Human-drawing advice?

What the title says.
 
I have many issues with drawing Humans. I want some tutorials on how to get them drawn in a decent amount of time and make them look good. Eyes are on of the worst problems. Can’t ever get the shape.
 
I can’t draw cartoon humans. I mean, I can, but I can’t. It’s an obsession. The only ‘cartoon’ thing I can do are ponies. I guess I’m a perfectionist. My humans have to look as realistic as possible. When I try to do anything but, I freak out and start over, because, well, it doesn’t look like a human!
 
TL;DR: So while they look better than they used to, I want them perfect. Halp.

Here’s some that might help you
 
Good luck luna

I like Harry Partridge
 
IMHO you should just get relative sizes and positions right. Drawing dots on a sphere and putting them in the right place in 2-D as the turn the sphere isn’t even an anatomy thing. Drawing eyes…I mean, they are just circles behind slits.  
Cartoon humans are easy because they are just funny shaped geometrical objects, like this .  
There are so many tutorials on Google it’s really just a matter of what style you want to draw. (Anime-ish, Barbie girls, realistic, funny/idealized-realistic, etc.)
 
I mean, you just learn to draw a box with a sphere on top, and four pairs of other cuboids joined together hanging from it. Then you learn how to draw this from different angles. And then you learn about the general shape of the body, where it gets wider and thinner, and adjust the basics accordingly. Adjust based on the character’s gender, age, and the sort of looks and personality you want to convey. The basic ratios of the body are well known and any search for “human parameters” will net plenty of good hits .
 
And once you learnt how to get general shapes and 3-D right, and then learn how to get shapes right, then you start with anatomy more n depth. It helps to go one step at a time, like, you can devote a lot of time to eyes first and the face in general (that’s the best start), then you can devote a bunch of time to drawing hunks and babes to get the chest muscles right, or the hand or the foot to get those right.
 
TO me it’s always more about the shapes and the general effect. Like, if you want fat, then of course every part of the body will look fat and get this sort of swollen quality and be rounder. If you want sleek and sharp, then everything looks longer, sharper, pointier.
 
There really are too many good tutorials. Here, this for example explains well how wide hips are more feminine. Doesn’t explain narrower waists having the same effect tho (though it’s in the same drawing…) But it’s pretty easy to do a search for “male female face difference” or body difference for example and plenty of good resources are there.
 
(Off-topic: why isn’t your artist tag “artist:luna the great” with “artist:queen luna” aliased to it through the Tag Aliases thread? The hash prevents that you can be searched by name.)

Well, before we had aliases, I was using artist:queen luna/luna the great.
 
I didn’t really worry about it because I never use that tag anymore, I’ve switched my artist:name over to the name I use on every other site. artist:amber flicker
 
Thanks for the links.

Go out into meatspace and draw people while they’re minding their own business. Or your own friends. Just be fast about it because you learn more from doing ten two minute sketches than one twenty minute sketch. Practice caricature, learn the basic proportions of the body and practice. Art is an exercise in purging - you have to get the suck out as fast as possible.

@1TrickPone  
Flops Friends? What friends?

Draw from reference images and check how well you did. A LOT. You need to be able to get proportions and shapes right to be able to exaggerate them, unless you go for that weird blob-people style hipsters use.
 
Art students who want to draw people well have to do thousands of gesture drawings, hundreds of sketches, and dozens of detailed anatomy studies.

@Eggonaught  
This is true, but what if i want to keep to simpler style? Bodily details like the small ones I’ve never been able to do, nor do I have much interest in doing so. But maybe I’m naive, should I learn to draw realistically first then learn how to cartoon? Some people tend to imply that. And I’m not sure if that’s quite what I wanna do.
 
Form and figure I’m all for learning but hyperrealistic anatomical studies…i dunno.

you need to learn what shape every muscle is, and where it connects to each bone, and WHY it’s that way. Have a deep understanding of interworkings of a human body and how it functions.
 
also known as
 
KNOWING YOUR ANATOMY.

You do need to understand something like feet in order to simplify them right, still.  
Like, getting the basic proportions right is the biggest part, but you’ve gotta be able to place the bony landmarks and muscle bulges in the right places to avoid “tube limb” syndrome, where the arm is just a sausage with random bulges.
 
But yeah, no, you don’t need to get into crazy da Vinci shit, but doing stuff like this is super essential. (just don’t cock up the ribs like that, lol)
 
But filling up sketchbooks with doodle pages like this is what gets you most of the way there. Detailed studies seem to be mostly about figuring things out.

@Eggonaught  
What if that’s too hard for me? :< (Yes I’ve tried).

@Sono
 
It’s too hard for everyone. thats the point. Drawing humans correctly is pretty much the hardest thing you can possibly draw. Embrace it.

 
Anatomy work. I know the eyes need to be smaller and the position of the right shoulder is off, but it’s an improvement. I’ll post the finished work when it’s done.

Are you checking against reference? That’s the easiest way to tell exactly what’s off, and figure out why you’re getting it wrong.
 
I had serious problems with shoulders for a long time, and being able to redline all my doodles and gestures showed me what I needed to fix

 
Improvements, I think. I’ll need to use a few darker shades on the skin next time, but hey, that’s what practice is for…

@luna the great!
 
They don’t look right cause the proportions aren’t right. Cartoons exaggerate features, but the overall placement of key features doesn’t typically change that much, unless you’re making ugly or funny lookin people. Your eyes are way too high, ear is inset too far, nose/nostril placement is off, shoulder girdle is nonexistant, etc.
 
Like a couple people said above, do some figure studies based on photo refs. Somethin that helps is putting a photo of a person on a layer in photoshop/whatever, turning down the opacity, adding a new layer, and drawing their anatomy on top of them. You dun have to draw like kidneys and individual ribs and stuff, but draw out the major superficial structures and volumes.
 
Been doin some studies like this. Can post a tutorial workflow maybe tomorrow. Haven’t ever done any tutorials before, so don’t know how good it’ll be.

You need to start drawing from life. It’s the only way to get facial proportions down, especially without a teacher to correct you.

@luna the great!
 
’kay, finally got this done.
 

 

I dont understand some of the shape lines. How does the big one in the middle of the torso work and what does it represent? (top middle)

@Sono  
Think like cutting her in half right down the middle. It wraps across the torso and crotch, and up over the neck and head.
 
It’s not really perfect. Think the neck is kinda wrong, and the rear end line sticks out too much since the line should kinda tuck into the… er, crack. But that’s why this is a good exercise for drawin people. Usually when you look at a photo you just go ‘yeah that’s a peoples!’, but this makes you really examine them and figure out how all the parts are shaped and where they are.
 
If you’re not really worried about rendering practice, then just go up to step 3 and repeat that on a bunch of references. You don’t just have to add those contour lines shown, add as much as you want, until it starts to look like a 3d wireframe.

Oh I see. And yeah there’s no way I can realistically paint yet, I can’t even paint abstractly yet, painting is quite beyond me and probably my worst artistic skill. Not going to bother with that for a while.

@luna the great!  
heres some advice, STOP painting/coloring/detailing stuff that you cant sketch.  
you could be focusing all that worktime in improving your anatomy.
 
whatever you plan on drawing, draw real life anatomy first.