Drawing Tips :D

[Brendathayssa]

Hello: D, How do you study your anatomy / drawings? Do you know any sites with tips? we will help each other: D

[Kaydreamer]

DRAW FROM LIFE

It's the most common bit of advice you'll get, but it's so important! Learning to draw... anything, but mostly the human figure and face as comic artists, will be so much faster and easier if you add drawing from life to your workflow and practice.

Something which can make that a lot more fun is to find a photo reference you like and decide you're going to draw one of your characters in that pose. Then, draw the pose multiple times!

• First, as a fast gesture drawing. (2 to 5 minutes.)
• Then, slower, more realistically. Try to match what you see in the photograph as closely as you can. (10 to 15 minutes.)
• Then, draw it again, but this time in your style, as your character!

After having done the first two steps, drawing your character in that pose will be much easier than usual, and it'll look much better, too. I often do this, and it's really helpful.

Line Of Action is a great website to find figure reference on. They have clothed and unclothed reference. (Used clothed if you're a minor, otherwise unclothed is always preferable so you can see how limbs and muscles fit together.)

I'm also a huge fan of Grafit Studio's reference pack on Gumroad, though they're about $15 per pack. (I spend my PayPay commission money on them, so I never really notice.) Heads up, a lot of their reference is nude, so keep that in mind before you go look for them.

[Brendathayssa]

I loved the tips, I took a look at the site and has several cool poses and also poses for hands, I didn't know these sites, thanks.

[darthmongoose]

A piece of advice I have for comic artists particularly is: study acting. Books aimed at animators rather than illustrators are really good for this kind of thing. I see a lot of comic artists who have learned to draw beautifully accurate proportions, or to use 3D models or ball jointed dolls to get perfect proportions, but don't know how to stand a character in a way that expresses mood or has weight to it, or how to pose a character in an action pose so that it looks like they're moving rather than posing in perfectly weightless balance. Or others their expressions, poses and mannerisms are just stock ones copied from other artists (often from different cultures they have an imperfect understanding of).

Studying how to put a sense of weight into poses and make characters seem to relax or stiffen really helped me to visualise the body with a sense of volume, especially tricky areas like the power abdomen, shoulder and pelvis, which can be really expressive, but are hard to do anything with on a 3d model or a doll. People talk a lot about "line of action", but that's really only one aspect of this, so it's a good idea to get some good animation textbooks like "Drawn to Life" to learn from the best.

[Brendathayssa]

I took a look at the book and thought it was really cool, thanks for the tips

[Hodge]

Ah well I made this thread which could be helpful~

This is a motivational thread for posting your studies! It can include figure studies, gesture drills, anatomy, photo studies, master studies, etc. The point is to share, keep each other accountable, and track our progress. It can be boring stuff and not the kind of stuff that does well on social media, so it can be easy to slack off on them. But I've found that art studies have been key for my art journey and I hope others will join! Here is a list of drawing reference resources (will add …

[Xentama]

Yeah I'll give a few tips:
-gesture drawing websites are good for understanding the human form, but drawing people in real life situations is better for understanding human behavior. (like different outfits, how are they sitting, how are they carrying themselves, are they alone or with people)
-most teachers will tell you to go out in public yourself to achieve this. However, if you go to Youtube and search 'street walk' or something to that effect, you will find videos with tons of pedestrians to reference. (all over the world I might add)
-also sketch fab is a website that sells 3d models for like video games and stuff, but they have viewers that let you turn things around and zoom in and out. so like say you wanted a generic car at a certain angle and google isn't cutting it, then you can position the car in the desired angle and screen shot it for reference.