Welcome!
Have you ever been frustrated at drawing people? I struggle with the whole process: proportions, features, poses, faces, hair, etc. What’s a budding artist to do?
Every Wednesday, most weeks, on this blog I post a strategy, process, or reflection for illustration with the iPad app ProCreate, and the past week I’ve focused on drawing people again. My teacher is Jennifer Nichols of Leila and Po Studio, whose Creative Learning community and courses I have been a member of her community for over a year and am so thankful for all the lessons and support from everyone there.
Inspiration
This month Jennifer provided lessons in her community on drawing people. The start was a wonderful two part lesson of 1) Drawing People and 2) Drawing Fairies with wildflowers. I knew I wanted to do that, but then she added in more lessons members have been taking all month: Cute Characters.
Another maximum-moment lesson was the use of her template for a sketchbook, which I have used to practice sketching and drawing the people and fairies we’ve been learning to draw and illustrate. Here you can see some of my progress:
Progress
In the last image, you see me trying to apply the strategy of using a public domain image of a person and attaching a wire frame of lines/dots to discover where the shoulders, arms, legs, hands should be in the sketch. With a frame, we can then adjust them to our own illustration, such as the Shooting Star Fairy:
Here are three more people I created with the wire frame strategy, in order by earliest date:
With the wire frame strategy in mind, we learned in the third course how to draw “cute” characters– big heads, little bodies. Here’s an example, with Jennifer’s information since she’s our teacher:
Which became this cute fairy character, Kami:
Jennifer provides the lessons, brushes, and often a sketch to start with along with a pdf to remember the proportions af a body and how to draw faces. It’s a fabulous community, our Creative Learning community and courses.
Try it!
Whether you simply try this strategy for drawing people like many people use or you join us in the Creative Learning Community by Jennifer Nichols to be part of a community and courses that support your learning and add more detail to be successful, I hope you share your illustrations with Jennifer and myself on Instagram. Jennifer’s hashtag is #ipadartwithjennifernichols.
Please continue to be a part of the #warmup4art series to learn and enjoy our work together! See my sharing at IG @42Sheri and Twitter @42Sheri.
I wonder, if I draw a line... 