Figure Drawing Technique Livechat Joshua Jacobo Free Critiques 10

All right, I've got some new critiques for everybody. Remember, if you would like to have your work critiqued, just go to the New Masters Academy community forums. This is a free service that we're putting on during the crisis. All right, let's get started. Okay, so we've got our first painting here. I really like this. I find it charming. It looks like there's a lot of feeling in it. I get the sense that this was sort of painted with love. We've got sort of a cartoony style here. There's definitely a designing of the shapes going on, and it's not totally flat, like the chin, the nose, the forehead, how that plane breaks. There is a lot of form here, but what I'd like to do with this critique is I'd like to just sort of draw from your drawing in a sort of with a similar sensibility, and I'm just going to push that three-dimensional idea even further. I'm going to show you that oftentimes we don't need to resort to shape. We can get to our shape from a three-dimensional perspective, so all I'm doing here is I am looking at the shapes and the design that you've got, and I'm just trying to justify it three-dimensionally in a way that makes sense, and so I'm using my knowledge of anatomy. I'm using my knowledge of the head, but essentially what I'm trying to do is I'm just trying to build something that's a little more architectural, a little more sculptural, something that is going to help us in our process, and so there obviously are a few issues here that I'm not copying exactly. You know, like the near side eye is very large compared to the far side eye. You've got a really dramatic fall-off in perspective as we move past the center line into space, which probably is a little too much. It's also happening on the far side shoulder. You know, it could be stylistic. There could be a reason, you know, you're doing that, but to me it ends up looking like a telephoto... I'm sorry, a fisheye lens, which is probably, you know, it's... I wouldn't have gone that route with it, so, you know, eyeballs a sphere. You know, it's like in the case of the near side eye. You can see it looks like a sphere kind of on the left side, but on the right side it just stretches in such a way that doesn't feel like there's a sphere in there. You know, the mouth wraps around the cylinder, like you've got the shape of it, but, you know, I don't have the sense that there's one corner that's wrapping around to another corner. I think you did a pretty good job on the chin on how you did that, and I like the way you tucked these jowls down into the neck. I thought that was done really well, but just we can push it a little bit more, you know. We can build everything, and thinking three-dimensionally can actually become our default way of thinking artistically, and so we can correct these shapes, and we can do a lot of three-dimensional drawing as sort of a rehearsal for our final lines that go over the top. But, you know, even in how the collar, you know, wraps around, we want that follow-through. You want to feel like it's actually going up and around the neck, and then it's coming back, and the more we can push that, the easier it's going to be for us to light these forms and model these forms. You know, like if you have this scaffolding underneath, let's say this was a very lightly, you know, drawn or it was painted underneath, then as you can see here as I'm showing, figuring out where the lighting should be, even if this is totally from imagination, and even if this is not the lighting you have in your reference, we can easily decide where that is. We're not going to struggle as much with that because we've figured out the three-dimensional form, we've solved these problems, we've thought our way through it, and so my advice to you is going to be to do that. A little bit more three-dimensional construction and a little bit less of the designing with shape. And you can come in here, like you could come and correct these shapes, but you've already got forms, which is nice. This drawing's fantastic. I just wanted to start actually by pointing out something that you do really well here that most of us miss, which is that you're wrapping your features and your forms around the head convincingly and in basically correct perspective, and that's tricky to do. And obviously, you know, you could probably take this even further than you have, you know, for example, so we've got a suggestion of how the jaw is, but there's a difference between the jaw and the actual masseter muscles. We could add the hyoid bone, you know, maybe we could, you know, compress a little bit the line up there of the brow. Maybe we're showing the bottom plane and the antihelix of the ear a little bit differently, but you're doing the right thing, like you're killing it there, so keep going like that. But my critique for you has to do with how you're handling these values, because what I'm noticing is that your halftones on the light side are getting too close in value to the values of the shadow side, and so what I'm going to do here is I'm just going to try to find sort of where you have put your core shadow, and I'm doing this with hatching. This is how I usually draw. You can do it any way, and so now I'm filling in what's supposed to be an even tone. Obviously, I'm doing this pretty quickly here in Procreate, but I'm going to fill in with an even tone, and then once that tone's in, and once it's visually grouping more as the shadow group, then I can come in and I can add darks, whether that's local color, like the beard, which I'm imagining, you know, something like this is going on here. I can go on the light side even and find some darks to actually frame the head, so now I've got a dark on either side of the face, and it frames the face, and I can find the darks of, you know, occlusion shadows, like the eye, between the eyelids and the nostril, and then, you know, for the halftones here, now I can, in a more controlled way with my values, come in and I can model these forms three-dimensionally, and so this is sort of the approach. I mean, not so much the way I'm doing the drawing, but in terms of the steps, this is the approach that Mark Westermo teaches, you know, it's illustration drawing, basically, and I recommend you take his course and also Chris Legaspi to study that a little bit more, because I think you can benefit from that. So this drawing's awesome. I love the texture. I love the rendering of it. I think, I mean, I think it's undeniable this is just a cool drawing. It looks like you have done Steve Houston's advanced figure drawing. Yeah, the rendering technique is very cool. So I think, though, we're having a little bit of construction issues, like the center line, things aren't quite adding up, the far side scapula is not really, it doesn't seem like it would really be there, and so my recommendation is also going to be my critique demonstration here for you, which is that I want you to do Renaissance Figure Drawing course by Glenn Vilkow, because this process, which is gesture and construction and building the figure from the inside out, would benefit you in the technique that you're doing, and hopefully I can show you that. So, I mean, I'm losing the foot right now. I don't think it's a good idea to have a foot just popping out from behind, you know, it looks funny, it looks flat, so maybe there's, you know, we could change the pose a little bit, but for the purposes of this, I'm just going forward, so I'm just going to move forward. So I'm trying to find the ribcage, I'm trying to find where the scapulae, where they would lie, how the ribcage is going to, you know, insert and relate to the pelvis. One thing I noticed, just looking at your drawing and trying to replicate it, is that that scapula is too wide versus how tall it is. The dimensions of the spine of the scapula versus the height of the body should be around the same, and yours seems stretched, which is okay, maybe you're trying to get that dramatic look. I mean, even Michelangelo did a very similar thing in some of his work, but I am noticing that, so I ended up sort of just going with what you have in terms of your scapula, more or less, but as you think your way through it, if you're drawing more like this, at least as an underdrawing, let's say, and you're thinking your way through these forms more, you start to get a sense of where the dynamics are, where it's pushing, you know, where the weight is, how it's moving, and most importantly, where all the surfaces are, because you're trying to do this really cool effect, you know, it's almost like a cityscape, an abstract cityscape, or like a turner. It reminds me of some Chinese art that I've seen, but you're trying to do this effect, and so you need to know where the darks are, otherwise the effect won't work. So it's abstract, but it needs to be, like, based in some kind of reality. So what I'm trying to show you here is that if you build from the inside out, it will be easier for you to figure out where your shadow side is going to be, and what that form is doing, and so in some of your areas where you've got these lines, or the construction underneath doesn't quite make sense, you could clean that up a lot, and I think that would really benefit your work. So you can see here, like, I mean, it's a no-brainer. You could also change the light, you could change the pose, you could draw from imagination this way, but it gives you the ability to really to figure out what's going on, because there are so many areas, and, like, these subtle tones that you've got there, it gives the illusion of that you're looking at something that's real, too. Like, also, like, same thing with, like, highly rendered academic art. You get the sense you're looking at something real because of the subtle values that you see, but if you look closer, it doesn't quite work, you know, like, there's construction problems there. So I think if you were to construct internally a little bit more, and you would practice that, and you would think about the gesture coming from the inside a little bit more, you could pull this effect off better. Beautiful work. Okay, another super advanced, beautiful piece. This reminds me of a piece I critiqued by Alex that was also really advanced. Also, this does look like you've done the, you know, the Russian academic drawing course on our website. So you also have, there's also some things that are not part of that course that I think, you know, you're doing well here as well. It's not just that. But my advice to you is actually similar to the advice I gave Alex, which is that if you're going to do this sort of carved, three-dimensional style, then you have to have a little bit more anatomy, anatomical understanding. So, you know, in this case, the overlap you had of how the deltoid was inserting onto the arm, it was going behind the biceps, which is wrong, has to go in front. So I'm just showing you a little bit of how you would have to kind of think, you'd have to think your way through some of these problems using that anatomical knowledge. So, also, this is not a big deal, but the eyes seem a little bit high to me, maybe. It actually kind of gives it a caricature kind of look, which maybe you were going for. But yeah, this area is tricky. You know, another thing I'm noticing is it looks like latissimus dorsi doesn't quite seem like it would be able to get, wrap around and get to its origin the way you've drawn it, because it's got to get to the back of the pelvis there, the high point. And so there might be an issue there. Also, I'm sort of thinking of serratus anterior, and I'm not really feeling like the latissimus is bulging to move over those muscles the way that maybe it should. So since I sort of drew a few parts of the deltoid, there's actually seven parts, but usually we think of them as three. I'm going to just diagram really quickly. So like, here's a simple idea of a clavicle that's inserting into the scapula. There's teres major. Here's the humerus coming forward. And then, so we've got this rear head here. We have a head coming off of the acromion. And then we've got the lateral third of the clavicle. We've got a head coming off of that as well. And then we've got pectoralis, which is coming off of the medial head third of the clavicle. So I'll just diagram this for you from above. So we've got the S-curve of the clavicle. Why is it S-curve? Well, it's got to wrap around your neck so you don't choke yourself when you lift your arms. It's like bicycle handles. Then we've got the spine of the scapula that's coming back this way. It sort of creates like a bow and arrow shape if you were to mirror it. And then off of the acromion process, it shows the major breaks of these groups of muscles here. So those are the origins of the deltoid, the parts of the deltoid. And here is the origin of where pectoralis should come off of. So in this case, you've got that area is huge in your drawing. I think you'd have to model that out a little bit more. You'd have to think your way through a little bit. Also, I have no problem losing form in shadow if it's the background, if it makes sense. But in this case, it's right there in the core of your drawing. And so it's also key. It's like this compression of how he's sitting seems very important. So I wouldn't do it in this case. I would go in there and figure it out. Yeah, some of this line work is really nice. So yeah, a little bit more anatomical structure, thinking your way. You're three-dimensional in how you're carving these sides out. But you need to be more three-dimensional in the anatomical forms. So one thing I'm noticing, obviously, is he's sitting here on a block. And the feet are planted on the ground. The knees are forward. The pelvis is flat. The shoulders are coming over. And the arms are making contact with the legs in the same point. In other words, this whole pose is symmetrical, which can be interesting. You take something asymmetrical and organic, like a human figure, and you make it symmetrical. That can be interesting. Although, I think it'd probably be more interesting if, just like design repetition and variation, that you would also do something else. But one thing I noticed, though, is that one construction line, as you can see here, is not lining up with the others. It's not working in the structure you've set on these elbows. So I think what we're going to need to do... So you're setting the rules. It's your universe. If you're saying that all of this stuff is symmetrical, but the elbow is violating that rule, it's just like if you were drawing a head and the eyes, nose, but then the mouth wasn't following the same construction line. So I'm just going to stretch it out here and get this to sort of line up with the rules of your drawing world that you've created. So we can rotate the upper arm to sort of make that work. We're going to rotate this area. I think that, yeah, if you're going to go for this sort of symmetrical situation, and this whole thing is, you know, it's in one point perspective. If you're going to do that, then you're probably going to need to be a little bit more precise. Like, you don't want to let anything slip. And I would go and check even more than what I've done here. I'd check sort of everything to see how it's lining up. It is interesting that the head is in a profile, even though the rest of the body we're seeing from above and to the left, that tells me that maybe the face is, the neck's actually turning, but yet I'm not getting any lines on the neck that show me that. So the head's actually not really going with the body in that way. Also, you know, you're sort of giving us this block, and we know that the, you know, the heels are back against that. But then if that's the case, then the feet are not in the correct perspective. So we need to bring that foot forward. So, I mean, awesome work, really, really advanced stuff. If you're going to go with this sort of architectural one point perspective symmetry sort of idea, then I think we just need to be a little bit more consistent with it and make sure that we're, you know, that we're mastering that. The other, yeah, the other thing that I was saying is that a little more anatomical structure. So like, for example, we're sort of missing the pectoralis where it would be inserted on that far side arm. I think we can get that. I think we can work out a little bit more how the torso is coming together. But yeah, fantastic work. And it's really fun to critique. Keep drawing and keep sharing your work, please.