Sloths Draw

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...

slothsdraw is a community for people who want to practice drawing more regularly, and would like the framework and support of a group to help them stick with their resolution.

Once a week there will be a post with prompts and suggestions for drawing exercises. Members can then pick and choose one or more of those to draw, and post their results (or don't do anything, it's not homework after all). There is no formal commitment to draw anything in reponse to the prompts since this community is not supposed to be stressful, but it is intended as a place for artists not lurkers, so don't join if you don't intend to ever draw anything.

Any member can suggest such prompts and exercises for the weekly posts and thus help out with ideas for practicing.

Membership is moderated, but anyone whose journal doesn't look like a troll's (e.g. newly created, empty journals that aren't obviously secondary or backup journals to another established one, like it would be the case if someone's main journalling account just wasn't on IJ) is welcome to join.

Both original and fan art are welcome. There are no restrictions in this community on posting adult content, but members should indicate whether a drawing is only appropriate for an adult audience. Specific warnings are not required, but optional if an artist wishes to clarify why they consider the content to be mature, for example.

All art posted to the community must be placed behind an LJ cut or just linked. Previews outside LJ cuts are only allowed if they are small, i.e. more or less thumbnail sized. Also, any preview images chosen should be suitable for general audiences ("worksafe").

Members can decide whether they prefer to f-lock their posts, or to make their art public depending on their own comfort level. It's also up to the individual poster whether they want to invite concrit and discussion of their art to learn from each other (obviously how successful asking for concrit will be depends on how active the community turns out to be), or rather let their drawings stand as they are.

Rules in short:

• only join if you intend to participate at least sometimes
• put all art you post behind a cut tag
• label adult content, and keep any preview images small and worksafe
• f-locking art is optional, and up to the poster
• inviting discussion/concrit is also optional, so artists should indicate whether they want that kind of feedback in their post