Partway through this week, I began to feel the despair, like maybe I’m not really improving by doing these figure studies. What I’ve been doing is freehand sketching a figure, overlaying it on the original reference to see how close I got, correcting some things, and then doing clean-up and shading passes. What I wasn’t doing was breaking down the figure into forms. I was doing shapes, not forms. I wasn’t training the part of my brain I’m supposed to be with these exercises, the part that tries to understand the 3D form behind the shapes.
The above picture is me taking a step back to work on those skills. The green forms on the left were sketched directly on top of the reference, and then I made a freehand copy of them, which I then refined into a full figure study. The result is a little off model, but I’m actually quite happy with it. Nothing about it jumps out as wrong (with the possible exception of her eyes). It’s a reasonably good human figure sketch.
These others were from earlier in the week.
My color picking still needs work. The pros just make that look so easy.
