Figure studies Ahoy

Lots of figure exercises here folks. Time to get things rolling. There's several weeks of material I'm going to cover in this post and I'm not even uploading all the exercises and practice that I've done so best to get started. 

 

 

First up we have samples of the bean and the robo bean! Exercises from a fellow who goes by the name of Proko on youtube. Check him out, his free videos have been a great help in doing these exercises and improving my understanding of figure drawing. There are a ton of gesture drawings and the like that I do every day but the bean and robo bean help simplify and abstract the figure to help you think about positioning of the body and the extremely basic planar geometry of it all. I use these for warm ups alongside the gesture work and it's been a big help. This is just a small sample.

 

The whole point of the bean and robo-bean exercises is to learn to turn the body into a mannequin type figure for ease of drawing. These are a couple of exercises in that direction. I even did a couple of studies focused on turing the body from different angles. That one was more of a guided exercise. I guess in some ways the top two ones are both more guided. The bottom two pages aren't and out of those, I feel like the woman I have on the bottom right is the most successful. The big problem with that one is that the neck isn't long enough unfortunately.

These studies were longer and more detailed. I went from the mannequin phase to something more detailed. I feel like I'm getting a stronger sense of the musculature involved. The only issue I have with this one is that I don't feel like the width of this model really came through. In the reference he's a MASSIVE man. I feel I may have made him a bit too lean here but it was really easy to see how the musculature all interconnects on this guy. 

To close it out several nose studies. Im continuing working on improving my portraiture and I'm starting by breaking down the face into its features. We'll be moving on to other studies soon but right now eyes, noses and lips are the order of the day and I've been studying several different types of noses. it's such a weird body part. 

Last we have some eye studies. I also did a quick color work up of one just for my own practice on going from black and white to color. I learned a few things I've been doing wrong and have to keep in mind in the future.