Lesson 20-24 The chest cavity.

Since the chest cavity had already been explored in a general sense, I skimmed through these lessons quite quickly and didn't do a great deal of practice on them. You may have noticed a few more sophisticated chest cavity in previous images, aside from that I have a few pages with some more practice sketches of the chest in 3d. Making the stretch from 2d to 3d was a bit difficult at first but after I spent a couple of hours plugging away at it, it has become a bit more natural now.






Please excuse the poetry on one of my sketches, I use alot of surplus printed paper and that one is some poetry by one of my friends, if you find you wish to read more you can go here Avance.

Suddenly, skulls. Millions of them!

What can I say, I was excited, empowered, heard the voice of god commanding me to draw, I dont really know, all I know is that over a period of a couple of days I drew more skulls than I could reasonably count, for no better reason than the fact that I could :D. Of particular note, check out the ultra squashed ones, I am particularly proud of those. You may also notice sketches from lessons not covered here so please ignore them for the time being.

Lesson 15-18 the 3/4 view of the skull

So now that I was starting to get the hang of drawing the side and front views, it was time to bring it all together and draw the 3/4 view proper, you may think that this is the hardest part but it was in fact the opposite, It came together much faster than I imagined. This was another of those eureka moments, after my first couple of 3/4 skulls I realised, "holy shit, I just drew this!", no reference, no copying, no one standing over my shoulder telling me where I went wrong, nothing, just the knowledge in my head, a pencil and a blank piece of paper. I know that I may be ranting about this and all but for someone that has hardly ever examined a skull, let alone drawn one, being able to reproduce one spontaneously is pretty groundbreaking stuff.

Study of the front of the skull and 3/4 view

After a while I bit the bullet and decided to fully document the front of the face and its construction. I just couldn't do it unless I had some refrence to help me along. Suffice to say this did the trick and certainly helped clear up the fuzzy bits in my mind. Because I carried it around in my bag so much the graphite has been smudged alot but you can still make out most the measurements and instructions I noted. Probably one of the best things I ahd done and definitely prevented me from giving up :)

Lesson 12-14 Front and 3/4 view of the head

After my recent success at drawing the side view I was feeling pretty confident, but that was shattered after trying to do these lessons, Moving from the side to the front was more challenging than I expected. It took me a couple of weeks to get this method under my belt properly and really started to test my resolve to do these lessons.




Though it looks like I got the hang of it, duplication without this reference was harder than hard , it was a fucking nightmare!! Ever tried picking up a cat that doesn't want to be picked up? and the little fucker scratches any exposed flesh, almost gets your eye and then fucking runs off? I felt like that after trying to remember how to draw the front of the skull. Bastr'd, so I chilled, tried not to panic and watched the lessons several more times

Formulas for the side view of the head. Lessons8-11

This simply blew me away, by following Riven's guidence, the skull suddenly had definition. After I had finnished lesson 11 and had drawn my characters face (completely different to Riven's I might add), I think my brain released some serious dopomine as a reward. I was chuffed for hours after I was done. :D For those that are curious It took me, from lesson 1, on and off with 2-4 hours work watching and sketching a day, one week to get to this point. It did vindicate alot of what Riven was talking about in his lessons though. I no longer had to take him on faith, the result was right there in front of me. This is when I knew, not thought, knew, i could draw at a level even higher than what I had thought previously. This was a eureka moment.

Getting some answers. Lessons 4-7.

After the last couple of lessons I was sort of wondering what the hell was going on. Why did I make this "invention" as he puts it. With the next lessons I finally started to get those answers and my brain is kind of saying, OOOooooooo...k? The side view, rib cage and so on were starting to make a whole lot of sense with the 8 head formula. If I hadn't been astutely watching a video and reading a book I doubt this would have had the gravity needed to put these pointsacross properly and probably gone over my head as another gimmicky way to draw. Luckily it didn't :) And all the dots and measuring, dividing to get propotion? I "got" that too. It just made so much more sense to me when i could see it and hear it. The picture on the page and in my mind was created for me, not a "before" picture and "after" picture. My mind was almoist ready to scream stop though when it saw Riven trying to make me draw three dimensionally but I coped. Barely :) all in all this page got well loved and is a compilation of about 3-4 hours work at least, don't laugh now, with the rules and formulas I got in my head now I can reproduce these any time I like. I am the stick figure master.... oh yes, fear meee... :D

But seriously, this is where I really started to take Riven and these lessons to heart, my personal philosophy has always been "small steps" and this approach was definitely going to help me become a better drawer.

Note: Because I am MUCH further along than what is seen here, I will be posting two or three of these blogs a day with another picture, this will actually be good for everyone reading because you get to see my results sooner rather than later, but I just wanted to give you guys a heads up incase it seems funny I post so often and imporve so fast, In all honesty, each of the pictures posted are often drawn over 1-3 days on and off and over multiple lessons. As I get closer to where I truly am I will try to keep each lesson to one page where possible. Remember ppl, I started this ambitious little project on the 13th of Febuary 2007, that is a little over two months ago from this post. I am tempted to show you all where I am at ATM but that would just spoil the fun. I'll give you a hint though, I have finnished drawing the skeleton and am onto attaching the muscles to the skull now. So be sure to keep reading, theres alot more to come! ;)

"The Structure of Man" It begins.

This is my very first human figure I have drawn in over 10 years, I had tried hard in high school to make the magic happen and had a few false starts 5 or 6 years ago but since then, nada, all my stuff was either side on or front on and very, VERY average, if I had shown those drawings to children they would have laughed, oh yes, thay would have laughed.

I had once again taken an interest in art the couple of months before i started this first drawing because of another art site, they had free lessons in pdf form but they all mainly focused on drawing from life, shading, cartoony faces and such, "plegh!" I thought and then stumbled accross a link in an art critique forum which had online videos that touted that it can teach you to draw, expertly I might add. I had a quick look, then lost interest because the work I was looking at was way out of my league (ironically the site that said it could teach you to draw from nothing had the hardest lessons at the top of the page) but after a couple of weeks of monotinous "shading and cartooning" from pdf lessons on the other site I came back to it and noticed the first lesson was WELL withing my comfort zone, so I thought, "fuck it" and picked up a pencil.

The man that does these tutorials is called Riven Phoenix, and tapes everything he does on his pad so I was able to follow along which really made it easy to follow. I was a bit skeptical of this first couple of lessons but I played along. Here is my first result, I admittedly found it hard not to laugh at my own ineptitude at this point but hey, whats 20 mins, I had seen the end product material on his site and, well, if this guy is comfortable with making stick figure "inventions" thats fine with me, he must know what hes talking about.... right?


Note the date, I started this on the 13th of Febuary, lets see how long it takes me to become a pro ;)

Welcome

Hello and welcome. My name is Simon aka "Ferret" and I have been an avid lover of various types of art for a long time. So much so I have always wanted to draw the things I see and imagine. The thing is I can't, and for many years have put off, or been unable to find a solid, basic footing so I can learn the basics and really draw without being frustrated or depressed. I'm sure many people know where I'm coming from, you see something on TV or in daily life and say to yourself "damn! that is so cool! I wish I could do that!".

It is only in recent years that I have realised that I CAN do amazing things, my esteem and ego has been hardened and tempered in recent years so that it is no longer a question of "if" and "maybe" I'll do something but more a "how" and "when".

This now brings me to the creation of this blog, it is called Discovering the Structure of Man because it is going to be focused on the blog www.the-structure-of-man.blogspot.com . The site offers detailed drawing tutorials on how to "draw the human figure from your mind", I'll admit I was skeptical and a bit sardonic after previous attempts led to me crashing and burning many years earlier but after a few hours of watching I became hooked. The idea of this blog was inspired by a forum of another person's journey from absolute beginner onwards and the startling progress he made.

It can be seen here ... Journey of an Absolute Rookie: Paintings and Sketches

This is not to say, I have become a fantastic artist or whatever, nor is it to stroke my ego or have it stroked, thats what "deviant art" is for :). It is simply to show my progress to anyone who is interested. And maybe this will inspire you and give you confidence to do something in your life that you feel passionate about. I will be posting photos of my sketches and will briefly comment and note where I am in the structure of man videos. I will post everything from the beginning but as I write this I am nearing lesson 90 of 227 so there is a backlog of sketches that I will post first. Wish me luck.....