Other than hundreds of hours of practice, was there anything else that helped you get better at scale and proportions?
If I’m drawing something unfamiliar, like for example a car and someone crouching next to it, I will look up stock photos of them separately and make collages of them/copy paste them into one image.
For stuff like people/animals if I’m having trouble I will draw studies first
You gotta watch/pay attention to a lot of stuff when you go about your day. Like for example, sometimes when I’m standing in line getting groceries, I will imagine what the lineart for the counter with all the stuff looks like. Or how I would paint the cashier’s hand when he scans my card in. Small stuff like that. The majority of scale and proportion is remembering what makes something look right in reality
Sighting (the thing you see artists do by holding out a pencil and squinting) is actually a thing that helps
One specific exercise you can try would be negative space exercises:
If you’re new to drawing you might see this and go ????? there’s so many things happening at once. A basic drawing exercise is to just find the shape of the empty (negative) space. It helps train your eye to not rely on the details (which can confuse you) and judge distance correctly.
You can trace at first, but when you start drawing from reference you’ll find yourself making decisions like ‘does this line align with that other one’ or ‘does this seem too far’ and the more you do it the more you get a feel eventually for ‘this shape is maybe 2/3 of this other shape’. There’s loads of these exercises on the internet and it’s always one of the basic stuff in how to draw books.
