Kinda confused

[Oleg]

Hello, I just have a question/issue. I took a life drawing class last semester but i had to drop it in 1 month after starting the class due to personal issues. Before that class i have never touched a charcoal before in my life and the best thing i ever drew was just random scetches of whatever comes to my mind. So anyway, as i guess any life drawing class the first month or so you do just random poor detailed form of the body by looking at the girl that poses for us, then after that we finaly started to draw with charcoal and we started to learn how to draw a profile of the face.

That day it was a guy replacement and we still used jsut regular pencils and BAM the first try to draw his profile i got this perfect profile of that guy in front of me with very nice shading, i could not belive my eyes. So i am like ok thats weird... second time i try same thing... very nice profile, and one of the best in class (exept this russian old lady that drew her whole life and took the class jsut for credit). Anyway next day the girl that always poses for us came back and we started to use charcoal. Same thing, i got this perfect profile of her and with very nice shading. The point i am getting is that i never drew a face in my life before and on my first try i get this awesome profile (btw i am 23). After that unfortunately i had to drop the class.

After that i deside to get a 8x11 sctech pad to draw at work, and i realised one thing. I can sit there all day and draw perfect face profile of any person i want with great detail, but when i try to draw anything else, i have a huge problem with it. Like any type of object of even the rest of the body looks like crap. Any of you have a sugestion? LOL is that like a psycological disorder :) (j/k) Or what should i do. Any tips will be preciated.

[haribubba]

keep trying?

[NoSeRider]

Life drawing is a staple. You gotta keep doing it.
All other art classes seem unimportant compared to life drawing.....if you want to be a character artist for 2d or 3d or any d.

Charcoal sucks, so use charcoal pencils.....it's a pencil but with charcoal.

[dbclemons]

I know of others who have said they have an easier time drawing profiles than full front faces, and reasoned that it had to do with it being easier to spot the features of the head when looking at it's side. You get a clear silhouette to reference. When looking at the front of the face, or by extent, the rest of a figure that may be in a pose that hasn't a clearly defined silhoutte, it is harder to spot the key points in the shape of the figure on the page. That's just a theory, but seems reasonable. If you feel that's a problem with your own drawing, try to find other means of proportion references to go by: that hand is about 2 heads over, draw a line from here to there, etc.

Hope that helps,
-David