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Here's some stuff I've been doing over the semester in my life drawing class:
http://www.csulb.edu/~kcamero2/level...in/sketch8.jpg
http://www.csulb.edu/~kcamero2/level...in/sketch9.jpg
http://www.csulb.edu/~kcamero2/level...n/sketch10.jpg
http://www.csulb.edu/~kcamero2/level...n/sketch11.jpg
Hey Hero
Nice stuff. I like the last one the best. The first three look rather anime for a life drawing class, which leaves me with the question, are you drawing people from life or are drawing what people "are supposed to look like" to you. I'm not saying you think people look like anime in real life, it just seems like you saw that there should be an eye here, & plugged in an eye you are comfortable drawing into that spot. Same goes for the comic feel of the bodies. I have always felt that the biggest challenge of drawing from life was to throw away your preconceptions about what things look like. I have always had to remind myself to draw the actual shapes in front of me, instead of getting lazy & using references to stuff I have drawn in the past. I understand this is your style, but It can become easy to rely on style to get you past things that are troublesome.
I'm not trying to say that I could do better or anything, I feel that drawing from life is one of the hardest thing you can undertake in art. I also don't want you to feel that I'm knocking you, I have done the same thing many times. I would like to see some more realistic stuff like the last picture you linked to. Anything learned while drawing in the classical style can be applied to any other style of drawing, but not vice versa.
Once again, I'm not trying to knock you or anything. I am also struggling to teach myself to draw from life. It isn't something that can be mastered, but gaining skill is slow & hard fought from what I've experienced.
Anyway, just a few thoughts to take into consideration.
JM
well, the first few were from the beginning of the semester. The last one was done just last week. I know I was drawing too much in a manga style to be real, and after trying, trying, and throwing out all sense of 'style' in drawings, it got to look more realistic. The whole deal I had a hard time coping with is if you want to draw realistically, you have to really go for it, and can't use personal style to influence the pic. It breaks the attempt at realistic drawing.
I think your human anatomy is getting much better, Hero :D. Keep it up!
Ah, but making our drawings realistic does not necessarily make them look beautiful (which is one of our primary goals in creating art, no?). Making things look realistic is a technical skill and... well, here's a quote from Frank Frazetta's 'Icon: Frank Frazetta: A Retrospective of The Grand Master of Fantastic Art':-Quote:
throwing out all sense of 'style' in drawings, it got to look more realistic.
"A lot of new artists today put an awful lot of crap in their paintings. What they're doing is simply showing off their technical skills. And okay, that's all very nice. Somebody looks at their work and think, 'Boy, this guy can do it all!' But when you really look at the stuff, you know something is missing. You just don't get that sense of mystery and wonder that you can get when the artist knows what to leave out or when to push something to the background.
"I try to keep a balance, I try to know what to leave out and what to put in - and in the final analysis the original painting can look very simple. But it really isn't. Making it look simple is very, very difficult. It's easy to pack a pinting with detail, top to bottom, side to side - but it can be sort of a cover-up for mistakes."
I love that guy.
I agree with JM, somewhat, but I think you should hold on to your personal style. Don't throw it away but rather let it develop within you. Otherwise, you'd be the same as the rest who're studying 'real life' drawing. Don't kill yourself trying to achieve that extra edge in realism. Remember, drawing real life has principles and concepts that can be learned by anybody, anytime, anywhere. YOUR style, however, is yours alone.
Hey, like I said before, everything learned while drawing from life can be applied in other types of drawings in some way. I wasn't suggesting that you throw away your style, but that you use the drawing from life exercises to their fullest, which will help overall in the long run.
JM
Yeah, I think what I got from that class can be put into my own way of drawing, which you can't say the same when going the other way around. Picking up on realistic qualities helps you see what underlies the human body, face, posture, expression, and so on. Now I can take that and feed it into the way I normally draw. It should be fun ^^
Yeah what everyone said is ture, but you gotta be carefull not to get to reliant on life drawing. Drawing what you see is a great talent but can also cause problems (at least it started to for me). Alot of times I'll get stuck when trying to draw from imagination and I'll spend all day looking for a reference and it'll end up looking like the reference but not what I originally intended the drawing to look like. Learn spacial relationships and screw all the other stuff they shove down your throat (ie. perspective, anatomy, shading techniques.)
And style is everything, even in life drawing.
Oh and by the way, very good progress on your work, even the more manga-esque ones seem more volumous than some of your prevoius work I've seen.