Life drawing

this is just one way to start. It's how I usually start.

cartoon arm connections

For me, connections and joints are the hardest things to draw. I like to group anatomy and think of bigger ideas. I think of all the anatomy going from the torso to the arm as one big squishy form.

A big thanks to everyone who sent in drawings

I got a ton of drawings and I tried to write back to most people, but sorry if I didn't get a chance to write back. There were a lot of drawings that I would give the same notes for, so I picked drawings that I applied to most of what was sent in. The biggest thing I noticed was shape design. Just make sure to go through your drawing and check for bad shapes and even spacing. I always do an even spacing check. Of course, if I show my drawings to someone better than me, they can always find ones I didn't see, but you just draw as well as you can and don't worry about it. Again, there is no such thing as a perfect drawing, you just keep getting a tiny bit better one drawing at a time.

Paul Wee teaching at LAAFA

Paul Wee is one of the best figure drawing artist I have ever seen and he's teaching at LAAFA this next term. I already signed up! Hopefully I will see some of you there.

Draw over for Steve LeCouilliard

Here is a draw over for Steve LeCouilliard. Steve is a fantastic artist and does great comic work. The information below applies to page layout for comics as well. you want to lead the eye with gestures and shape design. As far as the construction mentioned here, most of this I learned from Charles Hu and kevin Chen. If you guys want to draw realistic characters I can't imagine trying to learn that on my own. You can learn how to draw cartoons, because the construction is much easier to see and there is plenty of how to books and reference, but for realistic figure drawing, there are no good books on the market. The only book that has a little bit of good information is figure drawing by Andrew Loomis. everything else is hard to find hidden secrets that only a few artist in the world know about. This is actually part of the reason I started this blog. this information is sooooo hard to find, and it can be soooo frustrating trying to find it. And in a side note, there is no such thing as a good drawing or a good artist. Every drawing can be better, every artist can be better. You just draw the best you can and try to keep on getting better. I constantly take my drawings to artist and they find tons of mistakes with them, or ways to make things better. It can be discouraging if you think you "did something wrong." That's not the case. You just do the best you can.

Draw over for Karl Essex

Once you have a strong understanding of form and shape design as Karl does, then you can focus on gesture. Gesture is just the flow of things. All the little pieces and details. things like buttons on a shirt or wrinkles all add to the overall flow and gesture. Make sure your details aren't randomly shooting gestures off to other places.

Draw over for Marco