what would be the best painting medium to start with in terms of ease of learning. I watched a video where Jeff Watt recommended oil paints because they can be layered, do you agree?

After what essential foundational training in draftsmanship is needed before painting?

These are amazing grace! These remind me of Steve Huston's gesture drawings. I think you should move to longer gesture studies maybe add in some more anatomy. Anyway these are very elegant!!

Hi Renaldi, Your gestures have a lot of charaacter to them! What I believe you can improve upon are lines. I see a lot of sharp lines with are adding that character to your drawings but you need to balance them out with some slow sweeping lines. If you find a line to be somewhat straight don't try and give it a curve rather make it more straight, try and amplify the function of the line. I also feel the proportions are a bit off so keep a look out for negative shapes and overall proportions of the figure. Anyway these are great drawings and seem pretty animated, which is always a good sign!

Hi Pedro! Great effort. If I may I would like to point a few things out to you that might help you. First I would direct you to drawabox.com they have easy to follow lessons with video instructions to help you achieve a greater control over your line quality. They will also teach you the proper way to approach geometric forms with the right perspective. Right now your geometric forms are not accurate, to make them better you need to understand 1point, 2point perspective properly. As for your figure drawings, I would ask you to focus less on details and more on the overall gesture of the pose. Watch proko’s gesture videos and try to use sweeping lines (C,I,S curves only) to make your gesture poses. Try to emulate Stan’s line control and decision making. These things are important to pay attention to as they bring more life to our drawings otherwise they might seem stiff and loose. Keep learning and posting your work so we can see you progress! Hope this helped.

Hi figaro, I can share how I approach such things. I usually use a Copic to lay a basic structure( a sphere in this case for the head of the flower and then I add the elements like leaves and petals. This very basic layin acts as a guide for me as I usually use a fine liner to ink it. I usually focus on the bigger shapes ignoring all the details at this point. I try and draw the shape of petals and other elements focusing almost entire on their contour. After than what I believe adds the most 3D look to it are contours. You can be done here if you are practising forms initially otherwise you can go ahead and add the shadows , just separating dark from light. I will try to upload an example whenever I can till then you can let me know if you found this useful. Feel free to ask me if you didn’t understand something.

These are great! I love the rendering, can you share how you render in photoshop? Coming from a traditional background I find it pretty challenging. Btw Steve Huston is a great inspiration for me too, I love referencing his work and book.

Doing the same pose multiple times has worked so well for me as well, I feel I learn a lot more when I dive into studying the same pose rather than doing them at random.

Just uploading for today to make sure I'm keeping myself in check ;3 visualizing the plumb line is a but of effort but if I just enjoy myself things go much faster I feel.

Hi Lynx, Are you trying to depict a turning movement in the second pose? If so then I guess the front side of the hips should be higher than the other side in the exaggerated drawing because of the shift in balance. You could even try striking the pose to check it. Hope that helps.

These are so good! I am looking forward to see more drawings by you.

Hello! I think I would give yourself a little bit more time, and just work on a few images and make sure that your lines are really showing what you want them to show. I can tell which images the poses would be standing or seated, but the differences between each individual pose are hard to read. Perhaps have a go at looking at your drawings and trying to recreate the pose in your own body. Then look back at the actual pose, and see which missing or changed lines could have improved your read of that pose. Then redraw those poses. Maybe even stop yourself drawing the contour, and really limit yourself to basic 'stick-man' drawings for the shortest time control to really simplify the meaning of your lines. I think your seated pictures are the best (I really struggle with those!) so focus a bit more on the standing ones. Keep it up :)

Hi Jan, These look great! Your lines are very fluid and gestural I can make out the pose just looking at your drawings. You have really been able to capture the essence of the pose! These poses really remind me of Mike Matessi's force drawings. Great work!

I made more animal drawings, this time, I tried to be more dynamic, while keeping structured.

I've been practicing the Bean lesson for a while now, these are from a practice session today. I feel like it's been going pretty well, but I've been learning on my own for a while now and probably have some blind spots, so any feedback would be really helpful!

Hi Tobias, Mannequinization is a tough one so hang in there! I spent almost a month on it before i could convince myself to move forward. Coming to your drawings, remember to apply everything you learned in the previous lessons! I can see you are using the cylinders and boxes to simplify things and that's great, it will help you simplify form. Now you need to make them look more gestural, try and be more loose with the initial lay in, one way you could do that is by controlling your line weight. Mannequinization will also test your designing ability, use information that is absolutely essential for the pose and then add details where needed. I would say the best way to start is with a loose gesture, then find the right perspective. (take a step back and look for angles) Keep an eye out for the negative shapes! While I wouldn't recommend you measuring out everything while doing these poses I would surely recommend keeping proportions in mind while doing these. Proportions can play a key role in determining likeness to subject. I did the first pose you chose in my own process to show you how i approach it. I am sorry for my line quality I am very new to Digital Art. Let me know if this was helpful!

If you want to get started with fundamentals I would highly recommend starting with Fundamentals of Figure Drawing it will help you develop a good understanding of Form and basic Perspective. For a good introduction to perspective, Marshall has a 12 video course on his website.(https://marshallart.com/SHOP/all-products/all-videos/1994-perspective-drawing-series/) Otherwise you could learn a lot from ModernDayJames's Perspective Series on Youtube.(https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-YQfqQQpg3dFq5rxS9eFFf2ksMb7Ygpq) If you want to learn how to use primitive shapes to indicate form and draw almost anything with a bit of introduction to design, Concept Design Academy has Dynamic Sketching which i found to be extremely helpful. Composition and Values are the next step after form and perspective. For light and shadow - Dorian Iten's Course is the best one I know of. For composition - (I haven't personally gone through this one) Bill Perkin's Course on NMA is very comprehensive But for a brief introduction check out (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wg-So3ElA8g) I hope you find this helpful.

Are you going to do a comprehensive oil painting course in the future?