Peter Anton
Peter Anton
Durham, NC
Online art student working to become a freelance illustrator
@needsmuchhelp
I had a time with this horse I don’t think I fully understand structure
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Peter Anton
Your structure looks like you have the basic idea of it, you just need more practice is all. The biggest issue I see is proportion. Even if your construction were perfect, it would still be in the wrong place. It looks like you did a decent job with the "parts" (limbs, head) but didn't capture the overall big shape of the horse. The original horse could fit into a TALL rectangle, whereas yours would fit into a very WIDE rectangle. I'd take a look at Proko's gesture videos on youtube. But basically, start with the big shapes first and then work your way to the smaller shapes. Great job though, it just takes time and a lot of practice
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Marco Sordi
2023/9/17. Good morning everybody. Here's my daily character face concept. Thanks.
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Peter Anton
Looks great! Apologies for the wall of text, I'd format if it weren't so late. Your drawing has a great feeling and style to it overall. I have many thoughts which you can take or leave, I like trying to critique people to improve my eye/teaching skills, so feel free to ignore me :) I'd say the mohawk looks a bit too far left from the centerline. The ear anatomy looks a bit odd, especially how the hollow area is right up against the jaw. I also fee like the upper portion of the sternocleidomastoid could be indicated a slight overlap just below the ear, leading us toward the lower portion of it and giving the neck a bit more dimension on the right side.The shapes of the eyes are too similar, which would be perfect in a front view, but don't take into account the roundness of the head, which causes the far eye to be a bit more turned away from us. I'd also look into mouth anatomy a bit. The teeth feel like they are tilting with the mouth, instead of the lips moving around the teeth. If you try to move your teeth into the same position as your character's I think you'll see what I mean- it feels like I'd have to break my jaw to make that happen, considering how the line between the upper and lower teeth is at such an angle. The lower lip and chin indication both look like they are "floating" which suggest either a lack of anatomical knowledge or not knowing how to how to simplify that knowledge into lines. learning about the origins and insertions of the orbicularis oris will help you place the line on the outside of the mouth, for instance, instead of just having a floating c-curve. Hope that isn't too much all at once!!!
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Marco Sordi
2023/8/21. Good evening everybody. I’m in vacation but I can’t stay even a day without drawing. Here’s some character sketches I made using Looomis method. Thanks and have good week.
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Peter Anton
I love your expressions! Your characters feel very alive
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Jake
Don’t know about technical accuracy but I’m feeling a human connection to a lot of the eyes I have been doing
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Peter Anton
This is a good start! The left eye looks a bit bigger than the other. I'd avoid doing all those splotchy gray values all over the face, I'm not really sure what's going on there, but it looks like you don't have a clear separation of lights and shadow. Structure and studying the planes of the face will help with that. I think the face might be too long as well, or the eyes should be lowered
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Marco Sordi
2023/8/14. Good morning everybody. Here's my latest work (pencils and pure graphite on Kent paper, 21 x 29.7 cm). Thanks for your comment or critique. Have a good week.
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Peter Anton
It looks really good. Since you said you're looking for critique, there are a couple things that stand out to me: 1) The interior of the cloth, which frames her face, is all a hard edge. That tends to be less interesting and less dimensional than varying the edges. Softening the edges in some places, even losing the edge entirely when the values of the cloth and skin are similar, can be more visually interesting. Especially where the white hood meets the dark hair, a softer transition might be better to avoid creating a dark, flat triangular shape with the hair. That shape calls a lot of attention to itself, distracting from the focal point (the face). 2) The connection of the cloth to the head feels weird at the top of the head. The hood shape feels like we are looking at it straight on, where as we are looking down at the head by a good degree. It's possible that your reference looks like that, but I feel like the hood might come down a bit more towards the forehead. 3) Finally, if you look at the bottom of the nose, the cloth gets too close to it and creates a near tangent (tangent=unintentional focal point caused by lines that touch but don't ovelap). I wouldn't have that cloth so close to the bottom of the nose, because it creates this small bit of space that feels really cramped and distracting. These are mostly just design notes though, you did an excellent job!
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Samuel Sanjaya
0 minute pose figure drawings, I'm more aware of the simple form beneath the figure, altough the proportion is still off, and have some trouble for pose like s225 where it clearly off.  I still have this bad habit of hyperfocusing on one part instead of the overall figure, It usually came back if I get a little bit tired. I think that's why the latter figure have a more distinct wrong proportions.  Any feedback or critiques on how I can improve will be greatly appreciated.
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Peter Anton
Looking good! WHen you do side views, it looks like you have a tendency to turn the figure toward the viewer, making it more of a 3/4 view. Honestly, that's a pretty good problem to have. Most people do the opposite. One thing I see in a lot of these is that you are misplacing the head when you make it into a box. I think most of that would be solved just by making sure the tilt of the box matches the tilt of the eyebrows. Same problem with the box around the knees. When you draw the leg in the side views, a cube turns into a square, but you are forcing it to be a cube in 3/4 view, which makes it out of line with the thigh. Think about the thigh as a box with a side and top, and make the box a continuation of those planes.
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Marco Sordi
2023/8/3. Figure and portrait class with live model at R. Museum Art School tonight.
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Peter Anton
Looks great! Overall proportions look decent. I'd say your edges could use work. The hard outline all the way around the eye, hair, and ear really flattens things out. See in this John Singer Sargent drawing he doen't draw the bottom lid. There's also no harsh outline around the top lip. Yours also has a really hard edge where the cheek transitions to the mouth. You can have lines, just be careful about fully outlining forms. I'd also study the asaro head and real skulls to get a better feel for the eye sockets and cheek bones, since it feels like those are lacking structure. Same thing for the ears, they don't feel 3d.
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Peter Anton
Have you studied 1st and 2nd point perspective yet? Intuitive perspective (I am guessing that means approximating perspetive without calculating it mathematically) comes after you understand the basic principles. If you are just trying to fake the knowledge, it probably won't look right. Marshall Vandruff's perspective video on his website is great. It's old and bad production value but really good. Feel free to send me your art if you want an outside opinion on what to work on
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Reilly Herbst
I’m feeling a lot more confident with the loomis method. I’m starting to study the eyes and I want to make sure I’m placing them in the right spot. I split the brow and bottom of the nose in half and then I split that in half again. Please any advice and critiques are welcomed! Thank you
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Peter Anton
Looks great! The horizontal lines of the face should be parallel. You have the chin and nose markers going to a different vanishing point than the brows/eyes. On the side plane, you also don't have the jaw going at a steep enough angle (the part that goes from the ear to the chin). Imagine a stunt man driving a motocycle off a ramp. In the original, he goes really high! In yours, he is not getting much air. It would also be good to see an indication for the hair line and mouth
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@kartoffelpuffer
Apologies for the delayed response. It was difficult to organize my thoughts about all this. I have started again, using the book “How to Draw” by Scott Robertson as my primary resource. I created a daily goal for practice that I should be able to maintain even when school starts again. So far it’s been pretty good, practicing nearly every day and going above the daily goal since I have a lot of free time right now. I’ve also done exercises I had avoided in the first try of this book, thinking I didn’t need to practice it or not taking the time to figure it out when little instruction was given. These early exercises are ones that I’m familiar with, but the new ones are coming up soon. I know it’s going to get more difficult and I am prepared for that. Even if my lines aren’t perfectly straight, I move on when I feel I understand the exercise. I’ll come back to practice it more, and it may even be part of the newer exercise, but I won’t let perfectionism prevent me from progress. I’ve kept everyone’s advice in mind. Thank you all. I am determined to not give up this time!!!!!!
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Peter Anton
Well also, I'd say to reframe your thinking. You're phrasing it as if you failed and are having to restart from scratch. But you haven't quit and resstarted, you're just trying a different approach. If you make it this big thing of "everytime I don't finish something 100% it means I'm giving up" you set yourself up for failure. I'd suggest visualizing yourself climbing a mountain. You climbed the lower path, now you are climbing with Scott Robertson, and then maybe you climb the next part with Andrew Loomis. Maybe you slip and fall, but you're not falling all the way to the bottom of the mountain. Don't catastrophize every slip up, just recover and keep climbing:)
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Peter Anton
You might feel like your learning has come to a halt, but I suspect you've just reached a plateau. If you make it through this, you'll level up. Just keep going. You CAN copy the reference. Many artists do, especially when starting out. If your reference is good, you can make pretty good art that way. However, if you only train that way, it's all you'll be able to do. You won't be able to construct figures or modify references in a believable way unless you understand 3d form. Beginners copy, masters ANALYZE. Convert what you're seeing into 3d shapes and understand what you're looking at in simple terms. It is a hard skill to develop, and it takes time. Accuracy is...alright. It's good to be able to copy something exactly. If you are content with copying, that's 100% okay if it brings you joy. One question to consider: how often are you called upon to copy something exactly? When you go out and paint a landscape for an hour, you don't have time to put down every detail. When you paint a portrait and the person's hair is a really uninteresting shape that creates a weird tangent, it would be better to change it. If a figure pose is stiff, you might want to exaggerate it. What about if you need to draw a dragon? There are no photos of dragons to copy, unless you plagiarize. Not everything you see is equally important and often your reference won't be perfect. Really good artists are not blindly copying every little detail. They simplify and prioritize. They understand things simply. The beginner sees a tree and sees the leaves, and starts by drawing them one at a time. The master sees a tree and sees the big, simple shapes. What it means to study anatomy is that you are learning how the human body is put together, like a machine. A car mechanic needs to know about all the parts of a car so he can properly fix it. He can take it apart and put it back together. Anatomy allows you to do the same thing with the human body. When you know anatomy you actually begin to see it on the human figure, and then you can accentuate it. If you don't know the muscles of the back, you won't see them properly. You'll just see a bunch of lumps and bumps, even if you're looking right at it. Knowing anatomy allows you to organize all that chaos and understand it. "Oh that's the border of the scapula....I'll add a little curve so it really feels like it's wrapping around the back." Feel free to message me if you have any questions or need any suggestions on learning resources.
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Samuel Sanjaya
this is my ear assignment. Not as hard i thought it would be. Although still tricky. I hope I can get some feedbacks and critiques on how i did.
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Peter Anton
These look good, I'd work on getting the big shape right first. Several of these went off course within the first few lines you put down, because the overall shape isn't correct. #2 is way wider and squashed than the reference. #4 and # 5 are too tall. I think what's happening is you have an idea of what an ear looks like, and all of you drawings are looking the same as that generic ear in your mind, rather than actually seeing what's there. Try tracing over the outline of the ear (on top of the photo) just to see the basic shape, then do the same for your drawing and compare them. You draw a box around them and see how different the boxes are in their dimensions. Basically, simplify more. Keep up the efforts, it's good work.
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Cade Burdett
Day 29: Attempted the camel today from the level 2 of the CSI project in the Drawing Basics Course. I had to rush it a little bit because I’m going to be traveling all day today so I wanted to post one drawing while I had access to the internet. It’s gonna be a long flight so I’m going to have plenty of drawings tomorrow! Please let me know if you have any suggestions! Thank You
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Peter Anton
I haven't gone through the course, so I don't know the assignment, but the biggest thing I'd say is to look for the big 2d shapes. Try to picture the subject as a very simple shape, instead of trying to draw the complexity. This allows you to establish basic proportions, such as the legs, which on yours have gotten very wide. This happens because there is so much detail, and we start focusing on the curves of each leg instead of the overall shape of the four legs as a whole. It's tricky in perspective, where the body is foreshortened. You can see I did the same mistake on my version, where I made the back legs a bit too far away, as if we're looking at the subject more from the side.
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@kotka
Getting started on the final assignment was hard. I decided to test myself by doing another pose than the Yoni. This is Sekaa #38 after three hours of measuring, erasing, and ending up not using the whole paper somehow. I'm following along in the videos, applying the tips and techniques in the videos as I go along.
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Peter Anton
Something that helped me with "drifting" or shrinking drawings is starting with big shapes first. After that, try to get one part of the figure nailed down, like the torso, and then you can base everything else off the torso, which doesn't change. The reason it shrinks is because changing an arm (for example) forces you to change 5 other things that are based on the size/position of the arm. Whereas if you draw the 5 things based on a big overall shape, you can change the arm without having to change everything else.
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Peter Anton
I personally don't think it's helpful to replicate drawings and illustrations. I sometimes find it helpful to trace over them, as a way of "looking deeply" and going over every line. At the end of the day, you just have to draw the human figure. Go draw the figure, look at what problems you are having, and then see what Loomis would do to solve that problem. Basically, draw from the figure until you have a specific question, and then go the book for the answer. The real learning comes from drawing. I would guess 1% of the people who read the Loomis books actually follow the books from start to finish. I used to think I was undisciplined for not doing it that way, but I don't think many people do.
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Peter Anton
I think you should move on from an exercise when you feel like you've learned most of what there is to learn. If there is still a lot of meat left on that chicken bone, keep picking at it. It's never going to be perfect, but you want to get the point of the exercise. With gestures, it's flow and rhythm and movement. Once you feel like you have a good feel for that, move onto structure. Stick with structure for a while, making sure to do a few gestures to keep your skills sharp so you don't lose them. I would advise listening to a podcast episode called Deep Questions with Cal Newport, Ep. 254: The Laws of Less. Skip to minute 18 where he talks about disipline. You don't have to listen to the whole thing, just that part.
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Marco Sordi
2023/6/27. Good morning everybody. Here's my daily assignment from @Patrick Jones'e e-book "The Anatomy of Style". Thanks.
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Peter Anton
Looks great! I'd just say the knee looks a little far to the left. And more of a design note, since I don't know the reference, but the top half of the figure is very symmetrical, making it more static and less interesting than it could be. Again, that might just be how the reference photo was. Edit: also the tattoo doesn't feel like it's wrapping around the leg properly. I think the ellipse is too shallow, and needs to be more open, really wrapping all the way around the thigh
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Peter Anton
The overall feeling of the heads is good. What's lacking is an understanding of the construction of the head. Even if you want to do more of a cartoony, anime style, you have to learn construction in order to know where to place your lines. If you are open to advice, I'd just focus on learning each of the following, just commit to watching one Proko video a day and then doing one drawing from life or a photo, trying to apply what you've learned. -the loomis head -learning how the jaw and the ear meet up -learning how the neck connects to the head (a cylinder on a ball) -learning the structure of the eye -learning the structure of the nose -learning the structure of the mouth.
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Eric
Asked for help
Hi everyone, I did a portrait exercise using a model I have seen on a Stephen Bauman video on YouTube. I am not really satisfied. I really struggled with the proportion. It is definitely an aspect I need to work on. Amongst other things, eyes are not as I would like them to be. I’d love getting your comments on this one. I wish you all a wonderful day.
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Peter Anton
A few notes: -the center line of the face got very flattened out on yours, making her nose and mouth further to the right than they should be. Draw a vertical line from the tip of the nose to the eye, and you'll see what I mean. -the left eye is too high. On the original, the brow line tilts down to the right. On yours, it tilts down to the left. -Your mouth is drawn almost as if it is head on. I'd study up on the 3d forms of the mouth. -The left shoulder needs to slope down more -The ear is too small and looks more like it would in a profile view than a 3/4 view. If you'd like, try doing a tracing on top of your reference, in the simplified style of a Loomis head, then compare it to yours. In general, you are doing what everyone does, which is to make the pose more head on and more symmetrical. Look for assymmetry and focus on keeping it a 3/4 view, even though your brain wants to drag it into a straight-on, front view.
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Samuel Sanjaya
the anatomical layin. I dont have much knowledge about anatomy, so kinda referenced the jack hamm books. critiques are welcome
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Peter Anton
I would say it looks like you're too focused on the details. The proportions got a bit wonky. What might help you is starting with the envelope method, where you picture the figure wrapped in plastic, creating a simple shape with 4-5 sides. Then once you have that big shape right, you place the figure inside it. It might also help to just practice converting the original image into a silhouette, where it's all black. That way you won't get distracted by interior details and can just focus on proportions. I'd also recommend Michael Hampton's Figure Drawing: Design and Invention. That will help you draw the foot from behind.
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