My 3 Year Journey with Figures & Anatomy

This will be a long post but I want to detail the highlights of my improvement so far.

Images marked with “Imaginative” were largely (if not completely) based on imagination, where the others were heavily based on reference. I’m talking like…HEAVILY based on ref.

As you swipe through the images, they will get more and more recent, and improve in quality and understanding. However, there is a BIG jump right between 2020 and 2021. This is because I got fed up with my drawings during Inktober 2020. During that month of intense drawing, I realized how much I enjoyed drawing figures, but also how Inexperienced I was. It was frustrating.

As you can see with the January 2021 post, there are numbers next to the drawings. This is because I decided to draw 1000 detailed Figures in a short time period, averaging anywhere from 5-12 per day. I only got to 350, but the improvement is clear.

However, later on I realized that the only way I would be happy with my work is by drawing from imagination, at a similar skill level. Trying, and failing incredibly to draw from imagination after doing so many figure drawings led me to believe that I had not studied properly those few months. There was no other option. 350 appealing drawings from challenging references? And I can barely draw a simple character standing straight up? I was CLEARLY doing something wrong. I finally learned what would be the beginning of the rest of my journey, along with the core message of this Patreon.

First, realize that I couldn’t have gotten to the July 2021 drawings, without learning from the failiures of the past. In learning what did not work, I learned to change my strategy. Failing to draw characters from memory after 350 different drawings is a very, very comprehensive learning experience that you don’t get from messing around each day. I learned that the only way I could learn to do what I want, was to simply do exactly that (draw from imagination) take note of my struggles in great detail, and focus any studies on improving each little thing, one by one, then painfully testing my recall on a regular basis.

There are many, many nuances to all of this that I am looking forward to sharing with you in the tutorials and lessons provided in this Patreon. I hope the progress is inspiring for you all and believe me, you can do the same. I spent the first 20+ years of my life copying and tracing references 1-1. I’m still learning how to be creative and what I actually want to share with my art. Even my greatest skill, drawing faces is around 10% of what it should be when I don’t have reference. We are all in this journey together, with different starting points. However, that doesn’t mean we have to go a single week or month without making some sort of progress we are proud of when we make that the focus, instead of getting likes and other fleeting forms of validation.

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.