d r a g o n b o n e s    

It probably comes as no surprise that I love figure drawing studio sessions. The human form is amazing in its complexity, variety, and also its similarities. Talk to any professional about ‘tips for making it big’ and inevitably the first thing they will mention is practice, practice, and some more practice.

Wanna draw comics or fantasy art? Better learn to draw the human figure. Best possible way to do that? Figure drawing studios.

Yes yes. I know. Sure – you can use Google Image Search to find pictures as reference. While that’s great, there are a number of reasons why it’s just not quite as good as a live model. Some examples are:

• They are 2 dimensional images. You get a lot more information when the model is real, in 3 dimensions, and interacting with their environment.
• You can change the lighting with a live model.
• While there have been many an advance in digital photography, color depth and variety still aren’t there in bitmap images used on the net.

Northern Delaware Area Figure Drawing Sessions

Philadelphia

• Studio Incamminati  – Sundays 1pm – 4pm ($12)
• Sketch Club – Saturdays 9:30am – 12:30pm ($9 – $8 for members – $6 with valid student ID)
• Plastic Club - Fridays 6:30pm – 9:30pm | Saturdays 9:30 AM – 12:30 PM (moving model!) | Saturdays 1pm – 4pm ($8)
• PAFA Wednesdays 6:30pm – 9:30pm ($5)

Chester County and Delaware County

• Chester County Art Association – Mondays 7pm-10pm (Members only – $15)
• Community Arts Center – A variety of options – see link
• Main Line Art Center – A variety of options – see link
• Wayne Art Center – A variety of options – see link
• Delaware Art Museum – 1st and 3rd Mondays of the month 6:30pm – 8:30pm ($5) *This is a personal favorite, and I personally attend whenever my schedule allows

Every now and again, I find myself with some free time.

No really. It’s rare, but it does happen.

When that happens, I like to offer up the opportunity for folks to pay what they want for commissions.

You did, in fact, read that correctly. Pay what you want. If that’s $1, then it’s $1. If that’s $5,000,000? Well, I’ll try really hard to make the art live up to the commission price.

How It Works

1. Confirm that my Commission status (on the right) is set to OPEN.
2. Confirm that the Pay What You Want option (PWYW) is also set to OPEN. (Please note: if this option is NOT set to open when you request the work, I reserve the right to refund your money. This likely means that time is tight, but not tight enough to close commissions completely.)
3. Use the Donate via Paypal button in the upper right corner of this page to send me your commission fee.
4. Contact me via my contact form. Let me know the following information via the form:
1. What you’re commissioning me to draw. Be as descriptive as possible! The more information you give me, the closer I can come to drawing what’s in your head.
2. How much you sent me for the commission, and what email address you sent it from. This is to help avoid any criss crossing for multiple commissions or commissioners.
5. I will email you to confirm that I have received both the information and the commission money. I will likely have a sketch attached to this email. If I plan on doing more work/revisions, I’ll ask you to confirm that I’m headed in the right direction based on the sketch. If I feel that the sketch is complete, I’ll let you know in this email.
6. I welcome your thoughts/comments/critiques.

Please Note: I reserve the right to do as much or as little as I feel is warranted by your commission fee. If you feel that my work is only worth $1 (or if that’s all you can spare) then you’re not likely to get an illustration that took me 15 hours to complete. I will, however, likely give you more than your money’s worth in general – I do have a reputation to uphold.

Giving yourself pre-defined limitations is often the fastest way to improve your art skills. It gets you to think outside the box and improvise. You don’t grow your leg muscles by sitting on the sofa and you don’t grow your art muscles by doing the same kind of art day in and day out.

Recognizing this, I’ve decided to make a big portion of these posts into a collection of art exercises for folks to try out as just one more way to improve. Tutorials are great, but exercises force us to put what we learn in those tutorials into practice.

What You Need

Really, you could use whatever medium you like for this exercise, but the idea here is stealth, so you’ll often find that smaller is better. A pocket sized sketchbook and a simple pen or pencil is my usual set of tools when doing this particular exercise. Aside from your tools, you will need a place to work that has lots of people. Diners, malls, and festivals are favorites of mine.

How It Works

The idea here is quite simple. Try drawing someone’s portrait without them noticing you. If they see you working on their likeness, then you ‘lose’ the exercise.

How This Helps You

This exercise helps you improve in a few directions:

1. It helps to make you social. Many artists are loners by their nature. We’re observers of our society. I know that I often find myself hidden away somewhere for a few moments of peace and quiet. If left to my own devices, I might do this a bit too often. This exercise helps to prevent that. In the event that you ‘lose’ with one person, you will often find yourself talking to that person about your work. You might even make a new friend. Which leads us to…
2. It helps you to market your artwork. I’ve known a number of different types of artists over the years and not many of them have been good at marketing their artwork. Artists want to focus on making art. That much is understandable. But making connections with other people is often when gets the art sold. Selling the artwork allows the artist to keep making art. The cycle breaks if any of these components are missing, and this exercise is on great way to make those connections that often help sell artwork – even if indirectly.
3. It helps you to prioritize. We often get caught up when we’re working on an image. It’s easy to get overly focussed on the curve of this person’s chin, or the general shape of that person’s hair. Drawing in this ‘guerilla’ fashion makes you get down the necessities fast. Gesture lines are all the more critical to capture someone’s expression.

It’s time for a little art work out. One of the features I plan to make a regular component of the posts here is a series of exercises to grow your artistic muscles.

The Why

I really do think of artistic skill as being much akin to muscles. It seems the perfect analogy to me. Some people are blessed with the genetics to have a good physique (think ‘natural talent’). Just as even those fortunate few can grow unhealthy if they spend all their time on the couch, so too can even talented artists grow… weak if they don’t exercise that talent.

The What – A Page Full of Figures

Draw a collection of random figures in as many different poses you can fit on the page. Work on getting unusual poses – not the traditional ‘look at me posing for the camera’ stuff that is so rampant in comic books.

Try different body types. Thin, thick, tall, and short.

The idea here is to keep going. Keep filling the spaces left between figures until you feel the page is packed. This will give you ideas for unusual poses based on the odd shapes between the existing figures.

How This Helps

This exercise is good for a number of things, but the main ways it benefits you are:

• Gets you to try new poses – It’s all too easy to fall into a routine when it comes to how to pose characters.
• Helps you to keep things loose – filling the space and working with new and different poses makes it easy to keep moving from one figure to the next.
• Helps you learn to improvise proportions and body shapes – with the more unusual of the poses are not like the reference photos you may have already collected. It gives you a chance to work on something you can’t (or at least are not likely to) have reference for, and that’s great for building art muscles.

Protip: To work yourself a little harder, have the figures interact. One figure might be swinging from the arm or another. Another figure might be standing on the shoulders of a fourth. (Yes, I realize that I failed to do some of the things I mentioned here, but I was working fast during my lunch break today… )

As a wrap up to this series on drawing the Basic Human Face (part 1 | part 2) I wanted to add a little nuance to the face we’ve built out.

Creating the Map

Using the center line and matching points on the interior of the ears, I created some angles to show the curvature of the cheeks. You can see how the intersection points create a map of sorts for added details in the following image.

I find that using lines and vertices like this help immensely when drawing likenesses, which I’ll get into in more detail in a later post. Suffice to say that it’s a good habit to get into, and it makes it clear why folks have always told me that ‘artists are good at geometry’. This, for the record, is not always the case – just ask my high school geometry teacher.

Adding the Deets

Here you can see the added details I used the guidelines for. Simple delineation of the cheek bones and smile lines fall easily along the intersection points of my guides.

Protip: While it’s not exactly this simple, a good thing to keep in mind is this: the more detail you add to a face, the older the person looks. This easy trick makes it a simple matter to make a character look old or young – just by adding or removing additional information from our illustrations. Notice how much older this character looks just from the image above?

I also altered the poor guy’s haircut, because the simple ‘dome cut’ from above was making me nuts.

What other details could we add to this face? How would we map them out beforehand to know where to place those features?