Anyway I was wondering what is the best substitute for not having a live model? Is pose maniacs really that good of a anatomy drawing aid?
Go draw 10 of their figures a day and then tell me
Seriously.. it has helped me a lot. It's definitely true that real people have all sorts of proportional variations -- for instance I'm a tall man, but my proportions -- eg hip to shoulder measurement -- are relatively feminine.
A lot of the fun in drawing people is in these little (and sometimes big) quirks. So I recommend Posemaniacs for polishing your really rough points anatomy-wise.. and to also do some other drawing from photos of real people, and play with the proportion between these two according to how sorely you feel your basic anatomy skills to be lacking.
BTW, Posemaniacs doesn't only provide overall body refs -- they have eg. 3d scans of actual hands in various poses which can also be quite helpful.
One strong point of Posemaniacs is of course its 3d-ness. It's helped me far more in 3d construction than drawing from photos ever could (since they are 2d regardless of how a skilled photographer might mislead us to perceive otherwise.)
I want to draw a lot more but I want to make sure if I start again that I will be on a linear track to getting better.
Oh well, start anyway. Nobody's track to getting better can ever be linear, as far as I've observed; You can only keep giving things a good try and periodically discarding things that aren't working. And it follows from this that you can only know what things are really worthwhile after getting back into the game.
I'm willing to put in the work and the time but I don't want my soul crushed when I find out I've been doing everything wrong(that has happened a few times before)
It happens. Your current approach is quite incorrect, though it is instructive; I've found this is a very reliable truth that can be applied no matter where you are (and presumably, no matter who you are or when you are.). It's just the way life works. It's uncomfortable only in direct proportion to the magnitude of your misplaced arrogance.
Another question I have for you guys/girls is, "Is drawing fun for you? Do you enjoy drawing? Also where do you draw, is it at a desk, your bed(someone elses bed?) the floor, a chair, standing up, etc?
Even when I feel burned out drawing-wise, drawing is fun for me. At such times I just push on through the frustration to find the fun, and use a Lojban based concept generator I wrote to decide on subjects and perhaps find a spark of inspiration.
I mainly draw sitting down, but suspect standing up would be better. I prefer it when circumstances permit.
Finally my last most important question. Does anyone here draw in photoshop? If so isn't it hard to get really crisp lines like you would with a pen or a pencil? Whenever I try drawing in photoshop all of my lines are blurry. I drew the picture above exclusively in photoshop and the only way to get the lines looking nice was to carve them using the eraser tool. However doing that takes a large amount of extra time. Which in turn just rips out whatever vitality the drawing used to have in it. Anyway to sum this up "Whats the best program to do line art digitally?"
I don't use photoshop, I do use GIMP... IMO the tip about the pencil tool is good and I imagine it operates pretty much identical to GIMP's pencil tool, which I also prefer over Paintbrush.
I've done plenty of sketching in GIMP and find it is not too soft, if anything too hard sometimes. It all depends on your brush settings really, like someone else said.
However, if you really want pencily-ness, consider something like MyPaint [1] or Opencanvas which actually tries to mimic real drawing media.
Both MyPaint and OC provide a pseudo-'infinite' canvas, which is great for just reeling off multiple quick sketches (as you might with PoseManiacs)
[1] I luuuuuuv this <3 Both for sketching and painting, it is powerful, approachable, and simple. (
http://mypaint.intilinux.com/)
