Term 1: Figure Drawing I & Head Anatomy I
I skipped “Drawing Basics” of the streemlined Radiorunner Curriculum because I was already doing Draw-a-box in line with the old version and I went straight into Figure Drawing I and Head Anatomy I. I had already dome some studying of loomis and watching the Proko head series on youtube as well. So that part was a bit of a review for me, but around this time (IIRC) Alex had released the new streamlined curriculum so I wanted to start as close to the beginning as possible to avoid confusion.
Figure Drawing I
For Figure Drawing I, the goal was to watch all the love life drawing videos on youtube and then do the 2019 Figuary Challenge where you do live drawing session using videos (which are no longer free, sadly) from Croquis Cafe to draw a long. Lots of gesture drawing and live figure drawing.
Head Anatomy I
Head Anatomy I’s goal was watching the Proko portrait drawing videos on youtube and then doing Ahmed Aldoori 100 head challenge where you draw every head in a special Pinterest board he created. You can still find the 100 head video and board if you search for it.
Using the same board as everyone doing the challenge gives you an opportunity to see the same heads drawn by people of different skill levels. (You can search on the #100headschallenge still and find people’s drawings). I love drawing portraits so I spent a lot of time on this challenge. You’re supposed to draw 10 heads a day for 10 days, however I took my time and only did about 4 or so per day.
Each head took about 20–30 minutes. As you can see I was till using paper and pencil primarily at this point. I don’t think it’s a must to start on paper but I do think that it’s easier because you aren’t fighting with any interpolation from software or quirks from hardware. I used some blending stumps but tried to move away from that towards the end, I forget why. Blending stumps are fun to use though.
As you can probably tell I enjoy drawing portraits. I became quite good at drawing from references. I think I’ve always had good hand-eye-coordination though.
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I spent way too long on this but I enjoyed the results which I think is important. Sometimes the difference between a bad drawing and a good drawing is the amount of time you spend on it.
Notes
I should mention that around this time I also did Robert Marzullo’s How to Draw Heads from Any Angle gumroad videos. I was struggling to learn the loomis method and his course was much easier for me to understand at that stage than Proko. I also got his anatomy course and worked through that as well. This was the start of my obsession with anatomy as I also bought Marc Brunet’s Ultimate Anatomy curriculum from his Art School program.
Final thoughts
I love drawing portraits and I had a lot of fun doing the 100 heads challenge. I would love to do it again with digital paintings some day. I also should mention that Proko’s head drawing course was a bit hard to follow as a beginner and that’s one of the main complaints I have about Proko. He was/is kind of out of touch with what it’s like to not know anything about drawing. I felt, at the time, that his explanations were hard to follow and he kind of assumes you already know some of the basics and you’ll just get it easily (I find this to be a common trait amongst artists that got good at a very young age, they don’t remember the struggle). I only used his free videos. I do recommend checking them out though, since they are free.
For figure drawing, I started with gestures as was recommended. I did proko’s figure course on youtube as well. That plus Love Life Drawing’s videos helped a lot. However, now I think that starting with gestures is very difficult and perhaps not the best way to start drawing figures. LLD has a new free method, called Fresh Eyes, that is much easier understand and use in my opinion. I would definitely start there before doing gestures or line of action.
One thing I learned around this time was not to rely on one resource for everything. Sometimes a teacher might suck at explaining one thing, but be good at another. So Proko for example has some really good videos (his anatomy videos for example), but other teachers might have better videos on other subjects. Also sometimes you need to see or hear it multiple times from more than one source before it starts to sink in. You also might just click with one resource or teacher better than another.
I also want to mention that I started doing a lot of warm ups because I found that warming up first not only made a big difference in the quality of my drawings, but also in how I felt about drawing — my mental health. It lead to me enjoying it a lot more.
Here’s a look at my weekly schedule at the time. As you can see I always try to spend time warming up first. I think warming up is very important. It’s a great way to keep reinforcing the fundamentals. I believe it also helps you avoid feelings of frustration that come from not knowing how to start. Sometimes the first drawing or two look bad, or you feel they suck just because you’re going in cold. For example here with Head Anatomy I, I decided to do a page of loomis heads from reference as quick sketches (1–2min, sometimes up to 5min) first as a warm up.
So the first thing I did was practice the fundamental construction for about 30 minutes. Then I draw some heads for the challenge. Much easier, and produces much better results than if I had just jumped right into drawing the heads for the 100 head challenge.
