet but it makes perfect sense and seems like a great way to get a bunch of things on the table to work with! Thanks so much for sharing and watching 💖✨️
Hey, maybe the book "lighting for animators" could also be a good addition to your art books. I've been reading the pdf version of it out of curiosity and it is really refreshing to look at lighting from another perspective than just 2 dimensional drawing. The first few chapters are definetely valuable for the purpose of thinking about lighting and composition. That said, I love seeing your journey!! Keep up the good work :)
Thanks so much for this! I hadn't heard of this one before but will check it out. I love anything that makes you think about a subject in a new way, so it sounds perfect! Thanks for watching! 💖
Great progress! I really like that you try to draw the same reference image from several different perspectives. I haven’t tried that but it looks like it takes a ton of deep thinking
Thank you! It is a bit of a brain melter at first, but I think if you can draw boxes in perspective from any angle, then you can draw the human figure if you can see it as just a stack of boxes. I am a big believer in making complex ideas as simple as possible to begin learning them, before adding more complexity. I try to keep the complexity at a high enough level that it's tough, but not impossible, because that is where the most growth happens. The downside to this is that your drawings are always 'bad' because you are constantly grappling with something tough, and not just drawing the same subject in the same way over and over agin in great comfort, always getting great results, like a lot of artists do.
Love your videos, they are very inspirational as someone who quit drawing for a long time but now has a goal to try to improve through putting in a lot of hours. Enjoy seeing how you improve as time goes on!
Thanks! I appreciate you taking the time to watch them. It takes a lot of hours for sure. I just try to use them wisely, and hopefully somewhat scientifically to squeeze as much progress and growth out of each one as possible. Good luck with your studies! ✨️
15:36 I'm pretty sure Kim Jung Gi legit had a photographic memory. I heard of some people meeting him at cons, with years in between, and he still remembered them years down the line. That's why I think he had a much easier time visualizing scenes inside his head. I guess it also stems down to the whole thing of how well you can imagine stuff, like imagining an apple and how detailed you can make it inside your head, from being fuzzy and gray to fully colored and being able to easily rotate it 360° inside your head. When it comes to that, I myself am kinda on the same level as you, when you were explaining your process on how you draw a head. So when it comes to actual visualizing, it's not ALL about skill and there's also some neuroscience and biology at play, but i don't think thats an excuse to just brush it off, I guess i'll just have to work extra hard to catch up to others levels. Great progress btw! Will continue watching, trying to improve myself alongside!
Thank you for saying this! I see so many say that natural born talent doesn't exist, but it's just more as an advantage you have when you learn and how fast the process gets, and it's useless unless you practice. I saw a guy's video here on youtube claiming Kim Jung Gi had no talent, just practice, and he got really defensive when somebody pointed out what you're saying. He claims that way of thinking is setting yourself up for failure but I think it's the opposite. It's realising your limits and learning to work around them, even with them. Jeffrey Watts, as an example, is a great artist but he said in a stream that he will never be able to work in the same way as Kim Jung Gi no matter how much he practice because he doesn't have photographic memory. I also know a person who was born without the capability to see pictures in her head - at all! She will never be able to draw from visual memory, and she would be very frustrated in trying to learn art as other people and I think denying the neurological advantages is actually setting you up for extreme frustration to the point it makes you quit. She loves art but never pursued it, and I think it's so sad because she could have made other kinds of art and learn in other ways. It kind of makes me think of neurodivergent people getting told they're just not working hard enough and are lazy in school when they can even excel their peers if they learn in another way. And Picasso had an eye disorder which made his brain see two pictures and he had a hard time learning in the same ways as his peers, that's at least what I learned in my art and litterature class, so what you're saying with being born with advantages is really important to realise and not to forget, but I think people who wish to be like Kim Jung Gi one day can't handle that truth but honestly, I think artists should strive to be the best they can be themselves and focus on being unique instead of obsessing over becoming like another artist.
There is an interview with Kazone where he specifically says he does not have a photographic memory. He admits having a natural affinity for drawing. Watch his videos explaining how to draw objects, you'll find that KJG has intensely analytical understanding (this is the form, this is the function). It would be comforting to believe he is an alien, but it appears the only alien part is his work ethic and ability to understand concepts.
I think the thing that fascinates me the most in interviews I have seen with him is that he realised from a young age that his drawings were not realistic. He had one where he says he and all the other boys would draw tanks, and they draw them side on like most kids would, flat and orthographic, but then he would go home and watch cartoons and the tanks on there were three dimensional, so from a young age he figured out the importance of things like perspective and started playing with them. I think he had the ability to figure out what he needed to do to improve on top of everything else. I do think he was a one off in many ways, whether photographic memory, genetics, sheer will power, natural curiosity, or just luck. Probably a little of each. I think you describe it very well in that being able to visualise things in your head is a skill. It's a hugely underappreciated part of learning to draw. Really seeing the world around you and internalizing it. I thank you for watching, am glad that you enjoyed the video, and wish you the very best of luck in your own study and improvement! 💖✨️
@10.000hrs he doesn't had photographic memory when you go through his older books you see how much he improved. Also I met him back in 2015 and for the whole 5 days of the even he was drawing nonstop everywhere glued to his sketchbook or signing (drawing) his books
@@MathiasZamecki Wow that's amazing! Must have been such a great experience. That makes him even more impressive to me. I guess he really just loved what he did. Such a shame he is gone 😩 I'd love to have seen how he good would be at like 80 years old.
I started taking art more seriously roughly 7 years ago. You, Sir are miiiiiiiles ahead of me already. Being able to draw a face or full body even in multiple angles based on ONE reference is witchcraft to me. It is sooooooo hard to do.
Wow, thanks so much, that's really kind of you to say! It was incredibly difficult when I first tried it and it still requires a lot of concentration. Really I consider it more an exercise in drawing boxes in perspective than anatomy. I am just connecting boxes that match the proportions of the body parts, so it's been the perspective skills that have made the difference. I don't actually know much anatomy yet. Sinking time into the fundamentals definitely seems to really help you in whatever you try and use art for! Thanks for stopping by, and good luck with your own studies! 💗💫
The anxiety up to getting to the page. The uneasiness when just starting to draw. The frustration of trying to handle a difficult principle. All of this is part of the process, it means you are doing this right. And I love the thinking of doing things is bitesized chunks, building your principles. Yes of course new things and things you haven’t practiced in a while are difficult. I will try to embrace this and just look towards growth through time spend deliberately and intentionally designing one principle at a time. Thank you.
No problem my friend, thanks for your kind words and for taking the time to watch and comment 💖 I haven't covered it yet in a video but there is also evidence to suggest that working at the edge of your comfort zone/ skill level is where the most growth occurs neurologically speaking. The downside to this is that you are always producing crappy drawings 😅 when you get better and understand a principle, you make things harder, and the drawings suck again. So I encounter that a fair bit haha. But then when you look back, or test yourself with a finished piece of art, you realise how far you have come, so it's worth it in the end.
thanks for the video! i have intense anxiety and i expect to be excellent with just one or two drawings so it felt good to see people working for long hours, i expect too much and i should lower my standarts, this video made me calm :'D also your cat is so cute omg :D
Ah glad to hear it helped you out! Yes, it is very easy to compare yourself to others, and really want those results asap. I feel the same way a lot too! But I try to remind myself to slowly get there by just making steady progress, and working on one piece at a time until I feel I fully understand that little piece. Oh yes, she is cute when she is sleeping 😆 it's when she's awake she is a terror. I wish you the very best of luck in your art and your learning! You already have everything you need to achieve your goals! It just takes time 🧡🫂
That's nice to hear! I think if you can do a little highly focused training every day, you'll see results, and those results will encourage you to stick with it. I think the main points that seem to make people stop are lack of time/ it takes too long to produce work, so I only train for 1 hour a day and do quicker studies. Second would be that the work is 'bad', but those 'terrible' drawings are literally the learning process taking place. You are figuring things out on paper and that means making mistakes. You don't have to show them anybody, but you have to go through that for a while before the 'good' drawings appear. I experience that every time I learn a new aspect of art on here, and now deliberately try and find things I struggle with, because that seems to be where the most growth occurs. Good luck with your studies! 💕💫
one of my favorite artists, takuji miyamoto, approaches drawing something by thinking about these things and then verbalizing out loud what it is he's gonna draw: 1. Pose Which part of an action do you want the audience to see? When to cut the movement? Timing?? 2. Emotion Become the character! How would you express how you feel? 3. Angle Side? Above? Below? 4. Elbow/Knee Joints Bent = Interesting 5. Understand Why the character took that pose 5. VERBALIZE!! "What am I going to draw?" "I'm going to draw a stick figure" > Running > Falling > Throwing > Pushing > Jumping > Diving > Etc I've found his thought process pretty helpful for approaching things from imagination!
Haha I've never heard anything like this before but it sounds amazing. I will definitely give this a try! I love stuff like this. It's always good to try these things. Thanks for sharing! 💖
I wanna just tell you I appreciate the analytical part of how you paint and how you draw because I’m more intuitive painter so I tend not to think of structure and color and color, variation and light and shadow. I just tend to make shapes and paint them or make shapes and draw them in, but I don’t, understand my process even though I’ve been since I was 12 and I’m 51 so it’s nice to see and think about their approach to their craft
You're very welcome my friend! I suppose it's just how my mind works, but I feel much better dealing with subjects in this quantifiable manner. I have had conversations with people who take a far more expressionist view, and say that you should just draw and paint without thinking and express yourself, but to me that's not how the old masters did things, at least initially. I feel there has to be at least some degree of very formal study, much like learning chemistry or cooking, before you can just go nuts and create things to a level that is considered decent. Thanks for watching. I'm always grateful to hear from those for more experienced than me ❤️
fundamental is very helpful especially if you are a beginner and starting to grow, when I was using pencil I keep coming back to the basic to be on track of the right posture when it comes to draw a human subject, nice video👍👍✨✨
Thank you! I am spending a lot of time really working fundamentals at the moment, in favour of producing finished artworks. This is a bit of a double-edged sword it seems, but how I am approaching this for the time being. Thanks for watching! ✨
Very well put together and your efforts adhame me lol. Been drawing since ever but the advantage of an organised workflow is very obvious when watching this. Thank you for this great resource and keep it going! Also, when creating your own designs the problem (at least for me) most often is that I don’t have any ideas on what to design. Once I have an idea or inspiration it kind of goes by itself!
Thanks for your kind words! I personally feel I work much better with a game plan, especially for a subject as vast as art. That's really good of you share your experience. I definitely lack ideas! A few people have mentioned the use of prompts or words to come up with a design direction, so I might give that a try. Thanks for watching! 💗
@@10.000hrs I personally tried the 100 days challenge multiple times and tend to look for prompts during uncreative periods, but really I feel like it doesn’t help a lot. Most of the time I start searching for a prompt that really catches me until I don’t wanna draw no more lol, maby its a different story for you though, surely give it a try!
At the moment I can only work for 1 hour a day so it's like 30 years 💀 but hopefully at some point I'll be able to maybe a few hours a day and that will speed things up a bit. I will still finish though even if it takes 30 years 💪✨️
Incredibly impressed at your dedication to this kind of deliberate practice. I'm an adult piano learner and can only really get myself to do deliberate targeted practice like this about a quarter of the time. One thing you didn't cover (in this video, I'll check out your others now), is why you embarked on this journey?
Thank you! I think that deliberate practice is not actually sustainable for long periods at least in my experience. I can only manage about 30 minutes at a time. The reason I started this specific journey was to really combine my passions of 'learning how to learn' with art, because I've tried to get good at art several times in my life and always failed. I don't have any aspirations to be a concept artist, or anything like that, but I want the skill of being able to draw from imagination. The vast majority of meta-learning and neuroscience stuff out there is aimed at language and medical students, so I wanted to try and show how I use the same techniques in an adapted way to learn procedural skills, and benefit people like artists! Thanks for watching 💖 I appreciate the support and wish you good luck with your piano studies!
For some time now, I’ve been trying to learn how to draw comic book characters while maintaining good perspective. I’ve gone through various courses on perspective, some unnecessarily complicated. I’m fairly good at drawing boxes in different perspectives, but I still struggle to apply that to drawing specific characters, especially in more complex poses. Could you recommend any video courses that teach how to draw characters in perspective? Your progress is amazing! You’re inspiring me to keep trying to learn how to draw. Thank you!
Hi! Thanks for your question! For video courses specifically, I probably can't advise much, as I haven't done any specifically on this, but I will say that the ones commenters of this channel tend to find most useful are the ones on Proko. They also really rate Michael Hampton very highly. I think these are more for just general anatomy though. If you want to draw in a 3D perspective sort of like I am, I actually learned that from a book by Tom Fox called 'Drawing Form and Pose', and it works really well for me personally because it treats every section of the body as a box. Tom does have video courses on Gumroad and Domestika, and they might deal more specifically with the perspective stuff you are talking about, but again, I have not taken them myself, so cannot say for sure. I personally have been figuring this out with the following exercises: - draw from reference, and really try to contain the head, ribcage, and pelvis forms in boxes, and consider their tilt and rotation, and how it's working in perspective The great thing about doing this is the actual anatomy doesn't matter much. You don't need to make a cool looking character or study, just draw the invisible boxes wrapped around the body parts, and understand their perspective and proportions. - once you can do this, redraw the pose from an imaginary angle That's how I do the drawings you see in the videos. This allows you to still look at the reference pose, but now it's all on you to work out how these rotated boxes would look from above, below, or the other side, and get it looking realistic. You can then detail these up with real anatomy if you want. I'll also mention that when I first tried that, it was SO SO SO HARD, even though I could draw boxes in perspective pretty well, so don't be discouraged if you find it tough! I think being able to think in terms of boxes and perspective is the secret to drawing from imagination, so it sounds like you are already well on the right path to achieving your goals! I wish you the best of luck with your studies and if there's anything else I can help you with please let me know! 💕✨
Thank you! It's interesting to me thay when working from reference I work mostly in 2D shapes, but when conceiving my own scenes from imagination I have to work mostly in 3D forms, spending much more time considering things like perspective. Thanks for watching! ❤️
I am an acrylic girl through and through when I want to paint opaque paintings. I also do watercolor but those are specifically for working over inks and I want that watercolor look. But I started painting with Acrylics and they are my first paint love. I just love that I can paint over whatever I painted before, even going so far is covering the whole thing and starting over if I have to. On a side note, try gesso on your sketchbook paper before the paint. It will warp a little with the gesso but will flatten out mostly once dry and then you don’t have to worry about warping when you are actually painting.
Oh thanks! I've not tried gesso yet! It seems the way my brain wants to work is much more blocking in solid shapes, and acrylic seems better for that. I recently got a stay wet palette because they kept drying out and that's been fun to play with! Thank you for watching and for the advice 💕
12:02 To paraphrase my favorite online teacher that pushed my art forward, "Just because it's true to nature, doesn't make it good design" Ethan Becker. I got so caught up in making things look real, true to form, but i found my style and my freedom/ enjoyment, by bending the rules and making it seem believable. Then again, i love the comic style, not a realist myself.
Ooh I didn't know he said that, I have watched a lot of Ethan Becker over the years. Funnily enough, a few other people have commented this sort of advice, so there must be something to it. I think I'm still just finding my feet in being comfortable moving away from the safety that the realism offers me. Hopefully I can learn to just cut loose and make things that look appealing 💓 thanks for the help!
I remember one of the hardest paintings i did, digitally, was working within all blues, in attempt to render a NIGHT sky, with neon lights. That study took me a few dozen hours to really tune those subtle differences.
Haha that makes me shudder a little 😅 I think that would be a bit much for me to comprehend at my current level, but it sounds like a challenge! I respect the effort you clearly put in!
@@10.000hrs Haha please don't be humble, though it may sound like some grandiose thing, it wasn't a real sky, it was stylized. It was Night city from cyber punk! It really was difficult but im sure you'd do an amazing job at it!
One thing that helped me learning anatomy is learning the insertion points of muscles onto the bones. Once you have the simplified skeleton/mannequin it becomes a game of connect the dots. Most of the muscles and how they are placed can be memorised into halves or thirds in terms of proportion which is nice, and there's a lot of similarity between the legs and arms. To learn I studied Michael Hamptons video lesson where he breaks down the body into simple forms and gives both the design aspect and the complex version. Really helpful! Second was proko premium, using his videos that cover each part of the body is super useful. One thing to keep in mind is that no art tutor has EVERYTHING. I often found that Hampton had 80% of what I needed to know, but then proko might have the remaining 20%, and then perhaps another artist like tom fox had a nugget that neither of the other two had. I would pick chest for example, and switch between artists to try and absorb what their individual keypoints were and that helped form a complete picture (and then I did this with all parts of the body. Hardest things to draw in perspective anatomy wise arguably was the complex form of the pelvis. Lots of connection points to important areas of both the legs and the torso. Hardest muscle to wrap my mind around was the forearms surprisingly (not including the head). Easiest part was the legs... Not too much twisting/complex overlaps. Most fun to conquer was hands. Feels weird looking back and struggling now that I know how to draw them from imagination. Really awesome video tho. I had a similar studying method so it's cool to see it works for you also. One thing that massively helped in learning the muscle was also getting many references.... And just drawing the single muscle (after looking at Hampton etc) or even OVER it in Photoshop. It's a quick practice but over time you're instantly able to place the muscle and recognise it visually way easier. Then it's a combination of drawing from reference and then imagination, ideally finding where your knowledge lacks so you can go fill in the gaps by finding what part you were unable to complete. After a while you can then draw both with gesture AND construction at the same time which is super fun. Gesture to capture the motion/flow/shape, then refine using anatomy knowledge.
Woah that sounds amazing. I hope I can get to that level! I'm only now just starting to tackle the more individual parts of anatomy. I haven't checked out Hampton much but his name is mentioned so much that I really need to. I do like Proko but haven't tried the premium yet so I'll check that out at some point too. I enjoy studying it and find it very fun which I think helps me a lot. Appreciate you sharing your wisdom! It's really awesome to hear from people who have already achieved this and hearing about your experiences. 💖
definitely try more abstract ways to frame a figure other than boxes. I like a combination of Loomis stick figure limbs with 3d volumes for the chest, shoulders and hips. What I like about this is that Loomis curved the lines of his arms and legs to follow the shape of the bones underneath. I found this helps when I go to fill out the shape of the arm or leg because it reminds me how the muscles lay at that angle, and also forces me to think about the volume of them Instead of ending up with something all too cylindrical). I would also say that making your volumes intersect is GOOD practice, don't let it bother you!
Nice! To be honest I haven't really looked at gesture or anything like that yet, and really observe the body just as a volume. I would like to bring some of that in at some point though. It seems that no one teacher has it all, and that they all seem to be good at exemplifying different aspects of figure drawing 🤔
It seems the algorithm sent my last comment to the aether for being too long, so I'll keep this one short haha 1 - You've built a great community here with cool discussions in the comments! 2 - Design is more about working with lists of options, rather than using some vague visual library. Like think of each feature eyes can have -- how high they are, how much they protrude, their tilt, etc. You pick the options that suit the context and balance out other features. 3 - Guidelines aren't something you grow out of as an artist. You just learn better versions of them. Constructing in perspective doesn't have to involve harsh-edged forms like cubes. I pretend I'm working with clay balls, for example, and pile them up to build the underlying forms.
That's okay haha those pesky algorithms! Thank you, I love talking to everyone here and learn a lot from all the kind people who take the time comment, such as yourself 💕 That is actually a really cool way to think of designing and I had not considered that before 🤔 reminds me of in a video game where you get to design your character. The clay balls is also something I haven't considered much before 🤯 thanks for sharing such interesting points! This definitely gives me some stuff to think about and see how it can work into what I currently doing. I appreciate you watching. Thanks again!
If you want to have a light in value blue, you essentially have to desaturate it, Or shift the hue to Cyan. Most vibrant "light blues" are actually a Cyan hue.
@@10.000hrs Yeah, every hue and/or pigment. has a certain brightness where it is more intense and saturated. (There are in some rare cases multiple pigments at a very similar hue which have a different point where they are most saturated.) But technically there is a maximum amount of saturation that is visible to the eye for each particular hue, since color for humans is like a 3d blob that isn't even. There are some rules of thumb you can get when you look into it, but the amount of nuance in that is astounding. For each individual hue, you get a shade of the levels of brightness you can hit and how that effects the saturation. When your HSV slider on your computer is adjusted but you fix saturation at 100, and your hue at the value you want, then 100 saturation reflects the maximum that hue can be saturated in your encoding setup for that hue and brightness. And that is without even getting into how the eye can distinguish slight changes in hue, value, saturation, etc. That isn't even. Like some hues are easier to tell appart when dark than others. (Generally ones that are more saturated.) But even with semi-desaturated colors Another piece of trivia is that pure purple/violet on the color wheel is an illusion created. Since due to the way light works, the most "red" red that we can see, and the most low frequency violet that we can see are literally the furthest apart that two colors can be, But most purples have both violet and red in them. And so there are a lot of shades our brain constructs that don't actually physically exist as a "pure" color. One thing I don't understand is why a lot of reds have their strongest/most saturated brightness where it's darker. And part of me wonders if that is a little bit of blue being reflected in those wavelengths for that hue as well? Of course even if you look at "pure" colors, those wouldn't actually be the most intense colors in a lot of cases in subtractive mediums, since reflecting more hues within moderation would make it glow more and be brighter, And so in some cases only taking a single narrow frequency band would make the color too dark for use to read it as anything other than a black. (except maybe when placed in contrast to another color.) And there are a lot of specific wavelengths that get read as mixture and can be reproduced in our vision even if not a single wave is that length. Since our eye is adding signals from multiple types of receptors.
That's amazing! There is so much to learn and use but I think it's all part of the fun! You know a lot about colour, and I appreciate you sharing what your knowledge with me! Hopefully as I get more into worming with colours I can experiment with some of the things you have mentioned here. I guess all colour is just light in the end.
So using the fundamentals like the boxes and doing the same pose on one sheet many times but from different angles as well and focusing on one thing at a time. That's pretty cool
Yeah, pretty much. Boxes are a great general way to think about drawing anything, because it forces you to consider perspective, and view angle. Drawing a pose from different imaginary angles means you can use the original pose reference as a guide, and that helps you figure out where to put the arms, or how to twist the pelvis. It's a good way to bridge the gap between using references, and drawing totally from imagination.
@10.000hrs Can I say something? I have been watching your content for 3 days. I have been drawing for 16 years and in just those 3 days, I have managed to increase my skill tenfold all because I put into practice and I got some inspired by you. But these, I'll be able to make my comic in no time and I even manage to find out how to make distinct human shapes
@SuperSaiyanDCG that's amazing! To be honest, I think that's the real secret. I don't do anything special, I just take ownership and responsibility of figuring out how my brain works, and how to best use it. It requires focused deliberate practice and effort, which we can all commit to. If other people try that for themselves as you have, suddenly it unlocks their true potential 💪 good luck with your comic! 🔥✨️
@@10.000hrs Yeah it depends on the method that's right for you. I just see a lot of struggling artists having difficulties cracking up things and they're just thinking way too hard.
Side note about that intro, copying other drawing is deadass the 2nd best way to improve, right after mindful study and practice, which is copying with extra steps to make the most of it.
I think I spent a long time just mindlessly copying and somehow expected drawing ability to magically appear haha. I did get pretty good at copying but any time I tried to draw without reference it just came out so bad, and yet I would see all these amazing artists just drawing panels for their manga from their head 🤯 I couldn't work out how they had that skill
Being able to draw characters from different perspectives than the reference is very impressive for 200 hours. There is I think many professional artist who are definitely not able to do that.
Thanks! That's interesting to know. The funny thing is in my mind I am really just drawing boxes, which is the main thing I've practiced, but stacking them and joining them to map the figure and it's proportions. I still find it requires a lot of concentration, but I feel like I'm using more perspective skills than anatomy skills at the moment. Thanks for watching! ✨️
Hey mate, been seeing your video's pop up in my feed recently, if you really want to boost your drawing skills you should make an "Écorché" anatomical sculpture, half as a skeleton, the other half as muscles under the skin. It's genuinely worth 100's if not a thousand hours worth of drawing -- and yes, I do mean that making a sculpture is worth hundreds of hours -- all for a lot less.
Thanks for this suggestion! That's similar to something I was planning on playing with in the future so I might give it a go. It makes sense that spending time actually viewing something and creating it in real three-dimensional reality would help you see and understand how everything fits together. Like taking apart a car engine.
Nice, i also hope to be very good at drawing. I visited the Kim Jung Gi museum in South Korea a few months ago, it was a great experience! sometimes even though its not true, i feel like im the only person that cares about this stuff, good luck!
How much time (if any) have you spend focusing on long single image sessions? I've heard at the top art schools they'll do week long drawathons and the students always say they're miserable but supercharge their learning. RISD is a place thats famous for it. I don't know much about art, but I know as a musician the top guys always talk about how their practice is long gruelling and focused on 1 section of a song, rather than constant switching (even before they became 'pro') I'd be interested to see if theres research comparing pure quick sketch vs pure long sessions vs a 50/50 combo.
There is some correlation found in sports science: the two forms of practice that are generally recommended are heavily isolated methods(e.g. repetitions of free throws or martial arts techniques) and "game situations" that are playing the actual sport or extremely close approximations. Longer time spent on a single image effectively has an isolating effect, since it forces more reviews of your previous work and new observations. I mostly use exercises out of Nicolaides when I study, and one of the things he encourages is to use a slower pace - to add intensity until you can spend hours on one contour drawing. Sometimes I will use a metronome to remind myself to stop after completing a line and think before continuing. I've also done master studies by following along with a video recording at the master's pace and with their motions, which produces a similar kind of intensity.
Pretty much what the other person who replied commented! I only do longer form studies periodically, and treat them more like a sports match where I can try and apply all the things I have studied then do a post mortem and see what went wrong and what worked well. I might spend a few hours on these max at least for now but many have said the high level illustrators like James Jean might spend 100 hours on a single painting. I spend just 1 hour a day studying. The area of study is dictated by the algorithm, which should schedule the thing my brain is beginning to forget a little. When I train this way I do 30 minutes, a 10 minute break, and then 30 minutes. I try to favour quantity somewhat over quality here. If I am working on rendering values and shading in cubes, I don't mind too much uf the perspective is a little off as I'm not working that. They aren't perfect artworks, more like little experiments to play with a concept and push it along. The idea is to train little and often, and there is some evidence to suggest that this is better than marathon sessions, but it's not specifically been tested for art. I've never drawn for 8 hours in my life. One of my next videos will talk more about this but all learning is actually a biological process called myelineation, and it works a little like building muscle. Lift weights for 8 hours straight and you achieve nothing. Do 30 minutes for 16 days and you get better results. I think a lot the big art schools would make even better students if they learned how the brain actually works! The only reason I can think they get students to do things like that is that you are there for say 3 years, and so have to cram a lot in. The books I originally read that opened my eyes to this sort of stuff are by Barbara Oakley, so you can always check those out. Tim Ferriss' stuff is a bit more practical, but doesn't cover the reason any of it works neurologically. It's more about 'hacking' skill acquisition to speed up learning. Thanks for sharing the info on how musicians learn. That's very interesting to me. I have a friend who is a professional pianist and he says he actually always took the little and often approach, but those smaller training sessions were hyper focused. That's why I only train for 30 mins at a time. I really really concentrate! I think that they all work, but I would to see more research myself to see if one really is far better than the other, or if it's a personal choice thing! Thanks for watching and commenting 💖 I really enjoy speaking with others who are curious about this stuff.
@@10.000hrs Its a great group of people you're gathering with these videos. I believe that much like bodybuilding there is a volume / intensity relationship that explains why two different modalities of learning seem to result in faster uptake. In lifting you have high volume / high frequency / lower intensity or Low volume / low frequency / high intensity. Much like bodybuilding the actual growth/connections happen in the 'rest' period if i remember my science of Myelin right. Good rest and bad practice might actually yields better results than good practice and bad rest. That would be interesting to explore, its atleast half the equation after all!
@aberwood Yes! I do also play with other variables I have not discussed yet in the videos such as sleep, and how close I sleep after I practice. Diet is another. Cardio yielded some good results weirdly, and I recently started taking Creatine. I haven't ever tried experimenting with actual nootropics because I would only take chemicals that have a decent body of research behind them already, but there are a lot of different levers to try and pull that most traditional artists would never even consider.
Hey, your videos are awesome and I love following your journey. I have a question: do you implement active recall into your training? Like drawing the same thing again but without the reference and than comparing and analyzing the two at the end?
It depends. I do this when first learning something like say a piece of anatomy. I will try and study it, redraw it, and compare, but I try to draw more imagined angles generally. That means if I have a reference of a body part or figure, I try and start by using that as a reference to study but draw the thing from a different viewpoint. I then move into drawing the thing from various viewpoints, purely from imagination. At that point I only glance at the references occasionally to see what is going wrong. This takes a few study sessions to build up to. The problem I find with, say, looking at a face, then trying to draw the same face from memory, is that I view everything more flat, and therefore don't really consider things like perspective or thinking about the subject in three dimensions. When you deliberately draw something from a new angle or viewpoint, you are forced to turn and rotate the subject in your mind, and to me that's the real bit that makes a difference in understanding the form of something, and leads to more convincing drawings. All are good practice, but I think the more advanced stuff should be practiced more when you feel ready for it! Thanks for watching! ❤️✨️
Hi there, you know the part where you talked about 'sucking' at design? From my own experience, design, and the creativity necessary for it does come from ones visual library but i'd argue its a skill you slowly develop, i mean. all great designers were in the first place not designers at all. In the sense that you really do have to practice your creativity. for example, a really helpful exercise: designing your own clothes on characters using reference (not copying but more taking inspiration e.g. a pattern or texture from a certain jacket). Hope this helps! you've grown alot, congratulations!
Thank you! That does help, its so nice to get all this feedback from those more experienced. I think I'm still wrestling with this as an idea but really do agree with you that it takes time. Lots of people have actually commented to state that they feel its more something you just have to allow to kind of spring forth, and that realism and engineering are secondary to just making things that look and feel cool and stylish. I'll keep playing with it! Thanks for the advice! 💫💕
Sorry if you mentioned it and i missed it but when doing your head studies do you do the same as the torso where you have one ref and draw from different angles or do you draw random heads form imagination? Love the video and breaking down the process on how you study! Amazing stuff
The heads are all from imagination for this, but you could apply the same concept if you wanted to. The Tom Fox book teaches you how to construct the figure from boxes with certain proportions, so if you can draw the head box, you can subdivide it as he does to make a general head. Moving beyond that now, I am trying to draw such a proportioned head as an outline like Kim Jung Gi would do, which involves thinking about the box and its perspective, but not actually drawing any guidelines or anything. I also practice this using the references from imaginary angles, and it's even harder 🥲 but I'm slowly getting the hang of it.
@@10.000hrs Thank you so much for the response! i am excited to start up my own study journey! Keep up the amazing work and best of luck moving forward! You got this!
Great update my friend! Fude brush pens take years to master. I started using them years ago when I first heard about KJG. It's definitely a very frustrating tool to learn. I've only started getting good with them recently after much practice. At the beginning I practiced them every day, but there have been long stretches when I didn't use them. Now I use them a couple times a week to at least maintain my skill level. You can lose a lot of the finesse by being out of practice.
Thanks for the advice! I definitely do not use them enough and still find them quite intimidating 😅 it's impressive that you have figured them out. I hope your studies are going well and that everything is good in your life 💗
Not for painting. When drawing, I use reference I try to produce individual parts like this, only occasionally glancing at the reference. I also do things like try to draw the reference from an imaginary angle which is quite tricky. The 'blind drawing/painting' that I think you are suggesting is something a few people have suggested though so it's something I will experiment with in the future! It sounds like it will help!
I don't have a program to count the days, but I do have a program that tells me what to work on each day. It's called Anki, and it uses spaced repetition to get me studying a specific thing within the world of art that my brain needs a refresh on that day. If we don't use all the pieces of knowledge in our heads regularly, they fade and weaken. This program prevents that from happening and can be used for all sorts of things like foreign languages.
As a digital painter, I want to ask how long setting up and putting away your gouache paintings took you. I’m not used to it, but there’s a mental barrier for me when it comes to cleaning stuff up. With a tablet, I can just pop a program up and start. Your videos are excellent, as it summarizes a lot of points in learning fundamentals.
Thank you! I'm glad you found the video useful. The set up time for gouache is minimal really. I have a little pot I fill with water and a ceramic palette. I also have some cotton rags or old t shirts nearby to wipe the brush whenever I wash it. I simply put a couple of blobs of colour onto the pallete and start work. I actually experienced the same thing you describe, so I have tried to make the setup time as fast as possible. The clean up takes a little longer but it's still only about 5 minutes, as gouache is very easy to wash out of brushes. I think that on reality the apprehension that I felt was more for the actual painting than the set up. Like I was scared because I knew I was going to make mistakes. By also keeping the exercises I did as simple as possible, this fear quickly went away and I actually looked forward to painting! At this point, the set up and clean up don't even bother me anymore. I just enjoy the experience 💗
Haha I'm surprised nobody has asked this sooner 😆 honestly it's sometimes tough. My job actually currently involves waking up at 4.30am, and is essentially manual labour. I work in construction on movie and tv sets and sometimes have to do very long days far from home. I also usually work 6 and sometimes 7 days a week. When I get home, I draw for 30 mins, then take a small break, eat, etc. I then draw for another 30 mins which I record to make that day's video. Some days I am very tired and feel the work does suffer, as a large part of this sort of learning is actually having enough sleep etc to make your brain optimised for learning. I can manage the hour a day training, but the thing that suffers more is making the longer videos. I can only do that for a small window each weekend, and they can take many hours to produce 🫠 But if you want something you find a way to make it work! I organize my time using Google Calendar, to make a big to do list. I can then move the items around and arrange them into a block of things I will do on Sunday afternoon, for example. I also time myself. So if I want to make a video, I will literally set my phone to countdown say 2 hours, and when that alarm sounds, I stop and go do something else. This seems to activate Parkinsons Law, which makes you more innovative and productive in the time you allow yourself to do a set task. Compare this to just sitting down to work with no plan, where you might get distracted, or work for 6 hours and produce the same work you could probably have done in 2 if you focused.
@@10.000hrs Haha yes! I was trying to look through your past videos and comments to find out. But Ahhh, Thank you so much for taking the time and effort to share your process in detail! Despite your life and work circumstances, you persevere and stay disciplined. I find really amazing and inspiring. "But if you want something you find a way to make it work!" That is so true. Hearing about your work-life situation gave me a different perspective on managing my own time and how I have been taking my free time for granted. I used to think that I needed the perfect day, setup, and time of the day to practice, but now I realize that I was making up excuses to avoid feeling uncomfortable. I look forward to your future content! I know it takes time given your circumstances and how long it takes to produce these great videos, so please take all the time you need.
@@10.000hrsthis context inspires me so much more knowing you and I have a similar work situation and with realistic objectives and time spent per day, you have still seen that much growth! Amazing, man!
Thanks so much for your tutorials they’re very helpful for many people who want to learn drawing and sketching. There are lots of items we have to learn and explore but essentially, we need to study ANATOMY books, the BASICS form, the 3D forms, the facial features, bones and muscles, and more. It’s really important to study references, pictures, real life scenarios, in order to understand how the body works, as well as the context like cars, bikes, houses, trees, etc. In relation to the HEAD, we need to know the LOOMIS method in order to understand the most common method for the construction of the head. But in the end, when we understand the structure of the skull and bones, and we are to move it around in different directions, the guide lines are less important and you can draw by imagination. If we use a BOX for drawing de HEAD we can see clearly the 3D form, but sometimes, you can forget de roundness of the head.
Thank you! I appreciate you taking the time to help me, this is definitely an area where I struggle. I think the reason is like you say, I spend a lot of time thinking about the volume of the head in perspective, in a box, and neglect the curvature. I recently started to consider this a bit more and it's something I hope to get better at soon. I will revisit Loomis on your recommendation and see if it makes a difference. Thanks again! 💖
This might help with shading and lighting someone taught me to think of the main light source as its on camera everything it sees is what's in the light. This might also help those wondering why should you draw the same pose/object from different angles
Awesome! That is actually really useful as I will likely spend some more time rendering soon and so will have to consider things like this too! Thanks for sharing your knowledge! ❤️
ihave been going with you for somethime now and this is soooooo fun to do , just undresding how to learn things in very optimal way is something a been doing for my day to day life and its worked out so well in life I want to add something a lot of artist don't really do , keeping themself health with that amount of work ad how to strengthen muscles we use to draw and sit I would love to see you want to add this thing to the journey we are taking
Thank you my friend, it really is great to take charge of how you learn and really set a course for developing high level skill. I haven't done much specifically regarding muscles, but I try and keep in shape anyway. There is an interesting experiment I did with cardio that I want to make a video about at some point. I appreciate you watching ❤️ Hopefully I can keep producing content you enjoy! I hope to have another video out in September, depending on my job 😅
@@10.000hrs Some big manga have a lot of back pain, yes there work time is crime tbh But some artist or anyone who work setting slot they lack the muscles awareness in there lower back and hips how that connect to so many people to have bad habits of living with
Yeah those artists work some crazy hours 😅 I only draw for 1 hour a day right now, so maybe that's why I haven't considered my body as much. Important thing to bear in mind though!
Designing characters is easier when you have a prompt. Someone gives you a description of a character, customer, etc. then you’ll do research based off the description. Doing research allows you to gather references that you feel best captures the description. You’ll do some editing of the references and what you have left over will be the design
That's actually a really good point that I hadn't really considered. A lot of the work I aspire to create pieces similar to were likely produced under exactly those conditions. That being said, I am also fascinated by artists like Kim Jung Gi who could reproduce designs and details both from memory and original designs from imagination at will. I suppose he just did all the research over many years and stored it all in his head 🫠 thanks for bringing this up. I might try working with prompts.
If you look closely at Kim Jung Gi’s doodles, a lot of them are military themed and he was in the military so it makes sense to him because I’m sure hes looked at and studied everything he draws in those “stream” of consciousness drawing sessions. Some other advice I would give is master studies and Fan art from your own idea. Mix and match styles of artists that you like and focus in on the attributes that you like about them
Working from imagination, in my opinion, is a form of story telling. It's not so much about generating ideas, but more asking yourself questions and then problem solving them based on your life experience and interests. For me the most interesting ideas are actually questions. For example, "What would it feel like to pilot a mech?". The answer to that is another series of questions. The most obvious is "how do you represent that visually?". You probably want to show a cockpit view. "From which perspective?". It's probably a good idea to show pilots screen or window so we can see the world outside the mech for more story telling, so "First person or over the shoulder?". Probably over the shoulder so you can show a bit of the pilots personality... This tends to snowball and before you know it you have enough of a foundation to start rendering something.
That's actually a really logical way of thinking about this problem! I haven't ever really thought about it like that before but it makes sense. I think the thing I struggle with isn't so much things like picking a camera angle but more the actual design and details of a thing and making it look like it would actually mechanically function, and just has a decent level of visual interest. I'll definitely try what you suggest out though and see what difference it makes. Thanks for explaining it so well! I appreciate the help! 💕✨️
@@10.000hrs My example might have been a bit clinical, in reality the process is often bit more organic especially with a lot of practice. Going back to the example, since the setting is a cockpit we can start thinking about what goes in a cockpit and maybe a bit about the purpose of the mech itself. Every mech needs a power source so you dedicate a bit of the control panel to that. So maybe a screen or dials, some switches or levers. Basically decoration, all the little building blocks you can pull out of visual memory. You've gone from a very vague idea to something manageable. The same process applies to mechanical functioning of the mech. Once you have a bit of a story you can work on connecting everything together via the basic parts of engineering/mechanical anatomy. like hinges, pulleys, hydraulics, motors etc. Again this is just the foundation it's probably going to take several iterations to find the design language that works for you aesthetically. It's basically the same process as painting. We start by blocking things in, this acts as a reference and helps us refine the problem space down to something more manageable. Each layer narrows things down even further. At some point we will have enough of a foundation that we can let intuition fill in the rest of the dots. In essence this is just the creative process. I think a lot of it is just figuring out how to work with your imagination. For me this is story telling. where everything is interconnected and has a purpose on some level.
Ive been following for a while - question for you - how did you know where to begin and what to practice ona day to day to keep improving? Looking to build a weorkback schedule and study schedule but don't even know what is the most impactful things to start practising
Hi! That's a good question. I could already copy things, but couldn't paint or really draw from imagination. This led me to pretty much deconstruct the field of art like Tim Ferriss does for new skills he wants to learn. That is where the skill pillars come from. They represent the most general, abstracted, fundamental ideas in all of art. Really any artistic endeavour will involve using them, so I spend all of my time there. What I mean by that is if you see me drawing heads, and learning anatomy, I am still always thinking about it as form and perspective. Drawing boxes. If I paint a landscape or portrait in greyscale, I don't care about the subject and what it is, I care about the values I am using and their placement. Hopefully that makes sense. Trees and faces are just different shades of grey to me. Later on, you can get more specific and think more about what makes something look like a tree or a face, and begin deep diving into things like anatomy. As for how I know what to study, this is just informed by my weaknesses. If you are a total beginner, you might be drawing anime and not be happy woth the results, so you go study more anime qhen actually the problem is you have no understanding of perspective. The problem usually means abstracting, zooming out, and considering what more general fundamental thing you are failing at. As an example atm I have trouble drawing heads from below and above without drawing in a faint box first. This is either an issue with my knowledge of head anatomy, or an issue with my ability to correctly deploy my perspective skills with no construction lines, like KJG could. So I an currently working on both of those. What you work on will be personal to you, and requires you to be honest with yourself about what you are actually bad at, and to run little experiments all the time to try different things and see if you can find the best way to improve at something. Finally, try not to take on too much at once. There are lots of things I am bad at and want to improve on, but using anki as a scheduler means I only have a few problems to work on at a time, and I can only deal with 1 thing a day. This focuses you, and ensures you dk not overwhelm yourself trying to spin too many plates at once. Hopefully that helps a little but if there's anything else I can assist you with please let me know! ✨️
Oils are cheaper than gouache. U can study on any surface practically. I draw on random cardboards I find on a dumpster. So 'canvases' for your studies are literally free, you can get thousands of cardboards if you just walk around and search. And they can be massive in size and very thick, they wont bend unless u drown them in acrylic gesso (that isnt even needed). Brand of oils doesnt matter too, I pay 2-3$ for 46 ml tubes, they work just fine. Although oils most likely way harder to get used to.
I've never tried them! I do want to at some point though. A few people seem to think I might actually get on well with them based on how I paint so it's one to stick on the to do list! I do like the sound of them more and more. You've done a good job of selling them to me!
I bought the books How to Draw and How to Render, and realized that, specially when it comes to perspective, I already had a good base. Sadly, the author goes way deep into perspective, then quickly transitions to specific subject matters, like drawing cars or planes, which is not something I'm interested in at all. How to Render was a bit better for me in terms of how to handle different materials, light projection, reflection and refraction, but the moment it goes into more specific details like rendering specific materials or more complex shapes, it goes straight to 3D modelling which to me kind of defeats the purpose, so I am mostly using some of his work as reference and switching up the materials and lighting as I go. In the meantime I keep on creating stuff of my own in my small sketchbook, mostly with micron pens, lots of cross hatching, mixing pen and pencil and now I would like to try some engraving. As soon as I get my tablet though I'll get into colouring, which is something I've dreaded since I started drawing like 20 years ago.
Yeah it is very vehicle focused. I don't really practice those section at the moment as much as the fundamentals. Those fundamentals are truly excellent though, and are the main way I would say I have improved, granted that there are many sources to learn them from. Sounds like you have a good grasp on what you want to achieve, and experiment and play with things, which is honestly all I do. I was very intimidated by learning to paint too 😅 it helped me to remind myself that mistakes are the essence of learning, and so I just started simple and gradually increased the complexity. I still have a LOT to cover, but I really enjoy learning each new concept and trying to add them on top of what I already know. Good luck with it all! I am sure you'll get to grips with colouring quickly!
@@10.000hrs Cheers!! Yeah, I have been drawing since I was a child, but mostly just out of trying things around with pens and technical pencils, with portraits coming much easier than I expected. So now I'm trying really hard to diversify both in terms of technique and colours, but I'm sure you understand that it feels like you're drawing for the first time, and colours just don't mix exactly how you want them. It's an exercise in frustration and patience. I'll of course keep on trying now that I've rediscovered my passion for drawing (besides using it as an extension for photography). It's always nice seeing someone having a pragmatic approach to art while still implementing and discovering their style. Rock on!
This concentrated effort to learn to draw has, I feel, made you ahead of 85% of the general public of hobby artist. I find it problematic or annoying when people claim they are 'serious', as in wanting to earning a living from art and their skills... They don't have the basics like you do.
Thanks, that's kind of you to say. I often think about that and honestly was guilty of the same thing for years - either being very casual, or just trying to do things that were too advanced for me and wondering why I would fail. I think we see the other really talented artists and their work and try to emulate the end point without appreciating the many many years it took them to build up to that.
Yo, real cool video. So, I was "recently" (a few months ago) able to start drawing without using any construction or having to go back and redraw sections of my drawing, but there's a catch. I use a technique from the anime "Jujutsu Kaisen" as a tool for understanding what happened; called the "black flash". When a fighter focuses and has enough mastery over their magic, they can land a strike and infuse it with magic with perfect timing so that a cascading impact causes a distortion in space, amplifying the damage exponentially and causing black sparks to appear. The after-effects puts the fighter in the zone, allowing them to pull off superhuman feats of precision and technique. Furthermore, the fighter's understanding of magic deepens, allowing them to create new, never-seen-before techniques. This fictional technique is based off of a real life counterpart, flow state, which many top performers across many fields weaponize to increase their output. When I tried to use flow state, I had to engineer my whole day around trying to hit it, and it took a few hours, but when I did, I hit a "black flash" of my own. I felt like I made a month's progress in a single day, and I was suddenly able to "see" like a pro. The lines I drew on the shoulder told me where to place the elbow, the lines on the elbow told me how to angle the sleeves. Each line I placed showed me where to place the next. Based on video lectures I watched later of such pros drawing without construction, I believe they were doing the same thing. They're just so experienced that they can do this even without flow state. I haven't been able to hit that level of flow state since, but now I feel like I have awakened to understandings about perspective and form that I didn't have before. I have even gone back to rewatch lectures that I saw before I hit my "black flash", and the experience was completely different. I highly recommend setting a day aside where you have no extra decisions to make: all meals prepped in advance, no one else to bother you. Then, for that one day, do nothing but draw, sleep, and maybe go on a walk or two. Keep drawing sessions to 2 or 3 hours and get up from your desk at least every half an hour. The growth you will experience in that one day could dwarf a hundred hours.
Wow that sounds cool! I haven't trued anything with flow states yet but have heard of them. I generally only have to draw for 1 hour a day at the moment, but perhaps in the future I'll get a spare day to try something like this. I'll try and investigate them more and see what I can come up with. Thanks for taking the time to share what you learned! ❤️✨️
I tried drawing without guidelines for a longer period of time, but when I draw like that, I Iose my sense of 3D forms. I can't visualize well in my mind. I eventually returned to using guidelines, to 'feel' the shapes better, and then I struggled less with perfectionism and got a better result. I don't draw every possible guideline, only the ones I need. I think that drawing without guidelines work well for people with a good imagination, and I thought my imagination would get better but it didn't. Try it, but if it doesn't work, the result and pleasure of drawing matters more.
Thank you, that's very sobering and helpful advice. The weird thing for me is that I can draw simple things using no construction lines but once the subject reaches a certain level of complexity, like a human figure, then I fail. I'm interested in trying to figure out why that is and how the brain learns to work through this problem, hopefully to help others, but you are totally right that enjoyment should always be most important!
I wish I could work with your amount of focus and structure. I bought one of the books you recommended in your last video and started reading it and was like "guh, oh no, a college textbook." and have not been able to work my way through it. Actually I haven't been able to make myself draw much in general since the end of June.
It can be hard at times. Some of the books can be a little daunting, but a part of how I manage I think is the way I break things down. I spend only 1 hour a day learning which is manageable for most people. I only work in a single concept, and I don't progress or add a new concept until I really feel like I understand the current one. That might mean working from a single page in the book for a while, but once you have it down, it's like riding a bike. Sometimes that takes just a few sessions. Some I am still experimenting with and reviewing many times a month. Some I don't think you ever master and they just become these ongoing experiments and constant sources of intrigue and curiosity. I do think drawing should always be fun, and I do also think that all people learn slightly differently. I believe the most progress is made when you understand how you personally learn and retain information, and that means playing with how long you study for, how often, whether books work better for you, or videos, or an online course etc. Find the fun, find what gives you the best results, and it becomes far easier to motivate yourself to do things like study, work out, draw, talk to new people, or whatever else you want from life 💖
How did you learn how to draw bodies? I had an easier time learning the head with Tom fox's book but somehow the body seems to be a real struggle to me
I treat the body and head as 3 boxes One for the head, one for the ribcage, and one for the hips/pelvis. I got to a point where i could draw them in the correct proportions generally, and used cylinders for the arms, legs, and sometimes the stomach inbetween the hips and ribs. That's how I learned to think about the entire figure in 3D. Because I now understand perspective, and boxes are pretty simple in perspective, I can rotate them and draw them from different angles to create the figure from any viewpoint. From there, where I am currently studying, I learn more specific anatomy to better and more realistically understand the anatomy and how it intersects and wedges together. They gradually replace, or sit on top of the boxes. There are other things to consider here, like the fact that both sexes have slightly different proportions, and that characters can be stylized to make them look like a Pixar film character, but I don't concern myself with those things at the moment. Basically boxes are your friend! ☺️
Draw draw draw draw draw hours weeks days just draw draw been on my anatomy journey for 4 years and it went by in a flash iv learned a tremendous amount boxes where definitely my friend practice your shapes , best advice iv ever gotten when when i was young from an artist who told me to draw shapes all of them all 3d 2d , draw from life constantly i mean constantly real life perspective can train your eye trust me i looked past this advice in my younger years now i know why it’s so important and you only notice when you start drawling from life , meaning DRAW WHAT YOU SEEE mesure mesure messure everything is made of straight lines and formes and basic shapes Practice drawling silhouettes gesture drawling, take your time this is a life long journey and as painfully as it can be is well worth every last minute
I haven't because they are all scans of books and so it's kinda piracy. But I am working on a deck written by me that features my take on the concepts the books cover, all of the challenges, and my own notes. It should be available by the end of the year and will be free. You just download it as an anki deck. I'll announce it on here when it's ready! 💖
@@10.000hrs ok sounds good. I use Anki for languages and hadn’t thought about using it for drawing. Do you have a video explaining how you set up your deck? That would be interesting also. Do you set up drawing prompts or just information about certain forms etc?
ruclips.net/video/J_j3BunQ6AQ/видео.htmlsi=vdH3vjWG-f2kWLEx ruclips.net/video/4MF5LWwTPTk/видео.htmlsi=9k3VTXjjNbtPgjAh Those are the videos I specifically have on using Anki to learn art and should explain how the cards are structured and why. The entire thing is in 2 parts, and it might be a little boring in places, but those videos are the ones that specifically explain everything. There are a few things I have been made aware of since like the Import Media 2 add on which apparently makes decks from books automatically 💀 I haven't tried it yet but wow that would have saved me some time if it does work I will be releasing a deck later this year for free that people can try which will be structured like mine, and act as a sort of streamlined version of everything I have learned to hopefully help people try this for themselves Hope that helps!
If u struggle with comming up with a design, take it from your dreams. I personally have a 100+ characters I have created through my dreams, and thousands of locations in my mind as I cant draw environment well enough!
Wow that's a really cool idea! My dreams seem pretty everyday when I can even remember them haha but I might give this a go at some point. Thanks for sharing the idea! ✨️
To answer your question towards the end of the video, Kim Jung Gi had stated that he could see roughly 60-70% of the final picture in his mind before drawing it. So not that much compared to what most people think! A lot of detail is "improvised" while drawing
Oh wow I never knew that. That's really cool. I am still impressed that he could always come up with something to even draw to be honest 😅 I still can't even do that always, but the fact he can see even that amount is amazing. I find that for me it's more the broad and general things that I see, like the biggest forms and shapes, and then a lot does get improvised on top, so maybe that ratio always stays the same but you just get better at defining those key parts 🤔 Another commenter stated that every line influences the subsequent lines, and so the image eventually takes a certain direction. Either way it's really fascinating stuff - how an image goes from being in the mind of one person to paper ✨️ Thanks for sharing! 💖
I was in the same rut of being unable to make my own interesting designs. Yes, I could literally draw any reference photo you'd give me, regardless of the subject matter and complexity. I could render just fine. But I could barely create. I didn't have any design sense of my own. I had to go back to the fundamentals of understanding concepts like big-medium-small and shape design.
Glad it's not just me, and that you figured out a solution. I've made a little progress by thinking about things in orthographic first which I'll discuss in the 300 hour recap, but it definitely seems to be a separate skillset to having the ability to draw. I'll take your advice and review the fundamentals you mention 💖 thanks for the advice
How are you practicing perspective, shapes and volume? How you did that and what is right way to do that. What you can recomend me as an beginner jaoanese animator?
I think this skill is something very fundamental, and would be required by anyone who wants to draw anything from their imagination. I learned it from the book 'How to Draw' by Scott Robertson. It takes you from drawing lines and curves to understanding how perspective works, and then drawing boxes and other more complex forms. There isn't really a right way I feel, just find a book or other resource that explains it in a way you understand. When I started I worked on grids, or drew vanishing points and things to help. Now I do not generally need to do that, and just draw. You would need to understand the differences between 1,2,3 and 5 point perspectives quite well. When I practice specifically these skills I draw these forms from imagination and focus on making the illusion of dekth and perspective seem real. I am at a point where I am pushing myself to draw much more complex objects, hopefully original designs. I train like this EVERY day though when I draw, because even when doing things like figure drawing I am thinking like this and drawing forms. Hopefully that helps!
@@10.000hrs what about how to draw boom i started my drawing journey frim it and dropped in 50 page. Cause i really dont understand why i need this "mirroring curves" techniques un jaoanese like animation. Yes, some things might require mirrored parts, like or exaple, i want to tfaw a tsuba under unsuall camera angle, which can contain cyrves. Byt really, my braun just didbt find purposes of learning it
@@hans3437 yeah that's fine. The book is I think aimed more at industrial designers and people who want to draw things like cars. You probably don't need to know that stuff. If you learn the parts that are relevant for your animation like how perspective works, you can then start learning other things from other resources like anatomy, and applying what you have learned about perspective to that.
have you considered trying to draw and rotate insects? Since they don't have a skeleton, and have an exo-skeleton instead. They have very organic forms that are easier to understand. But still have a lot of detail. And much easier to draw and have them look good than animals. And you also get a really interesting surface texture too. Although, if you haven't done texture studies before, then taking some time to practice doing that first makes it easier to make great looking insects. You can of course make the forms without doing the texture first though. When it comes to the details of the anatomy, I actually recently got a bunch of cheap wax. 10 lbs for 30$ and I am going to use it to make an anatomical model. Where I build the human form, first the skeleton then muscle by muscle. So I get a sculpture of the human form without skin. Wax is also way easier to work than clay, (In addition to being way cheaper.) I heard a lot of art schools have all their students do that in their first or second semester. So I figured it is worth a try and should help me understand anatomy better. theioretically, you could do something similar by making a life-size head model with the muscles and such being built up, but that seems more difficult. I am debating about whether to do 1/6, 1/4, or 1/3 scale though. (1/6 is like 10 in. tall or so., 1/4 is like 1.5 feet or so, and 1/3 should be like a bit less than 2 feet tall. So the tallest I could easily fit and work with on a desk.) One great way to get better at design early on, is to use multiple references for the same work. Take 2-3 different objects and imagine how they could be combined into something new. Or try to think of alternative ways an object could be used. If you have done a bit of still life, then trying to think about what if a random object was placed outside and converted into a house for tiny people or bugs? Or for something bigger, what if it was buried by sand or covered in vines? Making a human figure and adding animal features can also be kind of creative. (While sticking to basic human anatomy.)
Thanks for raising some really good points here! I have never tried drawing bugs but it does sort of lean towards some other experiment I want to run soon... Textures I have never really tried yet but recently started learning it with gouache, which involves using things like the paper type to your advantage. It seems like a very useful skill to have so I'm looking forward to experimenting with it more. The sculpting thing has been mentioned by a few people and it sounds like a good idea, so I might give it a go at some point. You have some really cool ideas and it sounds like you understand a lot so thanks for sharing what you have learned with me ❤️
@@10.000hrs Well if you want to start with learning implied texture, I would recomend starting with ink. then moving to something smoother. Implied texture if effectively form on a micro scale which is ontop of a bigger form.
Oh yeah, I used to study Bridgman, but actually found books by him and Loomis to not be as helpful as the book by Tom Fox. I think it's personal preference but in terms of really emphasising how everything should be three dimensional and in perspective, Tom's book is far more up to date, and probably more thorough as well. At least for me!
Great video. Very entertaining and informative. Can you tell us what you used to do when you didn’t practice art correctly,so that we know if we are doing that.
Yes! I spent years copying anime, and could never draw it from imagination. So I decided to learn anatomy by copying it from books. I got really good at copying anatomy... but couldn't draw it from imagination without my references. Meanwhile I see these crazy artists like KJG drawing things from their head. I hadn't studied the basics of how to actually draw. Things like perspective, or an appreciation of value, line weight, or composition. If you just want to draw portraits from reference, then copying without ever learning things like perspective is fine. It depends on what you want from art. I want to be able to create the images I see in my head, and to do that I need a very solid understanding of things like perspective. In more practical terms, I experiment with different ways of studying art and have found thay for me personally I male faster skill progression when I study little and often, like for 1 hour a day. There is some evidence to suggest this is better than dumping all your energy into an 8 hour paintathon to try and brute force skill development, like most artists do. By experimenting with things and being aware of what works for you, you can develop a system that works for you to make yourself learn in the most effective way possible. So it's a case of knowing what you want, figuring out what you need to study, and then studying it in the most effective way possible (and continually striving to make that even more effective)! Thanks for watching 💕
Maybe a good exercise to draw without guidelines would be 1) draw 1 drawing with guidelines, then 2) put it away and do it again, this time without guidelines, then 3) Compare both, and 4) Fix anything that needs fixing. By seeing how glaring the differences are, your brain will register the mistakes and fixes deeper.
This sounds like a good idea! Sometimes I draw the guidelines over the drawing afterwards to see how close I got. I'll have to give it a try. Appreciate the suggestion 💕
15:40 : As someone who has worked a lot on memory drawing and drawing from imagination, I am occasionally puzzled when I see people talking about 'visualizing' images before executing. I wouldn't necessarily _rule out_ the idea that KJG or Tom Fox really did/do have visual experiences immediately before the execution of the drawing. But if I am to take the wording at face value, it also seems like a doubtful assumption (examining what they say about the matter won't necessarily help. It's plain enough that talk of 'visualization' is common in the context of teaching art. Whether this is an approximate notion that is compatible with accounts like 'I just think about the different things and characteristics I want in the picture', or a literal description, is what it is difficult to tell) Part of the reason I say this is because I get praised for my memory drawing, by strangers, so presumably it at least looks good to them.. and.. no conscious visual experience immediately precedes the drawing. I just _make the surface like the thing that I have in mind_ (of course, it would probably be correct to observe that this is partly a function of having enough experience that the tools and materials are comfortable). As far as I can tell there is one sole visual experience I'm having: the one of looking at the paper. So .. sure, there pretty much has to be some arrangement of constructs inside my brain that enables me to do this. But I think I've made enough of an account to call into question whether that thing has to be a visual image. I certainly don't manage to notice any such thing. Then again, maybe it is in this case just meant as a figure of speech for 'having an idea inside your mind' (hence my confusion, I can't actually tell whether people really are making this assumption.. except when they say things like 'memory drawing is impossible for me because I have aphantasia, right?'; it's pretty clear then that they take mental visualization to be a relatively literal notion.)
That's really interesting! Thanks for sharing your thoughts! We do have someone who comments here who suffers from aphantasia and he said that if he doesn't have references then he cannot really draw! It's something I had never considered before. I think that the visualisation is not literal. I don't literally see the cube on the page, but I see it clearly in my head in such a way that I can draw where it goes on the paper. It's quite weird to try and describe 😩 but if I was to draw a face, then at the moment I couldn't achieve that same thing with the facial features and expression. They sort of just happen as I draw. I more feel them out and go with what ends up appearing. I am assuming that ad I draw more I will get better at giving characters a more specific appearance or expression. That's why I am so fascinated when someone like Kim Jung Gi draws a person in a crazy pose and perspective but starts with something weird like the eyebrow. It's as if he's tracing an invisible image he can see with a lot of clarity in his head, probably more in his head than on the page. But then again maybe he just sort of lets it just sort of happen and take whatever form it takes?
@@10.000hrs "We do have someone who comments here who suffers from aphantasia and he said that if he doesn't have references then he cannot really draw!". I have also heard plenty of people who do claim to have visualization experiences say this kind of thing.. It's one of the things that made me wonder whether many people were taking 'visualization' literally and getting discouraged with their art as a result. (to be clear, it feels like I can 'think of an image' ie. have an experience that seems visual, to some noticable degree, so I wouldn't be classified as aphantasic; these experiences just don't seem, IME, particularly helpful to drawing.) "I don't literally see the cube on the page, but I see it clearly in my head in such a way that I can draw where it goes on the paper." Might be similar to me, I seem to just have intuitions about well, of course this thing must go there (because that presents it more forcefully), or of course it must be darker (because it's receding from the viewer in a non-front-lit scenario). We use 'see' in a way that's a bit too ambiguous sometimes. The most interesting thing about KJG to me is the relation of his way of drawing to the problem of 'feeling out' the image you mention: my observation is that to achieve a subtle, balanced image, be extremely minimal and light with your marks, cautiously emphasizing some parts of the image by *gradually* bringing in carefully controlled amounts of darker tones and blending them across the image (often necessary because otherwise the darkened part will become too eye-catching and somewhat 'separate out' from the picture). ... That kind of approach clearly leaves a lot of room for 'feeling out' the image. But working with the brush pen just kind of is like blasting away right from the start -- I don't know if you have the same experience here, but I would say as you put down heavy marks, they can draw so much attention individually that it's difficult to balance the following marks out properly with what is already there. Maybe starting with small elements like eyebrows helps to keep that under control?
@@vishtem33 The pens are very unforgiving, but that's actually why I use them, at least for practice. They force you to really stop and think about the mark you are about to make. I feel I have a very long way to go though before I can do what KJG does and get it reasonably accurate every time. I did hear him say that he makes what he considers to be a lot of mistakes, probably as a result of placing down a mark and it actually being not what he quite expected. However, he can then adjust the following marks to make everything work out and still get a decent result. But that suggests he feels things out on the page as be draws them. It's a really fascinating aspect of drawing and I think that even when we start drawing houses and stuff as kids we are using this skill, but as our brains learn more about the world around us, we have to train it more to be able to get what we understand about the form of an object to come out the end of the pen in the way we move our hand 🫠
@@10.000hrs As a long term goal you mostly never want to stop and think anything when making marks with few exceptions. You mostly work with the rational/conscious side of things on a macro level, planning, analyzing and everything you still need to practice more before you can just let intuition/subconsciousness deal with it. The one exception where you can take some time with marks are the first marks of an object when those double as construction lines/landmarks or when you add objects and you need to think/see how they interact with previous objects. It's just concepts like muscle memory and related stuff. You want to clear your mind for observation, focus and/or rest. Thinking in relation to execution is just too inefficient, draining and slow. The lesson from "permanent" sketching tools is to build confidence, speed and indifference to mistakes that just don't matter. If you decide to build around the mistake, you get to explore another route for free.
@leohuxtable439 That's a cool insight! I hope that I eventually reach a level where that's the case. I do think that the intuition aspect is the highest level skill, but it seems it has to be developed by observation. I'm still not sure exactly how it all fits together but its a fun process to explore. I'll try and empty my mind a bit more for future studies. Thanks for sharing your thoughts here 💗
I’m unaware of your mic setup but I might recommend getting something to help reduce the plosives for your voiceovers. The “s” sounds in particular come out very harsh when I watch on my phone. But loving the content regardless!!
Oh! Thanks for letting me know! I kind of just wing it really haha but I do have a pretty decent mic. I'll try and play around and see if I can get the audio quality to improve for future videos! 💕
I've gotta ask. Was "username too offensive" the literal username or did you have to censor it? I love the idea of a Patreon account named username too offensive.
To be honest, I learned it from the Tom Fox book, but to be able to do it you have to be able to draw boxes from any angle first, and I learned that from the Scott Robertson book. I will be putting out some more tutorial type content in the future hopefully but it probably won't be for a little while. To help you though, and good first step is to copy a figure, or even paste one into Photoshop etc, and draw the box around it. This will help you see the perspective the figure is in. I would start by trying to draw the square or rectangle shape the feet on the floor touch. Some references also have the figure on a box which helps even more. After a while you develop the intuitive ability to just understand the box and vanishing lines on and around the figure, and can draw the box first, then place the figure inside. It also helps to be able to see parts like the torso and head as boxes like I demonstrate in the video. Then you are just drawing boxes in a box! Everything is boxes if you break them down.
Sure! The ballpoint are regular old bic biro pens. Nothing special. The fineliners are generally by Unipin, and the fibre tip pens are Pitt pens by Faber Castell. The clear fineliner that produces a super thin line is called a GTEC 4 and I think it's by Pilot. The brush pen is an extra fine fude brush pen by I think Pentel. I like experimenting with different tools and paper to find combos that work. The paper is actually an essential part to making the pens work really, as some seem to work better on certain papers. I use mostly sketch books by a company called Pink Pig. Thanks for watching! 💖
Drawing from imagination exercises are just extremely difficult if not almost impossible (unless you already have hundreds of hours of experience) if you have aphantasia. Unfortunately a lot of things relating to using imagination to improve just dont work the same.
There is actually a subscriber who has commented before and suffers from this condition! He said that he literally cannot draw without reference, but was determined, and so just uses reference all the time. I'm fortunate not to have that condition, but because I'm trying to draw specifically from imagination, a lot of what I do is related specifically to that. I found the guy quire inspiring, because he wouldn't let it stop him. There is a way around every problem if we look hard enough 💪 thanks for raising this point, it's not something that gets talked about enough in art circles 💕
the hips example for the boxes is my exact problem for some reason i cant draw the hips straight from imagination and i find myself scambling even with the boxes
It's a really complex part of the body, and it moves in a multitude of ways, and it's dimensions and silhouette are different for both sexes. For me it's how the legs join into it 🫠 but hopefully work more direct study of that region we'll get there. Thanks for watching! 💖
These videos show the results of the methods I am testing that supposedly make best use of the way the brain learns and retains information. I have separate videos that cover the actual science bit. To save you watching them though, I am testing if spaced repetition, and programs that help implement it as a learning method such as Anki, can be used to learn a procedural skill like drawing in less time than traditional methods, and spending minimal time per day practicing. We know that these methods work for declarative skills like learning language vocabulary or the capital cities of countries, but they haven't been as thoroughly tested for skill based activities like art, music, etc. While I cannot currently test this using real neuroscience in a lab with a sample group, the experience has been pretty fun so far, and I feel it's working as a learning method, but whether it's more effective than traditional art schooling I still can't say.
Don't worry! I am working a deck I can share that features all the notes I have made, and all the challenges, but with none of the copyright infringement and illegal sharing stuff. I will announce it here when it's ready!
The best note I heard from Kim Jung Gi on drawing without guides, was that each of his lines are themselves guides for what he needs to do next. The very first line you draw on a face, for instance, tells you where the next line should go, based on what you are aiming to achieve.
That's really interesting and not something I had considered before 🤔 it makes perfect sense as there is really only a limited tolerance for the placement of any line within the perspective framework he is using for it to make sense. I can't say I'm there yet myself but that will be an interesting thing to think about while drawing.
Thanks for sharing! 💕
@@10.000hrs of course! It was helpful to me when i heard it so thought you might enjoy
deep observational skills are severely underrated! its THE best way to draw!
I love to put together art journals, I add everything from things in my own life that inspires me to random images I find on Google images and photos I take. This I find is a great way to build up a library of images and knowledge I can refer to especially when I'm suffering from creators block.
another tip he had was that if you're good at drawing one thing in particular, you can use it as an anchor for the rest of the drawing.
Like if you can draw people well, you can base the perspective of accompanying objects off of them
redrawing a pose from different angles is insanely hard!!! you have inspired me thank you
It really was at first, and honestly, it still can be 😅 but I think like anything, it's just a case of practising it.
It definitely helps to draw simple box and cylinder figures at first. Makes everything much easier to figure out and plot on the page.
Thanks for watching ❤️
I just wanted to mention how kind and nice everyone here in the comments and community is to you and eachover. It takes a good personality to attract other modest people.
Well thank you very much, I am sure it also takes such a person to recognise this in others ❤️ kindness costs nothing, and I genuinely only share how I approach these things to try and help those who resonate with it to improve as well.
I'm grateful for that, man❤😂
I don't know when i subscribed to your channel but I'm really grateful that I did it because it gives me a lot of motivation to see a guy like you slowly becoming very good with a clear goal in mind, don't give up!
Thanks so much! It's certainly a long road but I honestly just enjoy the process and would be doing this even if I wasn't making videos about it.
I'm glad you find the content useful and inspiring, and I hope to continue producing videos to help others progress as well.
I really appreciate you watching and subscribing ❤️
One way I try and come up with my own ideas is to pick a topic eg: Sci fi or fantasy horror, then put together 5 descriptive words that associations with the topic and brainstorm ideas in as many thumbnails I can.
Incidentally, "Draw a Box" has an exercise that's specifically about drawing shapes INSIDE other shapes, the way you describe how boxes don't necessarily work for anatomy since the parts of the body "bite into" each other.
So may be worth looking at that.
Ooh, nice. Thanks for sharing, I will have to go take a look at that!
I as an begining artist find this video very motivational. Even tho I already had been drawn for past 2 hour I'll probably go and draw even more today. I also liked how author has answered to almost every comment on the video, had a fun time reading all of them!
Haha it takes me a while but I eventually reply to everyone!
I do a little every day and like a bucket slowly filling drip by drip, your skill level builds up 💪 I am glad you find the videos useful and I am grateful for your support 💕
i love love love to see this because we always see beautiful paintings and drawings by artists but we almost always never get to see their progression from beginner to advanced
the time and energy that goes into perfecting your craft needs more acknowledgment so we can appreciate the beautiful final products!!!
Thank you 😅 I mean I don't know how long it's going to take for me to actually get really good but that's the whole point.
Exactly as you say, we never see this, but the methods I use a a bit different to other people and they seemed to work when I played with them before starting this channel, so we'll see what happens I guess.
Thanks for watching, and I really am grateful for your support 💗
This is really impressive, you surely have a solid method and some very clever ways to train those fundamentals. I've been drawing my whole life, and working professionally as an artist for more than 15 years. I can already see you do a lot of things better than I do, after only a couple hundred hours of focused practice!
Wow thanks! That's really useful feedback! I have been playing with these things for a few years and across a variety of subjects and when I found it seemed to work for drawing, I wanted to share it to see if others could make it work too.
I think that as a learning method in general it's incredibly valuable, and should be more widely seen in society. A lot of medical students use it, but that's about it.
Your gouache discoveries are really really valuable to me, thank you for sharing them! I always wanted to get more in tune with using gouache in art school, but felt like my schedule forbade me from really getting in there and experimenting before a project was due and grades were given. Ironically, less time to explore, more trying to harness one or two main skills and push them as far as possible to hit project objectives was what we got taught. Tough to be a mix of fine artist and graphic designer when you're in a boot camp just for the latter!
Oh wow, yeah, that does sound tough! Ironically, despite being recommended for beginners, I think the flexibility makes gouache harder to learn 🫠 I really struggled in the beginning to make them work how other artists do, but I understand a lot more now. It really is worth just fooling around with them in a no pressure way, just having fun.
Glad you found it helpful! 💫👍
@@10.000hrs I'm hunting for a sketchbook that is both cheap and won't get ruined (and is also small enough to tote to the coffee shop, where my brainworms will actually allow me to work more often than at home!) But your progress reports are very inspiring! Keep up the gorgeous work!
The only ones I can think of that are durable like that are probably moleskine but they are expensive 🥲 I found pink pig to be pretty good but they might only be a UK brand.
The density of useful, practical information in this video is amazing. I can't explain how rare it is to get information that is a step beyond "Simple info for first timers" but not "What the pro's do with 10,000 hours experience". (that applies to basically any subject from programming to painting).
Anyway, as a fellow "not my first 200 hours trying to draw" artist gritting his teeth and picking up the pencil again, thankyou.
Thanks friend! That means a lot! I just wanted to share something I would be doing anyway really! If it helps even a few people then it's worth it. 💕💫💖
Ive been drawing for about ten years but i started when i was 10 and never took the time to really learn the fundamentals. It’s been humbling going back to “beginner” practice and struggling. Super hard unlearning bad habits after so many years lol. Lovely video and good work
Well, you figured that out a lot quicker than I did 😅 I couldn't figure out how after drawing since a kid I literally couldn't draw anything, when you see kids who are like 15 drawing crazy stuff from imagination. I went right back to square one and started totally from scratch too. It is very humbling indeed ❤️ thanks for sharing your experience!
same here! started in 2014, but mostly sketched for fun, i would not consistently practice, so i stagnated a lot
Great video! When I saw that you hit the 200 hours I opened yt every day to see if you uploaded a new long form vid and here you are!
I'm also hyped for the discord server, the new baseline painting and the meta learning vids!
Keep up the great practice. it's super inspiring and making me want to draw. Thank you!
Haha great! I'm glad the videos motivate you to draw too. Thanks so much for your support and I hope I can continue to male content you find useful ❤️
Your progress is astonishing
Thank you! I think if you just do a little focused practice every day, you can't go far wrong! 🔥💪💫
I love how you easily explain how to draw, and paint all compacted in one video.
It's really informative thank you
You are very welcome! I find that I learn far easier when I work like this. I'm constantly investigating and experimenting the basic aspects of drawing, and this leads me to the next steps. Meta-learning is really learning how to learn, and having this awareness of your studies helps a lot I think.
Thanks for watching! ❤️✨️
I also found creating ideas really difficult while working as an artist for a video game studio. But I figured out a way that works for me. I usually start off with a random word, for example crown, and then I abstract that as a silhouette and apply it to whatever I'm creating. These visual images usually trigger my brain into coming up with something interesting, but massively reduces the barrier of entry to coming up with ideas. I'm sure your visual library is actually better than you believe. Finally, I find that I need to empty my head of any ideas that I think of immediately so I can make space for new ones quickly, which I do by writing or sketching. I treat the ideation phase a lot like automatic writing.
That's super interesting! Another viewer also mentioned the power of prompts and words.
I love the idea of starting with a silhouette. My initial foray into designing things in the past week has seemed to highlight the importance of starting with the biggest shapes and forms and then getting more detailed. Primary -> seco dary -> tertiary. Your approach seems to encapsulate that nicely!
Also fascinating to hear about the 'mind dump'. That's not something I have encountered yet but it makes perfect sense and seems like a great way to get a bunch of things on the table to work with!
Thanks so much for sharing and watching 💖✨️
Hey, maybe the book "lighting for animators" could also be a good addition to your art books. I've been reading the pdf version of it out of curiosity and it is really refreshing to look at lighting from another perspective than just 2 dimensional drawing. The first few chapters are definetely valuable for the purpose of thinking about lighting and composition.
That said, I love seeing your journey!! Keep up the good work :)
Thanks so much for this! I hadn't heard of this one before but will check it out. I love anything that makes you think about a subject in a new way, so it sounds perfect!
Thanks for watching! 💖
Thanks for sharing your progress with us. You've no idea how inspiring it is.
Ah, that's so nice of you to say! 💖 I'm glad you find the videos inspiring and I hope to keep working on them to help as many people as I can.
Great progress! I really like that you try to draw the same reference image from several different perspectives. I haven’t tried that but it looks like it takes a ton of deep thinking
Thank you! It is a bit of a brain melter at first, but I think if you can draw boxes in perspective from any angle, then you can draw the human figure if you can see it as just a stack of boxes. I am a big believer in making complex ideas as simple as possible to begin learning them, before adding more complexity.
I try to keep the complexity at a high enough level that it's tough, but not impossible, because that is where the most growth happens.
The downside to this is that your drawings are always 'bad' because you are constantly grappling with something tough, and not just drawing the same subject in the same way over and over agin in great comfort, always getting great results, like a lot of artists do.
Love your videos, they are very inspirational as someone who quit drawing for a long time but now has a goal to try to improve through putting in a lot of hours. Enjoy seeing how you improve as time goes on!
Thanks! I appreciate you taking the time to watch them. It takes a lot of hours for sure. I just try to use them wisely, and hopefully somewhat scientifically to squeeze as much progress and growth out of each one as possible. Good luck with your studies! ✨️
15:36 I'm pretty sure Kim Jung Gi legit had a photographic memory. I heard of some people meeting him at cons, with years in between, and he still remembered them years down the line. That's why I think he had a much easier time visualizing scenes inside his head.
I guess it also stems down to the whole thing of how well you can imagine stuff, like imagining an apple and how detailed you can make it inside your head, from being fuzzy and gray to fully colored and being able to easily rotate it 360° inside your head. When it comes to that, I myself am kinda on the same level as you, when you were explaining your process on how you draw a head.
So when it comes to actual visualizing, it's not ALL about skill and there's also some neuroscience and biology at play, but i don't think thats an excuse to just brush it off, I guess i'll just have to work extra hard to catch up to others levels.
Great progress btw! Will continue watching, trying to improve myself alongside!
Thank you for saying this! I see so many say that natural born talent doesn't exist, but it's just more as an advantage you have when you learn and how fast the process gets, and it's useless unless you practice. I saw a guy's video here on youtube claiming Kim Jung Gi had no talent, just practice, and he got really defensive when somebody pointed out what you're saying. He claims that way of thinking is setting yourself up for failure but I think it's the opposite. It's realising your limits and learning to work around them, even with them. Jeffrey Watts, as an example, is a great artist but he said in a stream that he will never be able to work in the same way as Kim Jung Gi no matter how much he practice because he doesn't have photographic memory. I also know a person who was born without the capability to see pictures in her head - at all! She will never be able to draw from visual memory, and she would be very frustrated in trying to learn art as other people and I think denying the neurological advantages is actually setting you up for extreme frustration to the point it makes you quit. She loves art but never pursued it, and I think it's so sad because she could have made other kinds of art and learn in other ways. It kind of makes me think of neurodivergent people getting told they're just not working hard enough and are lazy in school when they can even excel their peers if they learn in another way. And Picasso had an eye disorder which made his brain see two pictures and he had a hard time learning in the same ways as his peers, that's at least what I learned in my art and litterature class, so what you're saying with being born with advantages is really important to realise and not to forget, but I think people who wish to be like Kim Jung Gi one day can't handle that truth but honestly, I think artists should strive to be the best they can be themselves and focus on being unique instead of obsessing over becoming like another artist.
There is an interview with Kazone where he specifically says he does not have a photographic memory. He admits having a natural affinity for drawing. Watch his videos explaining how to draw objects, you'll find that KJG has intensely analytical understanding (this is the form, this is the function). It would be comforting to believe he is an alien, but it appears the only alien part is his work ethic and ability to understand concepts.
I think the thing that fascinates me the most in interviews I have seen with him is that he realised from a young age that his drawings were not realistic. He had one where he says he and all the other boys would draw tanks, and they draw them side on like most kids would, flat and orthographic, but then he would go home and watch cartoons and the tanks on there were three dimensional, so from a young age he figured out the importance of things like perspective and started playing with them. I think he had the ability to figure out what he needed to do to improve on top of everything else.
I do think he was a one off in many ways, whether photographic memory, genetics, sheer will power, natural curiosity, or just luck. Probably a little of each.
I think you describe it very well in that being able to visualise things in your head is a skill. It's a hugely underappreciated part of learning to draw. Really seeing the world around you and internalizing it.
I thank you for watching, am glad that you enjoyed the video, and wish you the very best of luck in your own study and improvement! 💖✨️
@10.000hrs he doesn't had photographic memory when you go through his older books you see how much he improved. Also I met him back in 2015 and for the whole 5 days of the even he was drawing nonstop everywhere glued to his sketchbook or signing (drawing) his books
@@MathiasZamecki Wow that's amazing! Must have been such a great experience. That makes him even more impressive to me. I guess he really just loved what he did. Such a shame he is gone 😩 I'd love to have seen how he good would be at like 80 years old.
you're getting really good its scary
Thank you! Still a long way to go but progress is happening 💕✨️
I started taking art more seriously roughly 7 years ago. You, Sir are miiiiiiiles ahead of me already. Being able to draw a face or full body even in multiple angles based on ONE reference is witchcraft to me. It is sooooooo hard to do.
Wow, thanks so much, that's really kind of you to say!
It was incredibly difficult when I first tried it and it still requires a lot of concentration. Really I consider it more an exercise in drawing boxes in perspective than anatomy. I am just connecting boxes that match the proportions of the body parts, so it's been the perspective skills that have made the difference. I don't actually know much anatomy yet.
Sinking time into the fundamentals definitely seems to really help you in whatever you try and use art for!
Thanks for stopping by, and good luck with your own studies! 💗💫
The anxiety up to getting to the page.
The uneasiness when just starting to draw.
The frustration of trying to handle a difficult principle.
All of this is part of the process, it means you are doing this right.
And I love the thinking of doing things is bitesized chunks, building your principles. Yes of course new things and things you haven’t practiced in a while are difficult. I will try to embrace this and just look towards growth through time spend deliberately and intentionally designing one principle at a time.
Thank you.
No problem my friend, thanks for your kind words and for taking the time to watch and comment 💖
I haven't covered it yet in a video but there is also evidence to suggest that working at the edge of your comfort zone/ skill level is where the most growth occurs neurologically speaking. The downside to this is that you are always producing crappy drawings 😅 when you get better and understand a principle, you make things harder, and the drawings suck again. So I encounter that a fair bit haha.
But then when you look back, or test yourself with a finished piece of art, you realise how far you have come, so it's worth it in the end.
thanks for the video! i have intense anxiety and i expect to be excellent with just one or two drawings so it felt good to see people working for long hours, i expect too much and i should lower my standarts, this video made me calm :'D
also your cat is so cute omg :D
Ah glad to hear it helped you out! Yes, it is very easy to compare yourself to others, and really want those results asap. I feel the same way a lot too! But I try to remind myself to slowly get there by just making steady progress, and working on one piece at a time until I feel I fully understand that little piece.
Oh yes, she is cute when she is sleeping 😆 it's when she's awake she is a terror.
I wish you the very best of luck in your art and your learning! You already have everything you need to achieve your goals! It just takes time 🧡🫂
Just found your channel when decided to try to learn drawing again after 4 years of not doing it, I hope I stick with it this time. 😅
That's nice to hear! I think if you can do a little highly focused training every day, you'll see results, and those results will encourage you to stick with it.
I think the main points that seem to make people stop are lack of time/ it takes too long to produce work, so I only train for 1 hour a day and do quicker studies.
Second would be that the work is 'bad', but those 'terrible' drawings are literally the learning process taking place. You are figuring things out on paper and that means making mistakes. You don't have to show them anybody, but you have to go through that for a while before the 'good' drawings appear.
I experience that every time I learn a new aspect of art on here, and now deliberately try and find things I struggle with, because that seems to be where the most growth occurs.
Good luck with your studies! 💕💫
one of my favorite artists, takuji miyamoto, approaches drawing something by thinking about these things and then verbalizing out loud what it is he's gonna draw:
1. Pose
Which part of an action do you want the audience to see? When to cut the movement? Timing??
2. Emotion
Become the character! How would you express how you feel?
3. Angle
Side? Above? Below?
4. Elbow/Knee Joints
Bent = Interesting
5. Understand
Why the character took that pose
5. VERBALIZE!!
"What am I going to draw?"
"I'm going to draw a stick figure"
> Running
> Falling
> Throwing
> Pushing
> Jumping
> Diving
> Etc
I've found his thought process pretty helpful for approaching things from imagination!
Haha I've never heard anything like this before but it sounds amazing. I will definitely give this a try! I love stuff like this. It's always good to try these things. Thanks for sharing! 💖
Wooh! Another video. Great stuff as always
🥰 thanks so much for following along! I really appreciate your support ✨️
Great to see your progress!
Thank you very much, you are very kind. I appreciate you watching ❤️
I wanna just tell you I appreciate the analytical part of how you paint and how you draw because I’m more intuitive painter so I tend not to think of structure and color and color, variation and light and shadow. I just tend to make shapes and paint them or make shapes and draw them in, but I don’t, understand my process even though I’ve been since I was 12 and I’m 51 so it’s nice to see and think about their approach to their craft
You're very welcome my friend! I suppose it's just how my mind works, but I feel much better dealing with subjects in this quantifiable manner.
I have had conversations with people who take a far more expressionist view, and say that you should just draw and paint without thinking and express yourself, but to me that's not how the old masters did things, at least initially.
I feel there has to be at least some degree of very formal study, much like learning chemistry or cooking, before you can just go nuts and create things to a level that is considered decent.
Thanks for watching. I'm always grateful to hear from those for more experienced than me ❤️
fundamental is very helpful especially if you are a beginner and starting to grow, when I was using pencil I keep coming back to the basic to be on track of the right posture when it comes to draw a human subject, nice video👍👍✨✨
Thank you! I am spending a lot of time really working fundamentals at the moment, in favour of producing finished artworks. This is a bit of a double-edged sword it seems, but how I am approaching this for the time being. Thanks for watching! ✨
Very well put together and your efforts adhame me lol. Been drawing since ever but the advantage of an organised workflow is very obvious when watching this. Thank you for this great resource and keep it going!
Also, when creating your own designs the problem (at least for me) most often is that I don’t have any ideas on what to design. Once I have an idea or inspiration it kind of goes by itself!
Thanks for your kind words! I personally feel I work much better with a game plan, especially for a subject as vast as art.
That's really good of you share your experience. I definitely lack ideas! A few people have mentioned the use of prompts or words to come up with a design direction, so I might give that a try.
Thanks for watching! 💗
@@10.000hrs I personally tried the 100 days challenge multiple times and tend to look for prompts during uncreative periods, but really I feel like it doesn’t help a lot. Most of the time I start searching for a prompt that really catches me until I don’t wanna draw no more lol, maby its a different story for you though, surely give it a try!
5 hours a day would take you about 6 years for 10k hours, I hope you finish this challange, I am looking forward
At the moment I can only work for 1 hour a day so it's like 30 years 💀 but hopefully at some point I'll be able to maybe a few hours a day and that will speed things up a bit. I will still finish though even if it takes 30 years 💪✨️
Incredibly impressed at your dedication to this kind of deliberate practice. I'm an adult piano learner and can only really get myself to do deliberate targeted practice like this about a quarter of the time. One thing you didn't cover (in this video, I'll check out your others now), is why you embarked on this journey?
Thank you! I think that deliberate practice is not actually sustainable for long periods at least in my experience. I can only manage about 30 minutes at a time.
The reason I started this specific journey was to really combine my passions of 'learning how to learn' with art, because I've tried to get good at art several times in my life and always failed. I don't have any aspirations to be a concept artist, or anything like that, but I want the skill of being able to draw from imagination.
The vast majority of meta-learning and neuroscience stuff out there is aimed at language and medical students, so I wanted to try and show how I use the same techniques in an adapted way to learn procedural skills, and benefit people like artists!
Thanks for watching 💖 I appreciate the support and wish you good luck with your piano studies!
For some time now, I’ve been trying to learn how to draw comic book characters while maintaining good perspective. I’ve gone through various courses on perspective, some unnecessarily complicated. I’m fairly good at drawing boxes in different perspectives, but I still struggle to apply that to drawing specific characters, especially in more complex poses. Could you recommend any video courses that teach how to draw characters in perspective? Your progress is amazing! You’re inspiring me to keep trying to learn how to draw. Thank you!
Hi! Thanks for your question!
For video courses specifically, I probably can't advise much, as I haven't done any specifically on this, but I will say that the ones commenters of this channel tend to find most useful are the ones on Proko. They also really rate Michael Hampton very highly. I think these are more for just general anatomy though.
If you want to draw in a 3D perspective sort of like I am, I actually learned that from a book by Tom Fox called 'Drawing Form and Pose', and it works really well for me personally because it treats every section of the body as a box.
Tom does have video courses on Gumroad and Domestika, and they might deal more specifically with the perspective stuff you are talking about, but again, I have not taken them myself, so cannot say for sure.
I personally have been figuring this out with the following exercises:
- draw from reference, and really try to contain the head, ribcage, and pelvis forms in boxes, and consider their tilt and rotation, and how it's working in perspective
The great thing about doing this is the actual anatomy doesn't matter much. You don't need to make a cool looking character or study, just draw the invisible boxes wrapped around the body parts, and understand their perspective and proportions.
- once you can do this, redraw the pose from an imaginary angle
That's how I do the drawings you see in the videos. This allows you to still look at the reference pose, but now it's all on you to work out how these rotated boxes would look from above, below, or the other side, and get it looking realistic. You can then detail these up with real anatomy if you want.
I'll also mention that when I first tried that, it was SO SO SO HARD, even though I could draw boxes in perspective pretty well, so don't be discouraged if you find it tough!
I think being able to think in terms of boxes and perspective is the secret to drawing from imagination, so it sounds like you are already well on the right path to achieving your goals! I wish you the best of luck with your studies and if there's anything else I can help you with please let me know! 💕✨
5:00 seeing you lay down the shapes of color here was great. and the image at the end was also very nice. the clothing is really good!
Thank you! It's interesting to me thay when working from reference I work mostly in 2D shapes, but when conceiving my own scenes from imagination I have to work mostly in 3D forms, spending much more time considering things like perspective. Thanks for watching! ❤️
I am an acrylic girl through and through when I want to paint opaque paintings. I also do watercolor but those are specifically for working over inks and I want that watercolor look. But I started painting with Acrylics and they are my first paint love. I just love that I can paint over whatever I painted before, even going so far is covering the whole thing and starting over if I have to.
On a side note, try gesso on your sketchbook paper before the paint. It will warp a little with the gesso but will flatten out mostly once dry and then you don’t have to worry about warping when you are actually painting.
Oh thanks! I've not tried gesso yet! It seems the way my brain wants to work is much more blocking in solid shapes, and acrylic seems better for that. I recently got a stay wet palette because they kept drying out and that's been fun to play with!
Thank you for watching and for the advice 💕
@@10.000hrs Oh a stay-wet pallet is SO helpful! Love mine, one of my early purchases and it’s so helpful. I think you’ll like it.
12:02 To paraphrase my favorite online teacher that pushed my art forward, "Just because it's true to nature, doesn't make it good design" Ethan Becker.
I got so caught up in making things look real, true to form, but i found my style and my freedom/ enjoyment, by bending the rules and making it seem believable. Then again, i love the comic style, not a realist myself.
Ooh I didn't know he said that, I have watched a lot of Ethan Becker over the years. Funnily enough, a few other people have commented this sort of advice, so there must be something to it.
I think I'm still just finding my feet in being comfortable moving away from the safety that the realism offers me. Hopefully I can learn to just cut loose and make things that look appealing 💓 thanks for the help!
I remember one of the hardest paintings i did, digitally, was working within all blues, in attempt to render a NIGHT sky, with neon lights. That study took me a few dozen hours to really tune those subtle differences.
Haha that makes me shudder a little 😅 I think that would be a bit much for me to comprehend at my current level, but it sounds like a challenge! I respect the effort you clearly put in!
@@10.000hrs Haha please don't be humble, though it may sound like some grandiose thing, it wasn't a real sky, it was stylized. It was Night city from cyber punk! It really was difficult but im sure you'd do an amazing job at it!
Ah sweet I played that game! Had some cool places that would be fun to paint.
One thing that helped me learning anatomy is learning the insertion points of muscles onto the bones. Once you have the simplified skeleton/mannequin it becomes a game of connect the dots. Most of the muscles and how they are placed can be memorised into halves or thirds in terms of proportion which is nice, and there's a lot of similarity between the legs and arms.
To learn I studied Michael Hamptons video lesson where he breaks down the body into simple forms and gives both the design aspect and the complex version. Really helpful! Second was proko premium, using his videos that cover each part of the body is super useful.
One thing to keep in mind is that no art tutor has EVERYTHING. I often found that Hampton had 80% of what I needed to know, but then proko might have the remaining 20%, and then perhaps another artist like tom fox had a nugget that neither of the other two had.
I would pick chest for example, and switch between artists to try and absorb what their individual keypoints were and that helped form a complete picture (and then I did this with all parts of the body.
Hardest things to draw in perspective anatomy wise arguably was the complex form of the pelvis. Lots of connection points to important areas of both the legs and the torso. Hardest muscle to wrap my mind around was the forearms surprisingly (not including the head). Easiest part was the legs... Not too much twisting/complex overlaps. Most fun to conquer was hands. Feels weird looking back and struggling now that I know how to draw them from imagination.
Really awesome video tho. I had a similar studying method so it's cool to see it works for you also.
One thing that massively helped in learning the muscle was also getting many references.... And just drawing the single muscle (after looking at Hampton etc) or even OVER it in Photoshop. It's a quick practice but over time you're instantly able to place the muscle and recognise it visually way easier.
Then it's a combination of drawing from reference and then imagination, ideally finding where your knowledge lacks so you can go fill in the gaps by finding what part you were unable to complete.
After a while you can then draw both with gesture AND construction at the same time which is super fun. Gesture to capture the motion/flow/shape, then refine using anatomy knowledge.
Woah that sounds amazing. I hope I can get to that level! I'm only now just starting to tackle the more individual parts of anatomy.
I haven't checked out Hampton much but his name is mentioned so much that I really need to. I do like Proko but haven't tried the premium yet so I'll check that out at some point too.
I enjoy studying it and find it very fun which I think helps me a lot.
Appreciate you sharing your wisdom! It's really awesome to hear from people who have already achieved this and hearing about your experiences. 💖
Thank you, amazing as usual!
No problem! Thank you for watching! 💕
definitely try more abstract ways to frame a figure other than boxes. I like a combination of Loomis stick figure limbs with 3d volumes for the chest, shoulders and hips. What I like about this is that Loomis curved the lines of his arms and legs to follow the shape of the bones underneath. I found this helps when I go to fill out the shape of the arm or leg because it reminds me how the muscles lay at that angle, and also forces me to think about the volume of them Instead of ending up with something all too cylindrical).
I would also say that making your volumes intersect is GOOD practice, don't let it bother you!
Nice! To be honest I haven't really looked at gesture or anything like that yet, and really observe the body just as a volume. I would like to bring some of that in at some point though. It seems that no one teacher has it all, and that they all seem to be good at exemplifying different aspects of figure drawing 🤔
It seems the algorithm sent my last comment to the aether for being too long, so I'll keep this one short haha
1 - You've built a great community here with cool discussions in the comments!
2 - Design is more about working with lists of options, rather than using some vague visual library. Like think of each feature eyes can have -- how high they are, how much they protrude, their tilt, etc. You pick the options that suit the context and balance out other features.
3 - Guidelines aren't something you grow out of as an artist. You just learn better versions of them. Constructing in perspective doesn't have to involve harsh-edged forms like cubes. I pretend I'm working with clay balls, for example, and pile them up to build the underlying forms.
That's okay haha those pesky algorithms!
Thank you, I love talking to everyone here and learn a lot from all the kind people who take the time comment, such as yourself 💕
That is actually a really cool way to think of designing and I had not considered that before 🤔 reminds me of in a video game where you get to design your character.
The clay balls is also something I haven't considered much before 🤯 thanks for sharing such interesting points! This definitely gives me some stuff to think about and see how it can work into what I currently doing.
I appreciate you watching. Thanks again!
If you want to have a light in value blue, you essentially have to desaturate it, Or shift the hue to Cyan.
Most vibrant "light blues" are actually a Cyan hue.
Oh! I haven't tried that yet but I think I get it! I'll give it a try next time. I appreciate you sharing your knowledge with me ☺️
@@10.000hrs Yeah, every hue and/or pigment.
has a certain brightness where it is more intense and saturated.
(There are in some rare cases multiple pigments at a very similar hue which have a different point where they are most saturated.)
But technically there is a maximum amount of saturation that is visible to the eye for each particular hue, since color for humans is like a 3d blob that isn't even.
There are some rules of thumb you can get when you look into it, but the amount of nuance in that is astounding.
For each individual hue, you get a shade of the levels of brightness you can hit and how that effects the saturation.
When your HSV slider on your computer is adjusted but you fix saturation at 100, and your hue at the value you want, then
100 saturation reflects the maximum that hue can be saturated in your encoding setup for that hue and brightness.
And that is without even getting into how the eye can distinguish slight changes in hue, value, saturation, etc.
That isn't even. Like some hues are easier to tell appart when dark than others. (Generally ones that are more saturated.)
But even with semi-desaturated colors
Another piece of trivia is that pure purple/violet on the color wheel is an illusion created.
Since due to the way light works, the most "red" red that we can see, and the most low frequency violet that we can see are literally the furthest apart that two colors can be, But most purples have both violet and red in them. And so there are a lot of shades our brain constructs that don't actually physically exist as a "pure" color.
One thing I don't understand is why a lot of reds have their strongest/most saturated brightness where it's darker. And part of me wonders if that is a little bit of blue being reflected in those wavelengths for that hue as well?
Of course even if you look at "pure" colors, those wouldn't actually be the most intense colors in a lot of cases in subtractive mediums, since reflecting more hues within moderation would make it glow more and be brighter, And so in some cases only taking a single narrow frequency band would make the color too dark for use to read it as anything other than a black. (except maybe when placed in contrast to another color.)
And there are a lot of specific wavelengths that get read as mixture and can be reproduced in our vision even if not a single wave is that length.
Since our eye is adding signals from multiple types of receptors.
That's amazing! There is so much to learn and use but I think it's all part of the fun! You know a lot about colour, and I appreciate you sharing what your knowledge with me!
Hopefully as I get more into worming with colours I can experiment with some of the things you have mentioned here.
I guess all colour is just light in the end.
So using the fundamentals like the boxes and doing the same pose on one sheet many times but from different angles as well and focusing on one thing at a time. That's pretty cool
Yeah, pretty much.
Boxes are a great general way to think about drawing anything, because it forces you to consider perspective, and view angle.
Drawing a pose from different imaginary angles means you can use the original pose reference as a guide, and that helps you figure out where to put the arms, or how to twist the pelvis.
It's a good way to bridge the gap between using references, and drawing totally from imagination.
@10.000hrs Can I say something? I have been watching your content for 3 days. I have been drawing for 16 years and in just those 3 days, I have managed to increase my skill tenfold all because I put into practice and I got some inspired by you. But these, I'll be able to make my comic in no time and I even manage to find out how to make distinct human shapes
@SuperSaiyanDCG that's amazing! To be honest, I think that's the real secret. I don't do anything special, I just take ownership and responsibility of figuring out how my brain works, and how to best use it. It requires focused deliberate practice and effort, which we can all commit to. If other people try that for themselves as you have, suddenly it unlocks their true potential 💪 good luck with your comic! 🔥✨️
@@10.000hrs Yeah it depends on the method that's right for you. I just see a lot of struggling artists having difficulties cracking up things and they're just thinking way too hard.
Side note about that intro, copying other drawing is deadass the 2nd best way to improve, right after mindful study and practice, which is copying with extra steps to make the most of it.
I think I spent a long time just mindlessly copying and somehow expected drawing ability to magically appear haha.
I did get pretty good at copying but any time I tried to draw without reference it just came out so bad, and yet I would see all these amazing artists just drawing panels for their manga from their head 🤯 I couldn't work out how they had that skill
Being able to draw characters from different perspectives than the reference is very impressive for 200 hours. There is I think many professional artist who are definitely not able to do that.
Thanks! That's interesting to know. The funny thing is in my mind I am really just drawing boxes, which is the main thing I've practiced, but stacking them and joining them to map the figure and it's proportions.
I still find it requires a lot of concentration, but I feel like I'm using more perspective skills than anatomy skills at the moment.
Thanks for watching! ✨️
Hey mate, been seeing your video's pop up in my feed recently, if you really want to boost your drawing skills you should make an "Écorché" anatomical sculpture, half as a skeleton, the other half as muscles under the skin. It's genuinely worth 100's if not a thousand hours worth of drawing -- and yes, I do mean that making a sculpture is worth hundreds of hours -- all for a lot less.
And how long does it take to make, though?
Thanks for this suggestion! That's similar to something I was planning on playing with in the future so I might give it a go.
It makes sense that spending time actually viewing something and creating it in real three-dimensional reality would help you see and understand how everything fits together. Like taking apart a car engine.
Nice, i also hope to be very good at drawing.
I visited the Kim Jung Gi museum in South Korea a few months ago, it was a great experience! sometimes even though its not true, i feel like im the only person that cares about this stuff, good luck!
Thank you! That sounds like a great place to visit. Hopefully I can get there one day. Good luck to you too! Let's both try our best! 💖
How much time (if any) have you spend focusing on long single image sessions?
I've heard at the top art schools they'll do week long drawathons and the students always say they're miserable but supercharge their learning. RISD is a place thats famous for it.
I don't know much about art, but I know as a musician the top guys always talk about how their practice is long gruelling and focused on 1 section of a song, rather than constant switching (even before they became 'pro')
I'd be interested to see if theres research comparing pure quick sketch vs pure long sessions vs a 50/50 combo.
There is some correlation found in sports science: the two forms of practice that are generally recommended are heavily isolated methods(e.g. repetitions of free throws or martial arts techniques) and "game situations" that are playing the actual sport or extremely close approximations. Longer time spent on a single image effectively has an isolating effect, since it forces more reviews of your previous work and new observations.
I mostly use exercises out of Nicolaides when I study, and one of the things he encourages is to use a slower pace - to add intensity until you can spend hours on one contour drawing. Sometimes I will use a metronome to remind myself to stop after completing a line and think before continuing. I've also done master studies by following along with a video recording at the master's pace and with their motions, which produces a similar kind of intensity.
Pretty much what the other person who replied commented!
I only do longer form studies periodically, and treat them more like a sports match where I can try and apply all the things I have studied then do a post mortem and see what went wrong and what worked well. I might spend a few hours on these max at least for now but many have said the high level illustrators like James Jean might spend 100 hours on a single painting.
I spend just 1 hour a day studying. The area of study is dictated by the algorithm, which should schedule the thing my brain is beginning to forget a little. When I train this way I do 30 minutes, a 10 minute break, and then 30 minutes. I try to favour quantity somewhat over quality here. If I am working on rendering values and shading in cubes, I don't mind too much uf the perspective is a little off as I'm not working that. They aren't perfect artworks, more like little experiments to play with a concept and push it along.
The idea is to train little and often, and there is some evidence to suggest that this is better than marathon sessions, but it's not specifically been tested for art. I've never drawn for 8 hours in my life.
One of my next videos will talk more about this but all learning is actually a biological process called myelineation, and it works a little like building muscle. Lift weights for 8 hours straight and you achieve nothing. Do 30 minutes for 16 days and you get better results.
I think a lot the big art schools would make even better students if they learned how the brain actually works!
The only reason I can think they get students to do things like that is that you are there for say 3 years, and so have to cram a lot in.
The books I originally read that opened my eyes to this sort of stuff are by Barbara Oakley, so you can always check those out. Tim Ferriss' stuff is a bit more practical, but doesn't cover the reason any of it works neurologically. It's more about 'hacking' skill acquisition to speed up learning.
Thanks for sharing the info on how musicians learn. That's very interesting to me. I have a friend who is a professional pianist and he says he actually always took the little and often approach, but those smaller training sessions were hyper focused. That's why I only train for 30 mins at a time. I really really concentrate!
I think that they all work, but I would to see more research myself to see if one really is far better than the other, or if it's a personal choice thing!
Thanks for watching and commenting 💖 I really enjoy speaking with others who are curious about this stuff.
This is amazing 👏 thank you so much for commenting
@@10.000hrs Its a great group of people you're gathering with these videos. I believe that much like bodybuilding there is a volume / intensity relationship that explains why two different modalities of learning seem to result in faster uptake.
In lifting you have high volume / high frequency / lower intensity or Low volume / low frequency / high intensity. Much like bodybuilding the actual growth/connections happen in the 'rest' period if i remember my science of Myelin right. Good rest and bad practice might actually yields better results than good practice and bad rest.
That would be interesting to explore, its atleast half the equation after all!
@aberwood Yes! I do also play with other variables I have not discussed yet in the videos such as sleep, and how close I sleep after I practice. Diet is another. Cardio yielded some good results weirdly, and I recently started taking Creatine. I haven't ever tried experimenting with actual nootropics because I would only take chemicals that have a decent body of research behind them already, but there are a lot of different levers to try and pull that most traditional artists would never even consider.
amazing content! thank you !
No problem friend, glad you found it useful 💖👍
Hey, your videos are awesome and I love following your journey. I have a question: do you implement active recall into your training?
Like drawing the same thing again but without the reference and than comparing and analyzing the two at the end?
It depends. I do this when first learning something like say a piece of anatomy. I will try and study it, redraw it, and compare, but I try to draw more imagined angles generally.
That means if I have a reference of a body part or figure, I try and start by using that as a reference to study but draw the thing from a different viewpoint.
I then move into drawing the thing from various viewpoints, purely from imagination. At that point I only glance at the references occasionally to see what is going wrong.
This takes a few study sessions to build up to.
The problem I find with, say, looking at a face, then trying to draw the same face from memory, is that I view everything more flat, and therefore don't really consider things like perspective or thinking about the subject in three dimensions.
When you deliberately draw something from a new angle or viewpoint, you are forced to turn and rotate the subject in your mind, and to me that's the real bit that makes a difference in understanding the form of something, and leads to more convincing drawings.
All are good practice, but I think the more advanced stuff should be practiced more when you feel ready for it!
Thanks for watching! ❤️✨️
Hi there, you know the part where you talked about 'sucking' at design? From my own experience, design, and the creativity necessary for it does come from ones visual library but i'd argue its a skill you slowly develop, i mean. all great designers were in the first place not designers at all. In the sense that you really do have to practice your creativity. for example, a really helpful exercise: designing your own clothes on characters using reference (not copying but more taking inspiration e.g. a pattern or texture from a certain jacket). Hope this helps! you've grown alot, congratulations!
Thank you! That does help, its so nice to get all this feedback from those more experienced. I think I'm still wrestling with this as an idea but really do agree with you that it takes time. Lots of people have actually commented to state that they feel its more something you just have to allow to kind of spring forth, and that realism and engineering are secondary to just making things that look and feel cool and stylish.
I'll keep playing with it! Thanks for the advice! 💫💕
Sorry if you mentioned it and i missed it but when doing your head studies do you do the same as the torso where you have one ref and draw from different angles or do you draw random heads form imagination? Love the video and breaking down the process on how you study! Amazing stuff
The heads are all from imagination for this, but you could apply the same concept if you wanted to.
The Tom Fox book teaches you how to construct the figure from boxes with certain proportions, so if you can draw the head box, you can subdivide it as he does to make a general head. Moving beyond that now, I am trying to draw such a proportioned head as an outline like Kim Jung Gi would do, which involves thinking about the box and its perspective, but not actually drawing any guidelines or anything.
I also practice this using the references from imaginary angles, and it's even harder 🥲 but I'm slowly getting the hang of it.
@@10.000hrs Thank you so much for the response! i am excited to start up my own study journey! Keep up the amazing work and best of luck moving forward! You got this!
Great update my friend! Fude brush pens take years to master. I started using them years ago when I first heard about KJG. It's definitely a very frustrating tool to learn. I've only started getting good with them recently after much practice. At the beginning I practiced them every day, but there have been long stretches when I didn't use them. Now I use them a couple times a week to at least maintain my skill level. You can lose a lot of the finesse by being out of practice.
Thanks for the advice! I definitely do not use them enough and still find them quite intimidating 😅 it's impressive that you have figured them out. I hope your studies are going well and that everything is good in your life 💗
@@10.000hrs thanks! I’ve been doing a picture book course and am working on completing the storyboard/dummy. Looking forward to the Discord!
9:30 have u tried painting from your mind and then compared to a reference image?
Not for painting. When drawing, I use reference I try to produce individual parts like this, only occasionally glancing at the reference. I also do things like try to draw the reference from an imaginary angle which is quite tricky.
The 'blind drawing/painting' that I think you are suggesting is something a few people have suggested though so it's something I will experiment with in the future! It sounds like it will help!
this is so cool dude, do you have any program or something to count the hours you draw every day or something? I want to know about this please
I don't have a program to count the days, but I do have a program that tells me what to work on each day.
It's called Anki, and it uses spaced repetition to get me studying a specific thing within the world of art that my brain needs a refresh on that day.
If we don't use all the pieces of knowledge in our heads regularly, they fade and weaken. This program prevents that from happening and can be used for all sorts of things like foreign languages.
As a digital painter, I want to ask how long setting up and putting away your gouache paintings took you.
I’m not used to it, but there’s a mental barrier for me when it comes to cleaning stuff up. With a tablet, I can just pop a program up and start.
Your videos are excellent, as it summarizes a lot of points in learning fundamentals.
Thank you! I'm glad you found the video useful.
The set up time for gouache is minimal really. I have a little pot I fill with water and a ceramic palette. I also have some cotton rags or old t shirts nearby to wipe the brush whenever I wash it.
I simply put a couple of blobs of colour onto the pallete and start work.
I actually experienced the same thing you describe, so I have tried to make the setup time as fast as possible.
The clean up takes a little longer but it's still only about 5 minutes, as gouache is very easy to wash out of brushes.
I think that on reality the apprehension that I felt was more for the actual painting than the set up. Like I was scared because I knew I was going to make mistakes. By also keeping the exercises I did as simple as possible, this fear quickly went away and I actually looked forward to painting!
At this point, the set up and clean up don't even bother me anymore. I just enjoy the experience 💗
How do you manage your time and energy if you have a full-time job? Great video by the way!
I think he said he only draws 3 hours a week.
Haha I'm surprised nobody has asked this sooner 😆 honestly it's sometimes tough. My job actually currently involves waking up at 4.30am, and is essentially manual labour. I work in construction on movie and tv sets and sometimes have to do very long days far from home. I also usually work 6 and sometimes 7 days a week.
When I get home, I draw for 30 mins, then take a small break, eat, etc. I then draw for another 30 mins which I record to make that day's video. Some days I am very tired and feel the work does suffer, as a large part of this sort of learning is actually having enough sleep etc to make your brain optimised for learning.
I can manage the hour a day training, but the thing that suffers more is making the longer videos. I can only do that for a small window each weekend, and they can take many hours to produce 🫠
But if you want something you find a way to make it work! I organize my time using Google Calendar, to make a big to do list. I can then move the items around and arrange them into a block of things I will do on Sunday afternoon, for example.
I also time myself. So if I want to make a video, I will literally set my phone to countdown say 2 hours, and when that alarm sounds, I stop and go do something else. This seems to activate Parkinsons Law, which makes you more innovative and productive in the time you allow yourself to do a set task.
Compare this to just sitting down to work with no plan, where you might get distracted, or work for 6 hours and produce the same work you could probably have done in 2 if you focused.
@@10.000hrs Haha yes! I was trying to look through your past videos and comments to find out. But Ahhh, Thank you so much for taking the time and effort to share your process in detail! Despite your life and work circumstances, you persevere and stay disciplined. I find really amazing and inspiring. "But if you want something you find a way to make it work!" That is so true.
Hearing about your work-life situation gave me a different perspective on managing my own time and how I have been taking my free time for granted. I used to think that I needed the perfect day, setup, and time of the day to practice, but now I realize that I was making up excuses to avoid feeling uncomfortable.
I look forward to your future content! I know it takes time given your circumstances and how long it takes to produce these great videos, so please take all the time you need.
@@apukiru Thank you friend 💕 that means a lot to me and motivates me to continue
@@10.000hrsthis context inspires me so much more knowing you and I have a similar work situation and with realistic objectives and time spent per day, you have still seen that much growth! Amazing, man!
Yes! I knew you would upload a video just because I asked!
😆 you got me!
Awesome!!
Thanks so much for your tutorials they’re very helpful for many people who want to learn drawing and sketching. There are lots of items we have to learn and explore but essentially, we need to study ANATOMY books, the BASICS form, the 3D forms, the facial features, bones and muscles, and more. It’s really important to study references, pictures, real life scenarios, in order to understand how the body works, as well as the context like cars, bikes, houses, trees, etc. In relation to the HEAD, we need to know the LOOMIS method in order to understand the most common method for the construction of the head. But in the end, when we understand the structure of the skull and bones, and we are to move it around in different directions, the guide lines are less important and you can draw by imagination. If we use a BOX for drawing de HEAD we can see clearly the 3D form, but sometimes, you can forget de roundness of the head.
Thank you! I appreciate you taking the time to help me, this is definitely an area where I struggle.
I think the reason is like you say, I spend a lot of time thinking about the volume of the head in perspective, in a box, and neglect the curvature.
I recently started to consider this a bit more and it's something I hope to get better at soon.
I will revisit Loomis on your recommendation and see if it makes a difference. Thanks again! 💖
This might help with shading and lighting someone taught me to think of the main light source as its on camera everything it sees is what's in the light. This might also help those wondering why should you draw the same pose/object from different angles
Awesome! That is actually really useful as I will likely spend some more time rendering soon and so will have to consider things like this too!
Thanks for sharing your knowledge! ❤️
ihave been going with you for somethime now and this is soooooo fun to do ,
just undresding how to learn things in very optimal way is something a been doing for my day to day life and its worked out so well in life
I want to add something a lot of artist don't really do , keeping themself health with that amount of work ad how to strengthen muscles we use to draw and sit
I would love to see you want to add this thing to the journey we are taking
Thank you my friend, it really is great to take charge of how you learn and really set a course for developing high level skill.
I haven't done much specifically regarding muscles, but I try and keep in shape anyway. There is an interesting experiment I did with cardio that I want to make a video about at some point.
I appreciate you watching ❤️
Hopefully I can keep producing content you enjoy! I hope to have another video out in September, depending on my job 😅
@@10.000hrs
Some big manga have a lot of back pain, yes there work time is crime tbh
But some artist or anyone who work setting slot they lack the muscles awareness in there lower back and hips how that connect to so many people to have bad habits of living with
Yeah those artists work some crazy hours 😅 I only draw for 1 hour a day right now, so maybe that's why I haven't considered my body as much. Important thing to bear in mind though!
Designing characters is easier when you have a prompt. Someone gives you a description of a character, customer, etc. then you’ll do research based off the description. Doing research allows you to gather references that you feel best captures the description. You’ll do some editing of the references and what you have left over will be the design
That's actually a really good point that I hadn't really considered. A lot of the work I aspire to create pieces similar to were likely produced under exactly those conditions.
That being said, I am also fascinated by artists like Kim Jung Gi who could reproduce designs and details both from memory and original designs from imagination at will.
I suppose he just did all the research over many years and stored it all in his head 🫠 thanks for bringing this up. I might try working with prompts.
If you look closely at Kim Jung Gi’s doodles, a lot of them are military themed and he was in the military so it makes sense to him because I’m sure hes looked at and studied everything he draws in those “stream” of consciousness drawing sessions. Some other advice I would give is master studies and Fan art from your own idea. Mix and match styles of artists that you like and focus in on the attributes that you like about them
Working from imagination, in my opinion, is a form of story telling. It's not so much about generating ideas, but more asking yourself questions and then problem solving them based on your life experience and interests.
For me the most interesting ideas are actually questions. For example, "What would it feel like to pilot a mech?". The answer to that is another series of questions. The most obvious is "how do you represent that visually?". You probably want to show a cockpit view. "From which perspective?". It's probably a good idea to show pilots screen or window so we can see the world outside the mech for more story telling, so "First person or over the shoulder?". Probably over the shoulder so you can show a bit of the pilots personality... This tends to snowball and before you know it you have enough of a foundation to start rendering something.
That's actually a really logical way of thinking about this problem! I haven't ever really thought about it like that before but it makes sense. I think the thing I struggle with isn't so much things like picking a camera angle but more the actual design and details of a thing and making it look like it would actually mechanically function, and just has a decent level of visual interest.
I'll definitely try what you suggest out though and see what difference it makes. Thanks for explaining it so well! I appreciate the help! 💕✨️
@@10.000hrs My example might have been a bit clinical, in reality the process is often bit more organic especially with a lot of practice. Going back to the example, since the setting is a cockpit we can start thinking about what goes in a cockpit and maybe a bit about the purpose of the mech itself. Every mech needs a power source so you dedicate a bit of the control panel to that. So maybe a screen or dials, some switches or levers. Basically decoration, all the little building blocks you can pull out of visual memory. You've gone from a very vague idea to something manageable.
The same process applies to mechanical functioning of the mech. Once you have a bit of a story you can work on connecting everything together via the basic parts of engineering/mechanical anatomy. like hinges, pulleys, hydraulics, motors etc. Again this is just the foundation it's probably going to take several iterations to find the design language that works for you aesthetically.
It's basically the same process as painting. We start by blocking things in, this acts as a reference and helps us refine the problem space down to something more manageable. Each layer narrows things down even further. At some point we will have enough of a foundation that we can let intuition fill in the rest of the dots.
In essence this is just the creative process. I think a lot of it is just figuring out how to work with your imagination. For me this is story telling. where everything is interconnected and has a purpose on some level.
Awesome, I can see how that would be very helpful. Thanks again, I am definitely going to try this and see how it helps me!
Ive been following for a while - question for you - how did you know where to begin and what to practice ona day to day to keep improving? Looking to build a weorkback schedule and study schedule but don't even know what is the most impactful things to start practising
Check out his videos “skill pillars” and “art goals”. He lays out the most likely fundamental abilities and how he checks progress continuously.
Hi! That's a good question.
I could already copy things, but couldn't paint or really draw from imagination.
This led me to pretty much deconstruct the field of art like Tim Ferriss does for new skills he wants to learn. That is where the skill pillars come from.
They represent the most general, abstracted, fundamental ideas in all of art. Really any artistic endeavour will involve using them, so I spend all of my time there.
What I mean by that is if you see me drawing heads, and learning anatomy, I am still always thinking about it as form and perspective. Drawing boxes. If I paint a landscape or portrait in greyscale, I don't care about the subject and what it is, I care about the values I am using and their placement. Hopefully that makes sense. Trees and faces are just different shades of grey to me.
Later on, you can get more specific and think more about what makes something look like a tree or a face, and begin deep diving into things like anatomy.
As for how I know what to study, this is just informed by my weaknesses. If you are a total beginner, you might be drawing anime and not be happy woth the results, so you go study more anime qhen actually the problem is you have no understanding of perspective. The problem usually means abstracting, zooming out, and considering what more general fundamental thing you are failing at.
As an example atm I have trouble drawing heads from below and above without drawing in a faint box first. This is either an issue with my knowledge of head anatomy, or an issue with my ability to correctly deploy my perspective skills with no construction lines, like KJG could.
So I an currently working on both of those.
What you work on will be personal to you, and requires you to be honest with yourself about what you are actually bad at, and to run little experiments all the time to try different things and see if you can find the best way to improve at something.
Finally, try not to take on too much at once. There are lots of things I am bad at and want to improve on, but using anki as a scheduler means I only have a few problems to work on at a time, and I can only deal with 1 thing a day.
This focuses you, and ensures you dk not overwhelm yourself trying to spin too many plates at once.
Hopefully that helps a little but if there's anything else I can assist you with please let me know! ✨️
@@10.000hrs thank you so much for this well thought-out reply!
Oils are cheaper than gouache. U can study on any surface practically. I draw on random cardboards I find on a dumpster.
So 'canvases' for your studies are literally free, you can get thousands of cardboards if you just walk around and search. And they can be massive in size and very thick, they wont bend unless u drown them in acrylic gesso (that isnt even needed).
Brand of oils doesnt matter too, I pay 2-3$ for 46 ml tubes, they work just fine.
Although oils most likely way harder to get used to.
I've never tried them! I do want to at some point though. A few people seem to think I might actually get on well with them based on how I paint so it's one to stick on the to do list!
I do like the sound of them more and more. You've done a good job of selling them to me!
I bought the books How to Draw and How to Render, and realized that, specially when it comes to perspective, I already had a good base. Sadly, the author goes way deep into perspective, then quickly transitions to specific subject matters, like drawing cars or planes, which is not something I'm interested in at all.
How to Render was a bit better for me in terms of how to handle different materials, light projection, reflection and refraction, but the moment it goes into more specific details like rendering specific materials or more complex shapes, it goes straight to 3D modelling which to me kind of defeats the purpose, so I am mostly using some of his work as reference and switching up the materials and lighting as I go.
In the meantime I keep on creating stuff of my own in my small sketchbook, mostly with micron pens, lots of cross hatching, mixing pen and pencil and now I would like to try some engraving. As soon as I get my tablet though I'll get into colouring, which is something I've dreaded since I started drawing like 20 years ago.
Yeah it is very vehicle focused. I don't really practice those section at the moment as much as the fundamentals. Those fundamentals are truly excellent though, and are the main way I would say I have improved, granted that there are many sources to learn them from.
Sounds like you have a good grasp on what you want to achieve, and experiment and play with things, which is honestly all I do.
I was very intimidated by learning to paint too 😅 it helped me to remind myself that mistakes are the essence of learning, and so I just started simple and gradually increased the complexity. I still have a LOT to cover, but I really enjoy learning each new concept and trying to add them on top of what I already know.
Good luck with it all! I am sure you'll get to grips with colouring quickly!
@@10.000hrs Cheers!!
Yeah, I have been drawing since I was a child, but mostly just out of trying things around with pens and technical pencils, with portraits coming much easier than I expected.
So now I'm trying really hard to diversify both in terms of technique and colours, but I'm sure you understand that it feels like you're drawing for the first time, and colours just don't mix exactly how you want them. It's an exercise in frustration and patience.
I'll of course keep on trying now that I've rediscovered my passion for drawing (besides using it as an extension for photography).
It's always nice seeing someone having a pragmatic approach to art while still implementing and discovering their style.
Rock on!
This concentrated effort to learn to draw has, I feel, made you ahead of 85% of the general public of hobby artist.
I find it problematic or annoying when people claim they are 'serious', as in wanting to earning a living from art and their skills... They don't have the basics like you do.
Thanks, that's kind of you to say.
I often think about that and honestly was guilty of the same thing for years - either being very casual, or just trying to do things that were too advanced for me and wondering why I would fail.
I think we see the other really talented artists and their work and try to emulate the end point without appreciating the many many years it took them to build up to that.
Yo, real cool video. So, I was "recently" (a few months ago) able to start drawing without using any construction or having to go back and redraw sections of my drawing, but there's a catch.
I use a technique from the anime "Jujutsu Kaisen" as a tool for understanding what happened; called the "black flash". When a fighter focuses and has enough mastery over their magic, they can land a strike and infuse it with magic with perfect timing so that a cascading impact causes a distortion in space, amplifying the damage exponentially and causing black sparks to appear. The after-effects puts the fighter in the zone, allowing them to pull off superhuman feats of precision and technique. Furthermore, the fighter's understanding of magic deepens, allowing them to create new, never-seen-before techniques.
This fictional technique is based off of a real life counterpart, flow state, which many top performers across many fields weaponize to increase their output. When I tried to use flow state, I had to engineer my whole day around trying to hit it, and it took a few hours, but when I did, I hit a "black flash" of my own. I felt like I made a month's progress in a single day, and I was suddenly able to "see" like a pro. The lines I drew on the shoulder told me where to place the elbow, the lines on the elbow told me how to angle the sleeves. Each line I placed showed me where to place the next.
Based on video lectures I watched later of such pros drawing without construction, I believe they were doing the same thing. They're just so experienced that they can do this even without flow state. I haven't been able to hit that level of flow state since, but now I feel like I have awakened to understandings about perspective and form that I didn't have before. I have even gone back to rewatch lectures that I saw before I hit my "black flash", and the experience was completely different.
I highly recommend setting a day aside where you have no extra decisions to make: all meals prepped in advance, no one else to bother you. Then, for that one day, do nothing but draw, sleep, and maybe go on a walk or two. Keep drawing sessions to 2 or 3 hours and get up from your desk at least every half an hour. The growth you will experience in that one day could dwarf a hundred hours.
Wow that sounds cool! I haven't trued anything with flow states yet but have heard of them. I generally only have to draw for 1 hour a day at the moment, but perhaps in the future I'll get a spare day to try something like this.
I'll try and investigate them more and see what I can come up with.
Thanks for taking the time to share what you learned! ❤️✨️
I tried drawing without guidelines for a longer period of time, but when I draw like that, I Iose my sense of 3D forms. I can't visualize well in my mind. I eventually returned to using guidelines, to 'feel' the shapes better, and then I struggled less with perfectionism and got a better result. I don't draw every possible guideline, only the ones I need.
I think that drawing without guidelines work well for people with a good imagination, and I thought my imagination would get better but it didn't.
Try it, but if it doesn't work, the result and pleasure of drawing matters more.
Thank you, that's very sobering and helpful advice. The weird thing for me is that I can draw simple things using no construction lines but once the subject reaches a certain level of complexity, like a human figure, then I fail.
I'm interested in trying to figure out why that is and how the brain learns to work through this problem, hopefully to help others, but you are totally right that enjoyment should always be most important!
Very nice video 👏
Thank you! 💕
Good Job Bro 👍
Thank you! I am grateful for your support 💖
I wish I could work with your amount of focus and structure. I bought one of the books you recommended in your last video and started reading it and was like "guh, oh no, a college textbook." and have not been able to work my way through it. Actually I haven't been able to make myself draw much in general since the end of June.
It can be hard at times. Some of the books can be a little daunting, but a part of how I manage I think is the way I break things down.
I spend only 1 hour a day learning which is manageable for most people. I only work in a single concept, and I don't progress or add a new concept until I really feel like I understand the current one. That might mean working from a single page in the book for a while, but once you have it down, it's like riding a bike.
Sometimes that takes just a few sessions. Some I am still experimenting with and reviewing many times a month. Some I don't think you ever master and they just become these ongoing experiments and constant sources of intrigue and curiosity.
I do think drawing should always be fun, and I do also think that all people learn slightly differently. I believe the most progress is made when you understand how you personally learn and retain information, and that means playing with how long you study for, how often, whether books work better for you, or videos, or an online course etc.
Find the fun, find what gives you the best results, and it becomes far easier to motivate yourself to do things like study, work out, draw, talk to new people, or whatever else you want from life 💖
How did you learn how to draw bodies? I had an easier time learning the head with Tom fox's book but somehow the body seems to be a real struggle to me
I treat the body and head as 3 boxes
One for the head, one for the ribcage, and one for the hips/pelvis.
I got to a point where i could draw them in the correct proportions generally, and used cylinders for the arms, legs, and sometimes the stomach inbetween the hips and ribs.
That's how I learned to think about the entire figure in 3D. Because I now understand perspective, and boxes are pretty simple in perspective, I can rotate them and draw them from different angles to create the figure from any viewpoint.
From there, where I am currently studying, I learn more specific anatomy to better and more realistically understand the anatomy and how it intersects and wedges together. They gradually replace, or sit on top of the boxes.
There are other things to consider here, like the fact that both sexes have slightly different proportions, and that characters can be stylized to make them look like a Pixar film character, but I don't concern myself with those things at the moment.
Basically boxes are your friend! ☺️
@@10.000hrs Thank you so much! This was really helpful, I’ll try to work with that information in mind :)
Draw draw draw draw draw hours weeks days just draw draw been on my anatomy journey for 4 years and it went by in a flash iv learned a tremendous amount boxes where definitely my friend practice your shapes , best advice iv ever gotten when when i was young from an artist who told me to draw shapes all of them all 3d 2d , draw from life constantly i mean constantly real life perspective can train your eye trust me i looked past this advice in my younger years now i know why it’s so important and you only notice when you start drawling from life , meaning DRAW WHAT YOU SEEE mesure mesure messure everything is made of straight lines and formes and basic shapes
Practice drawling silhouettes gesture drawling, take your time this is a life long journey and as painfully as it can be is well worth every last minute
Have you shared your Anki decks? Would be interested in downloading them to my Anki
I haven't because they are all scans of books and so it's kinda piracy. But I am working on a deck written by me that features my take on the concepts the books cover, all of the challenges, and my own notes. It should be available by the end of the year and will be free. You just download it as an anki deck. I'll announce it on here when it's ready! 💖
@@10.000hrs ok sounds good. I use Anki for languages and hadn’t thought about using it for drawing. Do you have a video explaining how you set up your deck? That would be interesting also. Do you set up drawing prompts or just information about certain forms etc?
ruclips.net/video/J_j3BunQ6AQ/видео.htmlsi=vdH3vjWG-f2kWLEx
ruclips.net/video/4MF5LWwTPTk/видео.htmlsi=9k3VTXjjNbtPgjAh
Those are the videos I specifically have on using Anki to learn art and should explain how the cards are structured and why.
The entire thing is in 2 parts, and it might be a little boring in places, but those videos are the ones that specifically explain everything.
There are a few things I have been made aware of since like the Import Media 2 add on which apparently makes decks from books automatically 💀 I haven't tried it yet but wow that would have saved me some time if it does work
I will be releasing a deck later this year for free that people can try which will be structured like mine, and act as a sort of streamlined version of everything I have learned to hopefully help people try this for themselves
Hope that helps!
@@10.000hrs thanks! I’ll check them out
If u struggle with comming up with a design, take it from your dreams.
I personally have a 100+ characters I have created through my dreams, and thousands of locations in my mind as I cant draw environment well enough!
Wow that's a really cool idea! My dreams seem pretty everyday when I can even remember them haha but I might give this a go at some point.
Thanks for sharing the idea! ✨️
To answer your question towards the end of the video, Kim Jung Gi had stated that he could see roughly 60-70% of the final picture in his mind before drawing it. So not that much compared to what most people think! A lot of detail is "improvised" while drawing
Oh wow I never knew that. That's really cool. I am still impressed that he could always come up with something to even draw to be honest 😅 I still can't even do that always, but the fact he can see even that amount is amazing.
I find that for me it's more the broad and general things that I see, like the biggest forms and shapes, and then a lot does get improvised on top, so maybe that ratio always stays the same but you just get better at defining those key parts 🤔
Another commenter stated that every line influences the subsequent lines, and so the image eventually takes a certain direction.
Either way it's really fascinating stuff - how an image goes from being in the mind of one person to paper ✨️
Thanks for sharing! 💖
I was in the same rut of being unable to make my own interesting designs. Yes, I could literally draw any reference photo you'd give me, regardless of the subject matter and complexity. I could render just fine.
But I could barely create. I didn't have any design sense of my own. I had to go back to the fundamentals of understanding concepts like big-medium-small and shape design.
Glad it's not just me, and that you figured out a solution. I've made a little progress by thinking about things in orthographic first which I'll discuss in the 300 hour recap, but it definitely seems to be a separate skillset to having the ability to draw. I'll take your advice and review the fundamentals you mention 💖 thanks for the advice
How are you practicing perspective, shapes and volume? How you did that and what is right way to do that. What you can recomend me as an beginner jaoanese animator?
I think this skill is something very fundamental, and would be required by anyone who wants to draw anything from their imagination.
I learned it from the book 'How to Draw' by Scott Robertson. It takes you from drawing lines and curves to understanding how perspective works, and then drawing boxes and other more complex forms. There isn't really a right way I feel, just find a book or other resource that explains it in a way you understand.
When I started I worked on grids, or drew vanishing points and things to help. Now I do not generally need to do that, and just draw.
You would need to understand the differences between 1,2,3 and 5 point perspectives quite well.
When I practice specifically these skills I draw these forms from imagination and focus on making the illusion of dekth and perspective seem real.
I am at a point where I am pushing myself to draw much more complex objects, hopefully original designs.
I train like this EVERY day though when I draw, because even when doing things like figure drawing I am thinking like this and drawing forms.
Hopefully that helps!
@@10.000hrs what about how to draw boom i started my drawing journey frim it and dropped in 50 page. Cause i really dont understand why i need this "mirroring curves" techniques un jaoanese like animation. Yes, some things might require mirrored parts, like or exaple, i want to tfaw a tsuba under unsuall camera angle, which can contain cyrves. Byt really, my braun just didbt find purposes of learning it
@@hans3437 yeah that's fine. The book is I think aimed more at industrial designers and people who want to draw things like cars. You probably don't need to know that stuff.
If you learn the parts that are relevant for your animation like how perspective works, you can then start learning other things from other resources like anatomy, and applying what you have learned about perspective to that.
Also, you can find interesting about drawing and design in Koos Eiseen's books.
Thanks for sharing! I'll look at those too! 💓
have you considered trying to draw and rotate insects?
Since they don't have a skeleton, and have an exo-skeleton instead. They have very organic forms that are easier to understand. But still have a lot of detail.
And much easier to draw and have them look good than animals.
And you also get a really interesting surface texture too.
Although, if you haven't done texture studies before, then taking some time to practice doing that first makes it easier to make great looking insects.
You can of course make the forms without doing the texture first though.
When it comes to the details of the anatomy, I actually recently got a bunch of cheap wax. 10 lbs for 30$ and I am going to use it to make an anatomical model. Where I build the human form, first the skeleton then muscle by muscle. So I get a sculpture of the human form without skin. Wax is also way easier to work than clay, (In addition to being way cheaper.)
I heard a lot of art schools have all their students do that in their first or second semester. So I figured it is worth a try and should help me understand anatomy better.
theioretically, you could do something similar by making a life-size head model with the muscles and such being built up, but that seems more difficult.
I am debating about whether to do 1/6, 1/4, or 1/3 scale though.
(1/6 is like 10 in. tall or so., 1/4 is like 1.5 feet or so, and 1/3 should be like a bit less than 2 feet tall. So the tallest I could easily fit and work with on a desk.)
One great way to get better at design early on, is to use multiple references for the same work.
Take 2-3 different objects and imagine how they could be combined into something new.
Or try to think of alternative ways an object could be used.
If you have done a bit of still life, then trying to think about what if a random object was placed outside and converted into a house for tiny people or bugs?
Or for something bigger, what if it was buried by sand or covered in vines?
Making a human figure and adding animal features can also be kind of creative. (While sticking to basic human anatomy.)
Thanks for raising some really good points here!
I have never tried drawing bugs but it does sort of lean towards some other experiment I want to run soon...
Textures I have never really tried yet but recently started learning it with gouache, which involves using things like the paper type to your advantage. It seems like a very useful skill to have so I'm looking forward to experimenting with it more.
The sculpting thing has been mentioned by a few people and it sounds like a good idea, so I might give it a go at some point.
You have some really cool ideas and it sounds like you understand a lot so thanks for sharing what you have learned with me ❤️
@@10.000hrs Well if you want to start with learning implied texture, I would recomend starting with ink. then moving to something smoother.
Implied texture if effectively form on a micro scale which is ontop of a bigger form.
Thanks! I'll see if I can give that a go!
Expected to hear Bridgmans when you mentioned wedging in anatomy but it didnt come up 😅
Oh yeah, I used to study Bridgman, but actually found books by him and Loomis to not be as helpful as the book by Tom Fox.
I think it's personal preference but in terms of really emphasising how everything should be three dimensional and in perspective, Tom's book is far more up to date, and probably more thorough as well. At least for me!
I love to see the still frame from Stranger Things season 3.
Haha yeah! I like that show. Thought it was an interesting choice of shot from a storytelling perspective.
Great video. Very entertaining and informative. Can you tell us what you used to do when you didn’t practice art correctly,so that we know if we are doing that.
Yes! I spent years copying anime, and could never draw it from imagination. So I decided to learn anatomy by copying it from books. I got really good at copying anatomy... but couldn't draw it from imagination without my references. Meanwhile I see these crazy artists like KJG drawing things from their head. I hadn't studied the basics of how to actually draw. Things like perspective, or an appreciation of value, line weight, or composition.
If you just want to draw portraits from reference, then copying without ever learning things like perspective is fine. It depends on what you want from art.
I want to be able to create the images I see in my head, and to do that I need a very solid understanding of things like perspective.
In more practical terms, I experiment with different ways of studying art and have found thay for me personally I male faster skill progression when I study little and often, like for 1 hour a day.
There is some evidence to suggest this is better than dumping all your energy into an 8 hour paintathon to try and brute force skill development, like most artists do.
By experimenting with things and being aware of what works for you, you can develop a system that works for you to make yourself learn in the most effective way possible.
So it's a case of knowing what you want, figuring out what you need to study, and then studying it in the most effective way possible (and continually striving to make that even more effective)!
Thanks for watching 💕
@@10.000hrs thank u
Maybe a good exercise to draw without guidelines would be 1) draw 1 drawing with guidelines, then 2) put it away and do it again, this time without guidelines, then 3) Compare both, and 4) Fix anything that needs fixing. By seeing how glaring the differences are, your brain will register the mistakes and fixes deeper.
This sounds like a good idea! Sometimes I draw the guidelines over the drawing afterwards to see how close I got. I'll have to give it a try. Appreciate the suggestion 💕
@@10.000hrs Hope it helps!
15:40 : As someone who has worked a lot on memory drawing and drawing from imagination, I am occasionally puzzled when I see people talking about 'visualizing' images before executing. I wouldn't necessarily _rule out_ the idea that KJG or Tom Fox really did/do have visual experiences immediately before the execution of the drawing. But if I am to take the wording at face value, it also seems like a doubtful assumption (examining what they say about the matter won't necessarily help. It's plain enough that talk of 'visualization' is common in the context of teaching art. Whether this is an approximate notion that is compatible with accounts like 'I just think about the different things and characteristics I want in the picture', or a literal description, is what it is difficult to tell)
Part of the reason I say this is because I get praised for my memory drawing, by strangers, so presumably it at least looks good to them.. and.. no conscious visual experience immediately precedes the drawing. I just _make the surface like the thing that I have in mind_ (of course, it would probably be correct to observe that this is partly a function of having enough experience that the tools and materials are comfortable). As far as I can tell there is one sole visual experience I'm having: the one of looking at the paper. So .. sure, there pretty much has to be some arrangement of constructs inside my brain that enables me to do this. But I think I've made enough of an account to call into question whether that thing has to be a visual image. I certainly don't manage to notice any such thing.
Then again, maybe it is in this case just meant as a figure of speech for 'having an idea inside your mind' (hence my confusion, I can't actually tell whether people really are making this assumption.. except when they say things like 'memory drawing is impossible for me because I have aphantasia, right?'; it's pretty clear then that they take mental visualization to be a relatively literal notion.)
That's really interesting! Thanks for sharing your thoughts! We do have someone who comments here who suffers from aphantasia and he said that if he doesn't have references then he cannot really draw! It's something I had never considered before.
I think that the visualisation is not literal. I don't literally see the cube on the page, but I see it clearly in my head in such a way that I can draw where it goes on the paper. It's quite weird to try and describe 😩 but if I was to draw a face, then at the moment I couldn't achieve that same thing with the facial features and expression.
They sort of just happen as I draw. I more feel them out and go with what ends up appearing. I am assuming that ad I draw more I will get better at giving characters a more specific appearance or expression.
That's why I am so fascinated when someone like Kim Jung Gi draws a person in a crazy pose and perspective but starts with something weird like the eyebrow. It's as if he's tracing an invisible image he can see with a lot of clarity in his head, probably more in his head than on the page.
But then again maybe he just sort of lets it just sort of happen and take whatever form it takes?
@@10.000hrs "We do have someone who comments here who suffers from aphantasia and he said that if he doesn't have references then he cannot really draw!". I have also heard plenty of people who do claim to have visualization experiences say this kind of thing.. It's one of the things that made me wonder whether many people were taking 'visualization' literally and getting discouraged with their art as a result.
(to be clear, it feels like I can 'think of an image' ie. have an experience that seems visual, to some noticable degree, so I wouldn't be classified as aphantasic; these experiences just don't seem, IME, particularly helpful to drawing.)
"I don't literally see the cube on the page, but I see it clearly in my head in such a way that I can draw where it goes on the paper."
Might be similar to me, I seem to just have intuitions about well, of course this thing must go there (because that presents it more forcefully), or of course it must be darker (because it's receding from the viewer in a non-front-lit scenario). We use 'see' in a way that's a bit too ambiguous sometimes.
The most interesting thing about KJG to me is the relation of his way of drawing to the problem of 'feeling out' the image you mention: my observation is that to achieve a subtle, balanced image, be extremely minimal and light with your marks, cautiously emphasizing some parts of the image by *gradually* bringing in carefully controlled amounts of darker tones and blending them across the image (often necessary because otherwise the darkened part will become too eye-catching and somewhat 'separate out' from the picture).
...
That kind of approach clearly leaves a lot of room for 'feeling out' the image. But working with the brush pen just kind of is like blasting away right from the start -- I don't know if you have the same experience here, but I would say as you put down heavy marks, they can draw so much attention individually that it's difficult to balance the following marks out properly with what is already there. Maybe starting with small elements like eyebrows helps to keep that under control?
@@vishtem33 The pens are very unforgiving, but that's actually why I use them, at least for practice. They force you to really stop and think about the mark you are about to make. I feel I have a very long way to go though before I can do what KJG does and get it reasonably accurate every time.
I did hear him say that he makes what he considers to be a lot of mistakes, probably as a result of placing down a mark and it actually being not what he quite expected. However, he can then adjust the following marks to make everything work out and still get a decent result.
But that suggests he feels things out on the page as be draws them.
It's a really fascinating aspect of drawing and I think that even when we start drawing houses and stuff as kids we are using this skill, but as our brains learn more about the world around us, we have to train it more to be able to get what we understand about the form of an object to come out the end of the pen in the way we move our hand 🫠
@@10.000hrs As a long term goal you mostly never want to stop and think anything when making marks with few exceptions.
You mostly work with the rational/conscious side of things on a macro level, planning, analyzing and everything you still need to practice more before you can just let intuition/subconsciousness deal with it.
The one exception where you can take some time with marks are the first marks of an object when those double as construction lines/landmarks or when you add objects and you need to think/see how they interact with previous objects.
It's just concepts like muscle memory and related stuff. You want to clear your mind for observation, focus and/or rest. Thinking in relation to execution is just too inefficient, draining and slow.
The lesson from "permanent" sketching tools is to build confidence, speed and indifference to mistakes that just don't matter. If you decide to build around the mistake, you get to explore another route for free.
@leohuxtable439 That's a cool insight! I hope that I eventually reach a level where that's the case. I do think that the intuition aspect is the highest level skill, but it seems it has to be developed by observation. I'm still not sure exactly how it all fits together but its a fun process to explore.
I'll try and empty my mind a bit more for future studies. Thanks for sharing your thoughts here 💗
I’m unaware of your mic setup but I might recommend getting something to help reduce the plosives for your voiceovers. The “s” sounds in particular come out very harsh when I watch on my phone. But loving the content regardless!!
Oh! Thanks for letting me know! I kind of just wing it really haha but I do have a pretty decent mic. I'll try and play around and see if I can get the audio quality to improve for future videos! 💕
I've gotta ask. Was "username too offensive" the literal username or did you have to censor it? I love the idea of a Patreon account named username too offensive.
😆 no it was their literal username which I thought was pretty funny. I guess the name they had in mind was genuinely too offensive.
I struggle to place the body inside a box. Would you do a very basic step by step walkthrough of that idea?
To be honest, I learned it from the Tom Fox book, but to be able to do it you have to be able to draw boxes from any angle first, and I learned that from the Scott Robertson book.
I will be putting out some more tutorial type content in the future hopefully but it probably won't be for a little while.
To help you though, and good first step is to copy a figure, or even paste one into Photoshop etc, and draw the box around it. This will help you see the perspective the figure is in. I would start by trying to draw the square or rectangle shape the feet on the floor touch. Some references also have the figure on a box which helps even more.
After a while you develop the intuitive ability to just understand the box and vanishing lines on and around the figure, and can draw the box first, then place the figure inside.
It also helps to be able to see parts like the torso and head as boxes like I demonstrate in the video. Then you are just drawing boxes in a box! Everything is boxes if you break them down.
@@10.000hrs I appreciate you taking the time. Thank you.
Could you tell me what pens you use ?
Sure! The ballpoint are regular old bic biro pens. Nothing special.
The fineliners are generally by Unipin, and the fibre tip pens are Pitt pens by Faber Castell.
The clear fineliner that produces a super thin line is called a GTEC 4 and I think it's by Pilot.
The brush pen is an extra fine fude brush pen by I think Pentel.
I like experimenting with different tools and paper to find combos that work. The paper is actually an essential part to making the pens work really, as some seem to work better on certain papers. I use mostly sketch books by a company called Pink Pig.
Thanks for watching! 💖
Have you heard of Lewis Trondheim? Thebguybtaught himself to draw by drawing a 500 page graphic novels with 12 panels on each page.
I haven't but looked this up, and it's pretty awesome. Thanks for sharing! I guess that is one way to learn!
Drawing from imagination exercises are just extremely difficult if not almost impossible (unless you already have hundreds of hours of experience) if you have aphantasia. Unfortunately a lot of things relating to using imagination to improve just dont work the same.
There is actually a subscriber who has commented before and suffers from this condition! He said that he literally cannot draw without reference, but was determined, and so just uses reference all the time.
I'm fortunate not to have that condition, but because I'm trying to draw specifically from imagination, a lot of what I do is related specifically to that.
I found the guy quire inspiring, because he wouldn't let it stop him. There is a way around every problem if we look hard enough 💪 thanks for raising this point, it's not something that gets talked about enough in art circles 💕
8:32 Now I know why I got so frustrated trying to paint lemons
Yeah, turns out it's actually quite an advanced thing to do 🥲 but hopefully with practice we can develop the skills to make it easier!
the hips example for the boxes is my exact problem for some reason i cant draw the hips straight from imagination and i find myself scambling even with the boxes
and yes discord update cant wait till its up
It's a really complex part of the body, and it moves in a multitude of ways, and it's dimensions and silhouette are different for both sexes. For me it's how the legs join into it 🫠 but hopefully work more direct study of that region we'll get there. Thanks for watching! 💖
WHOO HOO!!! YEAH!
🥰
Where is the neuroscience part?
These videos show the results of the methods I am testing that supposedly make best use of the way the brain learns and retains information.
I have separate videos that cover the actual science bit.
To save you watching them though, I am testing if spaced repetition, and programs that help implement it as a learning method such as Anki, can be used to learn a procedural skill like drawing in less time than traditional methods, and spending minimal time per day practicing.
We know that these methods work for declarative skills like learning language vocabulary or the capital cities of countries, but they haven't been as thoroughly tested for skill based activities like art, music, etc.
While I cannot currently test this using real neuroscience in a lab with a sample group, the experience has been pretty fun so far, and I feel it's working as a learning method, but whether it's more effective than traditional art schooling I still can't say.
acryl gouache is not gouache, it's rebranded acrylic paint
😅 oh I see. I found it to be more similar in consistency to gouache but for sure it behaves way more like acrylic.
Please share your Anki deck 😢
He can’t. His anki deck features scanned images from copyrighted books
Don't worry! I am working a deck I can share that features all the notes I have made, and all the challenges, but with none of the copyright infringement and illegal sharing stuff. I will announce it here when it's ready!
All this time Ive been trying to use my hand.