My path with drawing really began recently, mostly because I was thinking about getting my first tattoo and got obsessed with traditional old school style. So I started to design tattoo-flashes on my ipad and became that rare type of artist who feels more comfortable drawing digitally. Every time I picked a paper and just looked at that real blank space (with no two touches to erase or liquify tool to fix my proportions), I’d freeze. However, as deep as I’d go on my artistic journey, I realized there was no way to run: I needed to draw and paint in real life. Not only for skill reasons, but because I got this undenieable desire to experiment new materials and create different types of art.
So it’s been a while now, that I try to practice drawing in a consistent way. But every time I need to draw something that it isn’t still-life, it’s a horrible show in terms of proportion and perspective. I always end up with (beautiful!) but not intentionally big-headed girls, like they’re from Megamind.
So after some breakingdowns and a lot of Youtube tutorials, I finally decided to sit down and actually learn from someone who really knows what they’re doing. I got Michael Hampton’s book - Figure Drawing. It’s so good, and makes me see the process of studying drawing in a completely different way.
so I started to do daily exercises:
those I challenged myself to draw in less than 2 minutes each
they may not be pretty, but at least they dance!!
I was impressed by how hard it was to make skeletons but with movement and balance.
In the book Michael says: “Consider the gesture as the your animated way of capturing the lyricism of the entire figure. Do your best to keep the fluidity of the gesture, but still include the mechanics (skeleton, anatomy, perspective) in order to give believability to the overall figure.”
Michael continues talking about perspective, movement, proportion… he was listing all my currently biggest nightmares. I’m doing this article here to document my evolution with drawing figures! Now they may be fragile and kinda lame (xôxos, mancos e capengas), but I hope that with daily practice I’ll be sharing actual characters here pretty soon!
It’s important to demystify this idea of Art being “talent”. Of course you can have something different in you that makes the process maybe easier, but the only way to improve your creations and skills is:
- Practice.
- Practice some more.
- Practice a lot more than that.
- Study a little…
and than practice even more!
So this is my goal for now. Hope that the next article I can share more improved skeletons. Thank you for reading, and bis bald! Tchau 🧚🏼♀️