I absolutely love your work and your style! Do you draw without a reference and if so how? I can only draw well if I have a reference in front of me but as a consequence my drawings don't portray motion and life very well
Thank you so much! I actually draw without reference more often than I oughta’ because of that very problem—if I start off trying to copy a reference photo, the drawing turns out stiffer than I’d like (as happened with these stock photo requests I did recently).
(^referenced drawing VS non-referenced drawing—the left looks stiffer and more awkward, even though both were drawn within weeks of each other)
I think the best solution in this case is to begin a drawing without looking at reference photos, and then using the reference photos to “correct” aspects of the drawing that aren’t working well. That way you’re incorporating your knowledge of what’s going on in the reference photo into your drawing rather than (consciously or subconsciously) trying to recreate the reference photo with your drawing.
But that only applies to making “original” drawings—your comics, your paintings, your fanart, your doodles, whatever you’re doing for work or fun. You should keep drawing directly from reference photos when doing observational drawings for practice. And the more you do that, the more information you internalize on how figures are constructed etc. so that you can draw more easily without reference.
Particularly, doing gesture drawings should help you with portraying motion and life—quick sketches that help you understand the basic flow of the pose of your reference model. GrizAndNorm has a lot of good tutorials about observational drawing particularly as it relates to creating lively figures. This Line Of Action tutorial may be a good starting point:
Take a reference photo—or go to a live model session, or a randomized reference photo site like Quickposes—and try to sketch out just the line of action, or if that’s too difficult to start with, just try to convey the pose using as few lines as possible.
Then, when you’re creating your own poses, you can start by drawing an action line to get the overall “feel” of the pose, construct basic anatomy on top of that, and then compare it to a reference image to make sure everything’s working right. That should help keep your artwork more lively than if you started off thinking about muscles and bones.
And, as always, what helps the most is practice. :)
I hope this helps!! Let me know if you need me to clear anything up.
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