elkad
Earth
Long time art hobbyist finally learning the fundamentals :P

elkad
added comment inIs buying Drawing Basics worth it?
12d
Follow along with the free videos from the course and decide if its worth it yourself!
$140 is a lot of money and I'd highly encourage you to try out free learning material (not only from Stan) before you consider a paid course. It will help you see if you're able to commit to a course which you seem unsure of. It'll also help decide if paying for a course is worth it for you, maybe you'll be content with the free materials, maybe you'll be looking for more.
In my experience, I've generally found that paid courses are better put together (not that free content is bad) because lets face it, being paid gives them dedicated time to design and create quality content. Creating a course is extremely time consuming and not many artists have the time to make one for free.
I've taken a couple of Stan's courses (figure drawing and portrait drawing) and have been really happy with the quality. The courses are planned out well and I think Stan's a great teacher who's clearly passionate about art, he distills important info well and communicate effectively. That said, no art course is going to teach you everything there is to know or magically make your art amazing, you still need to put in the work and there will still be a lot to learn by the end!
So yeah, start with some free material and go from there. There are a lot of great courses out there (both free and paid) and Stan's courses are some of those. Hope that helps :)
1mo
Asked for help
Phew, awesome seeing everything coming together :)
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1mo
Asked for help
My lips protrude a bit too much. Or something is wrong with… something.

elkad
1mo
I think the lips are positioned too far down the chin. Generally, the lips should be contained in the top half of the the bottom third of the face (see the example attached). Because the head is tilted slightly downwards, there will be foreshortening and the lips will appear slightly lower but its pushed too far in your drawing.
Another point I had (and this may just be the cigarette distorting the lips) is that the lips should be turning more with the head, to me the lips appear almost as if they were on a front facing head. Try visualizing the lips as muscles wrapping around the tooth cylinder, it really helps with orienting the lips and make them look properly anchored to the face.
Also please try taking clearer photos in future, a lot of the drawing is out of focus so we miss out on seeing all the details!
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1mo
Asked for help
Been looking forward to this exercise! Hair is generally super detailed so breaking down the core shapes and shadows made it way more manageable. I feel like I need to work on observing and designing shapes
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2mo
Asked for help
A few ears at different angles. I've avoided drawing ears in detail for a long time, but this wasn't as daunting as I thought it'd be. I think I could use some work designing the shapes to emphasize the forms as 3D like Stan does.
Anyway, feedback is appreciated!
2mo
Asked for help
Few lip drawings with references, any feedback is appreciated :)
3mo
Asked for help
Some draw alongs with the videos and a couple extras. Any feedback is appreciate! :)
3mo
Asked for help
The whole approach to shading is super helpful, I normally have trouble managing values but focusing on just shadow or light area simplified things greatly. Personally I feel a little weak on identifying and simplifying shapes but let me know if you have any other feedback, thanks :)
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4mo
Asked for help
Here are some eggs! (In charcoal + 1 graphite. Might have a go at digital later). I haven't had much practice with charcoal or the overhand grip so these came out a little rough. Plus I think the paper was too textured or maybe the sandpaper I used was too coarse cause the lines ended up being roughly textured.
One thing I could work on is hatching. I tried following the contours to some degree but ends up looking a little sparodic. Any other critiques are appreciated!
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5mo
Asked for help
Measuring practice! It was kinda tedious but a great exercise, I really learnt a lot especially by checking against the reference and re-drawing
5mo
Asked for help
Last ones! First set is with reference, second set without.
I remembered the male chest proportions wrong on the front facing drawing and the figure looks a lot skinnier as a result. Also there's less detail and more anatomical inaccuracies in the second set but that was kinda expected given my lack of knowledge :)
Any feedback is appreciated as always!
Week 16: Continue with the drawabox lessons. I've had some awesome feedback from @elkad @James Hicks and @Danet . I think that i have a better understanding how ellipses and cylinders work. Getting them correct on paper freehand with a fineliner is a different story :) . Anyway, i'm 115 cylinders in the 250 cylinder challenge, drew along with the plant examples and drew some construction plants and mushrooms to. Also did a longer portrait drawing for fun, and did the branches exercise again.
6mo
Nice work! Nice rendering on the portrait too!
You're checking pretty your cylinders quite well although I'll point out a few errors I've
- sometimes when you're drawing the correct minor ellipses its not going down the centre of the ellipse. e.g. 111, 76, 82 are all off to one side
- As Danet mentioned, avoid cylinders with little to no foreshortening. You're not fully practicing perspective if there's no foreshortening. For that matter, practice a variety of foreshortening, get extreme in some of them!
One other thing I noticed is your ellipses in both the mushrooms and the curved cylinders aren't shifting, they're basically the same width all the way through. We're actually viewing each ellipse from a slightly different angle so some should appear wider/thinner than others, I've attached a diagram for explanation.
Keep up the good work!
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6mo
Asked for help
Hiya, here's my Hale's proportions exercises first image is using a reference and the second is from memory
Asked for help
week 15: second unit of the second term. officially i should be working on drawabox lessons 4-7, but i haven't done lesson 3 yet, so i'll be working on that first. I'm also working on the 250 cilinder challenge. For this week i did the arrows, leaves and branches exercises. I also drew the first 65 cilinders, and dit a bit of a longer portrait drawing for fun in my new strathmore toned sketchbook. I've found the cilinder challenge very challenging, not sure how to check if i'm doiing it right. Anybody got any tips for that?
6mo
Hi! I did drawabox a little while ago so I can offer some tips. Checking for mistakes is an important steps for understanding what you're doing wrong and how to improve. For cylinders:
- find the center point of the 2 ellipses and check if your minor axis divides the ellipses exactly in half
- with a ruler, draw the correct minor axis for each ellipse and see how it compares to the minor axis you drew, it should be perpendicular to the major axis
- check foreshortening is correct - the ellipse closest to the viewer should be larger than the one going away
- check the degree shift - the ellipse further away should be wider than the ellipse closest to the viewer. The difference in wideness should follow the amount of foreshortening.
So in this example:
- the minor axis runs directly down the middle of both ellipses, nice
- the minor axis is pretty close for the small ellipse but is not aligned for the larger one
- the cylinder is foreshortened the wrong way. Your hatching indicate smaller ellipse is visible and is closest to us, but if its closest to us it should be larger than the other ellipse
- the degree shift is good, the ellipse further away from us is wider. The difference in wideness is believable given the amount of foreshortening
So it should looks something like my example (although you can see it's not perfect either). Keep checking for mistakes and look for trends, that way you can figure out which areas you can improve on. Hope that helps!
Also if you haven't already, you should checkout the drawabox discord server, its pretty active and you're much more likely to get feedback from people familiar with the course content
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6mo
Asked for help
Hi all, brushing up on gesture with 2 minute sketches as my mannequin drawings are kinda stiff. I watched Mike Mattesis' Force drawing videos which helped me loosen up and think from a more gestural mindset, highly recommended if you're struggling with gesture like I was/still kind of am https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyuCq6VWVeA
(Thanks to @Jesper Axelsson for the suggestion :))
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6mo
Asked for help
Richer studies, the first set is from reference the second is from memory. Any feedback is appreciated, cheers!
Some non-average loomis heads
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6mo
Asked for help
X-treme! I feel like I'm struggling with how the underside of the jaw connects with the neck, any tips (or feedback) is appreciated!
6mo
Asked for help
A few side view sketches :)
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