How the **** do you draw a realistic human??

[Blind Pew]

I cannot get it right, any tips that ANYONE has would be most welcome.

thanks

[David]

There is a great book on this subject that you can read for free online.

[Endoperez]

You have to practice a lot.

How good a drawer are you? If you can't draw yet, I suggest looking for the book "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" by Betty Edwards. It explains some base things that are so simple most drawers forget they didn't always know. It's very basic, and the book promises more than most people get out of it, but it's still very good.

You also have to practice a lot.

If you aren't familiar with perspective, I suggest eventually reading about that as well.

In case you want to draw a lot, PoseManiacs is a great site that helps you do that.

http://www.posemaniacs.com/pose/thirtysecond.html
Drawing fast. If you want to be able to draw from real life, you have to learn to capture the intent and the basic shape and the basic movement of a person very, very fast. Making lots of quick drawings also helps you just draw without thinking about it too much, which (according to Betty Edwards' book) will give you better results.

http://www.posemaniacs.com/pose/negativespace.html
Negative space means the space between shapes. When you draw an outline of a chair, you also drew the outlines of the shapes that are not chair. If you draw an outline of a window frame, you also drew the outline of the window's glass pane. Seeing the negative spaces will help you draw profiles and silhouettes.

http://www.posemaniacs.com/pose/randomviewer.html
Random pose viewer without time limit. You can enable a grid, which helps you compare relative lengths and such.

http://www.posemaniacs.com/tools/perspective/pv1.html
One-point perspective visualization tool. I don't read Japanese, so I have no idea why they have this on their site.

http://www.posemaniacs.com/tools/handviewer/
Hand viewer, where you can practice drawing hands. The first object is a man's torso, for some reason, but just choose something else from the menu in the right. You can rotate the hands be left-clicking.



I started practising drawing about, hmm, perhaps two-and-a-half years ago. Back then, I couldn't draw at all. I'm very proud to tell that I'm already a poor drawer, a great improvement. If I had drawn more, even 2 hours/week, I'd be more than a poor drawer. So start drawing. If you get bored, try drawing without an eraser, when try drawing with a pen, then try drawing with your left hand, etc. Just keep drawing.

You can learn by copying, but if you only copy you'll only learn to copy. So draw more than you copy and/or trace, if you do that at all.

Finally, this guy is my favourite artist ever. Others might be better, but he's the reason I wanted to learn to draw. He can draw stories and jokes into a single image, and that must be fun.
http://www.elfwood.com/~andersson/profile.html
Here's one of his images I always link to in threads like this:
http://andersson.elfwood.com/Some_sort_ ... 24382.html

P.S. You might want to draw a lot.

[Blind Pew]

thanks, I'll check out those links. I have read pieces of "Drawing on the right side of the brain" and I found it very helpful. I should probably look through that book more.

[Froyok]

Hmmm, training, training, et again... training.
It's the best solution, I draw for a long time, and it is as it comes.

[Endoperez]

thanks, I'll check out those links. I have read pieces of "Drawing on the right side of the brain" and I found it very helpful. I should probably look through that book more.

If you want to read something, I suggest following the link David posted. Edwards' book is nice, but Loomis is really something else. I can tell you that reading alone won't help. I tend to read more than I draw, and I'm not learning very fast.

[Grayswandir]

I've found that drawing a stick or a bubble figure as an outline helps me get the proportions right. I'm always drawing legs too long though.

[Glabbit]

Heh.. proportion is just about the only thing I can call myself moderately good at when drawing humans. Apart from maybe expressions. I've always been complimented on my expressions. But they're a lot easier to do on stickmen, rather than full-body humans. I always get the eyes wrong D: Not to mentions the teeth, the hands, the feet, the... the everything other than the proportions.

[Untadaike]

I love to draw faces, not worrying about realism. I think I'm okay. Sometimes I cry when I don't like my drawing... only jk, lol, wtf.

[Grayswandir]

Stopy lying, we know those bottles of "fresh spring water" in your fridge are actually all the tears you've saved.

[Untadaike]

Stopy lying, we know those bottles of "fresh spring water" in your fridge are actually all the tears you've saved.

Ha ha, nice. Yeah, I drink them! (Eww, what if I get tears I've saved mixed up with the urine I've saved, ha ha, immature humor ftw ).

[Zhukov]

How the **** do you draw a realistic human??

Sadly, this is not something you can learn in an afternoon. However, here are some general tips. Obviously, these are all easier said then done.
Memorize your proportions.
This is arguably the easiest part. In fact, you probably could learn this in an afternoon. However, it will take some time before you can do it automatically.
Correct placement of facial features.
Harder then it sounds. People are used to analyzing faces in day-to-day life. This makes us really good at spotting flaws in a drawing of a face. So any mistakes you make will stand out.
Get the hang of volume.
Keep in mind that a drawing of a person (and nearly anything else) is a two-dimensional representation of shapes that have three dimensions. This is really important when depicting people in complicated poses.

I highly recommend the Andrew Loomis book that David linked. Don't be put off because it's a bit old. It has detailed instructions on all of the above and much more. I also recommend the book 'Fun with a Pencil' by the same author. It's a bit silly, but it was written specifically for beginners and contains a really helpful method for drawing human faces.

On top of that, there is of course that trite but true piece of advice that every beginner hates to hear: practice makes perfect.

Finally, this guy is my favourite artist ever. Others might be better, but he's the reason I wanted to learn to draw. He can draw stories and jokes into a single image, and that must be fun.

Well hullo. Someone else who knows of Mr Andersson.

I do so like his drawings. They're delightfully silly and, well... just plain fun. Sufficiently so that he can get away with stuff that usually really irritate me.

[Blind Pew]

Sadly, this is not something you can learn in an afternoon.

I just learned it in about ten minutes. Now I can do it on command, whenever I want.

[sophiesophie]

Find a reliable critic. My sister has an amazing eye for spotting flaws in my drawing that I would not have seen until later. Fix the mistakes. Also The more you practice, the better you get. Also tracing helps, just don't say that something you trace is your just because you ' drew it'. I sometimes trace things before I draw, and that seems to help me draw better. A good book i read on anatomy if you need anatomy help was Human Anatomy Made Amazingly Easy by Christopher Hart. It helped a lot.