more figure drawing practice

[eye_of_toad]

I found a decent figure-drawing tutorial. YouTube is overflowing with art "tutorials" that are awful.

Sometimes you get an "artist" who actually doesn't know what they are doing and gives terrible examples and bad advice. I remember once trying to follow along with a how-to-draw video where the artist drew the ear in the completely wrong place on the head. (It was a side profile view and they literally drew the ear as if it were on your cheekbone. I kept expecting the artist to catch their error on the sketch before drawing the details, but nope.)

More often you get an artist who knows how to draw but has no idea how to explain what they're doing. This often results in bad advice contradicting what they are actually doing. (I once meticulously measured out the proportions of the face based on the the verbal instructions, taking "half" and "a third of the way" very literally ... and ended up with a deformed alien. Because all the measurements they were saying out loud were wrong.)

And then you get the artists who post "tutorials" with "how to draw" in the title and yet they don't even attempt to teach you how to draw, they just show off what they can do.

But there are a fair number of art teachers on YouTube who do explain what they are doing clearly. I'm always pleased to find another one: Richard Smitheman

Watch on YouTube

Look! My human came out human-shaped.

(Please ignore the hands, feet, and head, because he didn't cover that in the tutorial and I mostly gave up.)

Richard Smitheman, tutorial #1

drawesome has a nice prompt this month about diverse body types and I'd really like to try to come up with something for it but I fear I may also spend the entire month practicing the "ideal" body types from all the figure drawing tutorials because until I get a hang of the basics, I can't improvise anything else. (Note that from the point of the view of art tutorials, "ideal" means skinny enough that bony landmarks are visible. It's not even intended as a judgement call by most of them; skinny people and muscular people are easier to draw than average people.)

Comments

[amberdreams]

You're right, finding the best YT tutorials is a bit of a lottery - I always found Proko very good for humans, though he tends to focus on one body part at a time. Thanks for the rec, I'll have to check Richard's out now too.

♥

[eye_of_toad]

Yeah, Proko is a good one. And there's a Mark Crilley video on how to draw an ear that I've re-watched two or three times. (I also have a few favorite art channels that aren't tutorials but are fun to just watch what other artists are doing. I only resent those kinds of videos when they are labeled "how to draw".)