There is a lot of good advice here, but I just wanted to say, where you're at is a perfectly normal place to be. So don't worry about committing crimes against art... And don't feel like you have to "nail" a course before moving on. Do the exercises, spend some time to absorb the information, and move on. Keep in mind, you don't have all the information yet to create beautiful drawings. Once you've gone through everything, you'll want to circle back, and do it all over again. It gets progressively better. Keep practicing!

I think the critiques below are pointing you towards the right direction. One thing I will add is that certain area lack three dimensionality, mostly in the legs. For exemple in the first image, the legs don’t look like 3D forms because there isn’t enough information to suggest it. Maybe adding cross contour lines could help. I think it could also be the way you made the legs attach to the pelvis and then to the knee. Because we don’t see one of the cylinder’s ellipses (top or bottom plane), the form look flat. So I think learning perspective, especially ellipses, could greatly benefit you. I drew over the legs of the third image, hopefully it will be of some help!

Hello Mrinconguous, When you draw the dummy you still have to start with the gesture, otherwise you will end up with a series of very static geometric shapes. Look carefully at the reference photo, identify the main line of action, on it find the position of the shoulders and pelvis and their inclination, then insert the arms and legs. At this stage limit yourself to sketching the gesture with simple curved lines (C S I ). This is the scaffolding on which you will build your shapes, you'll find it easier to maintain proportions and perspective this way :) I also recommend that you don't use a pen but a pencil, so that if you make mistakes you can easily correct them. Choose a soft pencil, use cheap paper and do a few sketches every day, always starting with the gesture :)

You may want to start with a quick gesture, to layout what goes where, and then place your blocks? It helps to separate planning from execution.

Just to give you an idea of how you can practice mannequinization, use the shapes that I made, and practice drawing them in perspective. Remember to think of them as 3D objects with a side, top and bottom. I hope this will help :)

Don't feel guilty! Study perspective. That involves way more than I can fit in one of these comments. In order to do mannequinization effectively, you need to be able to draw boxes, spheres and cylinders from any angle out of your head. This is harder than it sounds. I recommend starting by learning how to plot those forms out in perspective. Then you can draw them freehand and use perspective to check your own work. Be patient with yourself. I teach perspective in an animation school. A lot of students still struggle with it even after an entire semester. Its going to be even harder to learn it on your own just from books. Most perspective books contain the same information and they are all generally pretty good. Find the one that makes sense to you. My personal favorite is 'The Complete Guide to Perspective' by Craig Attebery. If videos are more your thing, a Youtube channel called 'The Drawing Database' has some excellent perspective content.

Hi mrincongruous, I advise you not to use clothed poses at this stage, they make it very difficult for you to see the shapes, especially the pelvis, which you have in fact misunderstood several times (it is perfectly normal since clothes hide it). In some cases there are torsions of the torso and important foreshortening (some poses you have chosen would be problematic even without the clothes which confuse the shapes). I'm attaching a couple of very quick sketches (sorry, they're quite messy!) to show you what I mean.

I think something you need to look out for is the angle of the rib cage/shoulder and the pelvis. In most cases if the rib cage tilts one way, the pelvis tilts the other way to counter balance. This especially applies to the pose of the guy with his shirt off (a sailor, I think). You did this well with the guy with the rose, but don’t be afraid to push and exaggerate the poses. Another thing I believe would help you would be to practice drawing boxes. The perspective is a bit wonky in a few of these, especially the very foreshortened ones (ex.: the person with the skulls at his feet). Focusing on getting boxes down will help you in the long run. Hope this helps!

I think u skipped the normal bean...

These are fantastic practice, and are looking good overall! It's always great to see folks working on their basic perspective, it's such an important skill that a lot of artists skip over cause drawing a million cubes is "boring", but it makes everything else 10x easier so definitely keep this up! You'll be glad you did. :D I think your cubes in general are looking good. Some of them are a little wobbly / skewed, but the convergence generally seems correct. I'd suggest putting horizon lines and vanishing points on these canvases to give yourself a scaffold to work on top of, and that should make the cubes significantly easier. With the cylinders, you're getting the convergence correct but the ellipses are a bit off on a lot of them. Essentially rotated in a way that breaks the perspective. There's a super easy solve for this though- if you draw a line through the exact center of the cylinder, this will be your Minor Axis, which is the shortest distance from one side of the ellipse to the other, AKA whatever direction the ellipse is foreshortening in, it will always follow this axis. Then if you take the Minor Axis and rotate it 90 degrees, you will get your Major Axis, which is the *longest* distance from one side of the ellipse to the other. Regardless of perspective or how foreshortened the cylinder is, these two axis will always remain the same and will always be 90* to each other; the only thing that changes is that the more the cylinder turns away from you, the shorter the minor axis becomes. If you want to be super precise about it, you can start by drawing an elongated cube, draw a line from each opposite corner to the other creating an X to find your exact center, then draw outwards following your perspective grid to get your Major and Minor axis, then simply put the ellipse properly in the squares and connect the edges to make a cylinder. It seems a bit finnicky at first, but if you do this exercise a lot you'll learn to eyeball these axis and be able to freehand them without too much trouble, which makes life way easier when drawing more complicated subjects. Keep up the good work! :D

To really help push your shapes, draw through the form more. Connect things from side to side even if you can't see them. That will help give more a sense of being solid and structure.I've found as a good little "cheat" to getting the perspective/angles down is to hold my pencil ( or any straight object) up to the reference and then with out changing the angle I'll hold it over my drawing to check if I"m correct. Great job practicing!

Good effort! It's depressing isn't it, thinking I can draw shapes and then you discover you can't :P As per the Reddit post did you try following the drawabox 250 box challenge? I found it was a good starting point to getting perspective in these shapes down, especially helping in drawing these perspective lines out first and trying to correct for it. Admittedly I only got 200 boxes into it before I gave up on it and couldn't deal with it anymore but it does hammer some points about perspective in shape building in mind.

I recommend that instead of copying shapes, its better that you learn perspective instead. I think you can look up one online about the basics of perspective like the vanishing points, parallel lines and the horizon/eye level. It will greatly aid your accuracy to draw these geometric shapes.

@mrincongruous I would study the nude figure for this exercise. It can be difficult to tell whats going on when they are wearing clothes and you don't have enough experience to disect whats going on. That being said, my biggest crit on these would be to watch your centerline. In general, follow the seem in the middle of the body that leads to the belly button for front poses, and the spine for back poses. Good job and keep going!

Bean figures of the torso. You guys should please give critiques

Hi there! Nice job so far! I feel like your lines are a bit too messy, which makes the whole learning process a bit too hard. Especially in more gestural drawings like the bean, you need your lines to also be gestural. The fix is pretty easy. Avoid chicken scratches. Instead of trying to search for a long, gestural line with smaller, messy ones, just use your entire arm to make a 'swoosh'. You can get used to it pretty quickly and it will help the clarity of your drawings immensely. Keep up the great work!

I would recommend trying to focus on the bean as Stan’s metaphor to them being two balls in a sock. In all of your drawing you seem to have drawn the two balls separately, which makes them look like shapes rather than a form. Try to think of them as being in the sock, when one side stretch the other side gets squashed and wrinkles. Try to find the flow of the body with your lines. It ok to draw the two ball separate, but I think in the end should feel like it’s one form. One thing I do that helps me understand the assignments more is drawing the ones Stan does in his videos. The other thing is that the center line of the beans is supposed to represent the center line of the body, whether it be the front (top of the sternum to the pubis for or less) and/or the back (the spine). It seems as though you’ve put it in the middle of each drawing (which is correct in some cases for example the last drawing) as opposed to using it to show the direction and gesture of the body. As for asking question too often and disrupting others, there is no such thing! This is a learning community and I would think most people are glad to help! Although I will say usually Stan tells students to work on a lesson for at least two weeks and to make sure you have a good grip of things before moving on. But seriously don’t worry about asking questions Hope this helps!