Silver Pandorica wrote:Thank you! I'm worried that if I try to learn perspective while not having a good grasp on the actual shapes, it would confuse things. Is perspective still helpful while I'm still struggling with basic anatomy and shapes? <3
Oh, yes, absolutely! Even if you're stills struggling, learning perspective can actually help you with your shapes too! It forced you to experiment, and helps you recognize certain shapes like "oh, this kinda looks like a small rectangle in here", whilst also teaching you to align features like, eyes, nose, mouth details, and how they respond to angles and how the body or tilts move. So even if you're learning shapes, learning perspective can help you do that as well, because it also teaches you to break those shapes down. I've been trying to learn perspective with the following things I've done:
x x x x x xand what I find out, or just find in general, that.. Like, really helps me is that because - if you see my lego stuff, you see that I'm working a lot with shapes, and because it's not accurate lego you can see those shapes are very rough and recognizable in my current skillset of drawing lego Mimi figures. so working with more basic or most basic shapes will really help you recognize toy, human, animal, etc anatomy. Because we're all just a bunch of walking shapes mashed together to make a human body. understanding kind of what you're working with can help you learn it. for example my strawpurry
(made by SpeedyJay, whom also made a bit of a how to draw humans tutorial at my request a while back), he's literally just a strawberry with legs and a kitty face and ears and I love him dearly. so what I did was literally just think about the shape of strawberries, or the shape of one strawberry that represents his body and I literally started with a circle and added a torpedo tip for a butt. and then I was looking a his ref and the shape of his limbs, but also thinking about the anatomy of a cat, and just applying the stylized reference to him
I can't draw humans but I have been doodling hands a lot as of late. since last summer, I think, and I've just been using my hand for a reference and recognizing that it's nothing but a glorified meat paddle, so you're see a square, a triangle on the thumb bits maybe, depend son the shape of the hand you're drawing-- sorry, tangent
Just don't overthink it, keep it simple and loose, don't stress or worry too much and recognize you're still learning. Even though you HAVE experience you'll always be learning no matter how pro you are - and that's gonna continue to advance you. and don't be afraid to use your old art of humanoids for reference because it could help sometimes; whether help you notice what's missing, or what you did last time that you're trying ot repeat and etc