Sloths Draw

This is a page with more or less proportional stick figures in various positions and movements.

( all worksafe, my poor stick figures get no adult action... )

This silhouette practice is sort of fanart. I had Nightwing jumping around in Gotham in mind (or maybe Blüdhaven, what with the lack of gargoyles). I did the pencil drawing and then inked it in GIMP and added a fire escape and roof background that's vaguely based on a simplified, inked version of two combined photos:

( silhouettes practice, worksafe )

Finally I tried the texture practice, taking a ball and trying to make it look like different materials, but with pre-inking in mind, i.e. they are supposed to work as b/w rendering. The success varied:

( just balls with different textures )

Again, concrit is very welcome.

I did the third exercise from the last prompts, and picked five complex objects, first drawing them from memory, then looking at references and drawing them again. I chose to draw a beach chair, an electric drill, a turntable, a microscope, and a hole puncher. I c&p'ed all sketches into one image for easier posting, the first attempts on the left, the ones after looking at references on the right.

( cut for sketches of objects, all worksafe and harmless )

Again, concrit is very welcome.

I did the second exercise from the last prompts, and picked two of these seven emotions to draw: confident, uncertain, frustrated, hurt (emotionally), flirtatious, mischievous, and tired. So, can you guess which ones I picked?

( cut for two drawings of faces, both worksafe and harmless )

Concrit is very welcome. Personally, I rather like how the first one turned out, the second not so much (one of the eyes looks really weird), but I decided to post rather than to fret too long.

1. Drawing humans in motion.

One popular method to get a feeling for how a human body looks in action is to practice by drawing correctly proportioned stick figures, like it's illustrated in these pages from "Figure Drawing Without a Model" by Ron Tiner (p. 54 / p. 55) and these from Andrew Loomis book "Figure Drawing For All It's Worth" (p. 39 / p. 40 / p. 41). Of course if you like some other method to simplify humans better, you could use that, or maybe you are already comfortable with human proportions and mass distribution and prefer to draw solid humans right away. Just draw some lively, interesting looking humans in motion, or maybe displaying emotional poses. Or have your stick figures interact with each other, maybe play out a scene.

2. Drawing expressions.

This is an exercise from Scott McCloud's comic Making Comics, but really it's just a list of emotions to draw. It is intentional that this list doesn't consist of the basic facial expressions that are most clearly recognizable (like joy, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust), but fuzzier ones, that are hard to convey unambiguously, especially just with a face and without added poses or gestures. It's taken from page 127:

Pick two expressions from this list, and draw a face to match each:

• confident
• uncertain
• frustrated
• hurt (emotionally)
• flirtatious
• mischievous
• tired

Then give the same list to a friend, along with your drawings, and ask him/her to guess which expression you were going for.

We could do the guessing part in the community as well.

McCloud's overview of drawing expressions is largely based on Gary Faigin's The Artist's Complete Guide to Facial Expression, a book that I really recommend, but in case that you don't have either of these or any other reference on hand, Cedarseed has a useful overview and tutorial for facial expressions online that also breaks down expressions into their components.

3. Drawing objects.

This is another exercise from McCloud's book, from page 57:

Test your visual memory. Try making simple drawings of five complex items from memory (examples: a fire hydrant, your favorite skyscraper, a pair of scissors, a sneaker, a game controller...) Then find the real thing or check the web for photos. Study the differences. Then draw the same items again from memory and see if you can capture them more effectively.

4. Using silhouettes.

I'm always afraid to make any area in my drawings truly black, even when black areas would help set a mood or fit with the composition. One way to use black areas are silhouettes. I scanned a chapter from a Wizard How To Draw book to illustrate the technique and show examples for the use of silhouettes (p. 82 /p. 83 / p. 84 / p. 85). So for this prompt, draw something using a silhouette somewhere in the picture.

5. Drawing textures/materials.

Draw as many different textures/materials as you like, whether in realistic styles or with more abstract graphic renderings (e.g. like inking and crosshatching techniques that are "read" as certain materials). Make things look hard and smooth or soft and fuzzy, shiny metal, or reflecting or transparent, wood or cloth or stone, leather or fur...