J B
Minnesota, USA
Non-traditional (i.e. mid-40s, post college) student, finally learning to draw
J B
added a new topic1mo
I’m interested in doing manga as a hobby and have been practicing alongside the drawing basics assignment. Thought I’d post a couple practice drawings for fun. These were done just with a ballpoint pen on printer paper, nothing fancy:
2mo
I have to echo the sentiment early in the first bit of the stream where the person noted that your videos and classes have helped a lot. I feel the same way; I never went to art school and am starting from scratch in my 40s. Your drawing basics course and your other YouTube videos have really been a huge help for me. Keep up the good work, Stan!
2mo
I’ve always found gesture drawing difficult, but this video was very helpful, especially to see Stan’s process. I’m hoping this unit will help me improve a bit in that area. Here’s a practice gesture drawing I did last night for fun of my dog sleeping.
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3mo
As both someone interested in art and also interested in psychology, this was a really interesting breakdown. I definitely understand this, very cool!
4mo
There will be more videos added (i hope :))
J B
4mo
I remember at the beginning of the course someone asked how long it would be and the estimate was something like 18 months overall
4mo
I'm in a similar boat, so I'll share what I've been doing in case it helps. I started by reading Andrew Loomis' books on drawing (be aware, there *are* nudes in them, but they're really well-known and considered to be excellent references). I'm doing Proko's Drawing Fundamentals course which has been hugely helpful. I went through Draw-A-Box (I stopped at the animal drawing section to go back and focus on Proko's fundamentals course for now). I also follow a number of YouTube channels: David Finch, Ryan Benjamin, Tim McBurnie, Marc Brunet, Mmmmemonexx, Chommang_drawing, Manga Materials, etc. All of that, combined with regular drawing practice using randomly-generated drawing prompts and just fun things I wanted to draw, has had a massive improvement in my ability over the past 6 months or so... like, leaps and bounds. Hopefully some of that is useful to you!
4mo
The procreate tip was just in time for me, I had been battling it recently trying to figure out how to adjust images correctly in that way. Thank you!!
4mo
It's funny, but I had originally meant to post here to recommend Draw A Box and how they do the intuitive perspective with boxes (I forget which lesson it was), where you try to draw your lines going toward the vanishing point, but don't use a ruler until you're checking them later. To be honest, that exercise ended up helping me a lot. I'm still a beginner myself, but one other tip I saw someone mention in a youtube video a while ago was to look on Google Street View and find a random place (or just Google Images) and then put the image into a graphics program and try to trace where the perspective lines are for each building or item. (Alternately, I suppose you could print it and do the same.) The person who posted the video said that it really helped them a lot to get a "feel" for perspective. I've been meaning to try it out myself also.
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added a new topic
ChatGPT for drawing prompts4mo
Hey everyone,
I know AI is kind of a charged topic right now, especially in the Art community, but I thought I'd share a suggestion that has been really helpful for me. A lot of times I've wanted to draw and had a difficult time coming up with ideas. I've tried various online drawing prompt generators and they work ok but not super exciting. However, I've been doing some research into ChatGPT for work-related reasons and it dawned on me that it would be a good way to generate drawing prompt ideas. So I gave it a shot and it really has been pretty helpful. I'll give it a request like "Give me a drawing prompt useful for drawing a comic scene for someone with less than a year experience" and it will generate an idea. You can also add specific themes if you want; there's infinite flexibility. And if you don't like what it gives you, you just tell it to generate a new one. You can also ask it to give you a drawing idea that highlights a certain area you want to improve in, such as drawing hands or architecture, etc. Just to be clear, I don't work for them and have no conflict of interest in recommending it, I just have found it useful for this and other things and thought I'd share the idea in case it's helpful to others.
4mo
Asked for help
Hi everyone! Here is my attempt. Proportions are very difficult for me but I felt like this went better than expected. It took me way longer than anticipated though, about 2 hours or so. Feedback is welcome, thank you!
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5mo
Agreed! As of now we don't have any Proko instructors lined up to teach a Manga course, but we're always looking for talented artists to cover popular topics. If you know of anyone selling a quality course right now that may want to bring it over to Proko let us know.
5mo
I did post comments on both of their YouTube channels mentioning that they should consider doing a course for Proko, but the two I mentioned above would be great. I would definitely buy a course from either one, for sure. I know Marcel from DrawLikeASir is pretty active online, but I know Urasawa doesn't answer comments very much. If you think they'd be a good fit, it might be more useful for someone from Proko to reach out to them, vs a rando like me on the internet :-D My comments might get lost in the comment noise they get every day.
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5mo
JB, you're right. We used to have around 8-10 people on our team helping students in the community and we've had to scale that down to 2 - @Jesper Axelsson and @Liandro. They're awesome but we need to do more. I'm going to talk to my team about this and we'll get everyone more active. Thank you for expressing your concern!
5mo
<3 No worries at all, Stan! I love the site and I love the Drawing Basics course. I recommend both to anyone I know who might be interested. Thanks again!
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Community engagement5mo
I love Proko's courses, so this isn't a criticism, but just a suggestion to help improve the site: I think the whole Proko experience would be improved if there was more community interaction by the Proko team. The reason I say this, is because I routinely check the community pages for Drawing Basics and for the Site Suggestions, etc and there's rarely any responses from Proko team members. Lots of questions asked but only occasional answers or responses. It feels sort of abandoned in a way. I feel like if there was more interaction/feedback from the Proko team to community questions, etc it would go a long way to improve the site and the community around it. There's a lot of feedback on social media from the Proko team, so I know they can do it, it just doesn't seem to extend as much to the native Proko site.
5mo
The reason you start and then stop has nothing to do with structure or being in a live class or using books or videos.
Research, shows that the reason this happens is because what you are doing gets harder and the brain avoids things that are hard and cause frustration.
To keep moving forward you have to lean into that frustration and keep fighting. You will then overcome your current plateau and you will move forward- until you reach another plateau, and it starts all over again- and again you will want to quit.
The more you do this, the more confidence you will gain, and the less you will want to quit.
This is what separates those who talk about doing it, and those who actually do it.
5mo
A lot of cool characters in there. It was a good walkthrough of how to manipulate the shapes effectively. Thanks again, Stan!
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Manga-oriented course6mo
It would be really interesting to get someone to do a full Manga-oriented course for the site. Someone traditionally famous like Naoki Urasawa (author of Monster and other popular manga series) or maybe a YouTube celebrity like DrawLikeASir. There's a lot of manga-specific subtleties that would be useful to learn in a specialized course and would create a nice parallel with the western-themed Marvel course that's being released.
6mo
Asked for help
Here are my sketches, will add original images in a comment. This was harder than it initially seemed that it would but I felt better about it as I completed them. Feedback is welcome, thank you! :)
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