How accurate should my life drawings be if I'm trying to

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For reference here's an extremely detailed figure drawing made by an atelier student.

The goal of this student is to render, measure, and recreate from life as accurately as possible. This is great if the life drawing is the end goal. But how useful is rendering this much detail when I have no personal interest in creating this type of artwork?

I know I need to draw from life to learn the fundamentals. But how much should I be concerned with measuring perfectly & rendering to perfection?

Looks like someone fell for the "draw from life" meme

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Conversely here's an example of how much detail I'd like to do. This is a real production storyboard from an old Cartoon Network show.

These two panels show a great command of depth, perspective, and line quality. You can make out tiny elements of the houses, the truck, and the water slide.

But there isn't much rendering, and the artwork follows a unique illustration style rather than rigid realism. I understand realism develops a style, but how realistic does one need to get before branching into stylized work? And does pinpoint accuracy affect one's ability to learn & draw in a stylized way?

For example storyboard artists often move from show to show. One board artist might need to learn SpongeBob, then MLP, then Gravity Falls, and then Family Guy which are all totally different styles. Constructing them from shapes makes the most sense and I'm struggling to understand how I should be practicing life drawing to help me reach this level.

>>2620336
There's no denying life drawing is valuable. It forces you to see depth which you just can't get from a photograph.

But the question isn't "should I draw from life?"

The question is "how should I draw from life to help me advance as an illustrator/animator?"

Keep drawing from life but don't focus on producing ultra refined finished work. It's better to spend a day drawing 1000 quick poses than one long study.

>>2620339
Keep falling the meme, child
The rest of us will be making it

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>>2620346
This is true but eventually wouldn't one need to get more refined to learn about lights and shadows?

My concern is exactly how detailed one should bother going, or how much time should be spent on a single drawing to render "to perfection".

I'm wondering how much a beginner should concern themselves with measuring the reference multiple times to get comparative measurements accurately. This isn't how you'd draw an animal at the zoo, but it still seems like an important skill.

Here's another example of a life drawing I found online. Decent detail but still easy what's going on

>>2620352

You drawing your blob bug eyed half naked cartoon children isn't considered making it.

>>2620339
Watch the movement in things.

Not just people and not just animals. The way a branch sways in the wind and poetic stuff like that.

When you animate you do so with the basic knowledge of how a body is put together and the way we carry our own weight. So when looking at people, try to imagine the way they move.

Life drawing is not just about how detailed and lifelike you can make it, but in how you study the form of what you draw. What kind of shape you see and how they connect.

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>>2620328
Read Force - Dynamic life drawing for animators. Look at life drawings made by animators, story board artists, illustrators with stylized work etc and what they focus on and that question pretty much answers itself.

Obviously there is some crossover, like both fine artists and animators study figures from life to get a better understanding of form, shadows, anatomy, perspective etc. But equally important for the latter, maybe even more important is it that they develop a sense of clarity with what the figure is doing and exaggerate that to tell a story.

>>2620369
Thank you for the book recommendation it looks fantastic. I will definitely check it out

As a followup question, how should I be practicing still lives?

Let's say I'm drawing my kitchen chair.

Should I be measuring every point of the chair to look for comparative measurements to match up and align proportionally? Or should I just draw the rough shapes and fill it in by eye?

How much should I be measuring when drawing a still life if my goal isn't necessarily to do realist art?

>>2620375
Raelist art will help you so much. I struggled drawing a cartoonish style for months until I started drawing everday real life objects where ever i went. Like coffe mugs, cars, a salt shaker, mostly people though. IT'll help you build basic fundamental drawing skills, improve your eye, your ability to picture what you are drawing in you head and to know how to add details.

>>2620375
Practice by doing the former. Measurements and proportion, that's what you need to learn to do, also with detail

>>2620375
measuring is useless when you ultimately want to learn to draw this stuff from imagination. When you do studies, don't try to draw pretty pictures by copying what's in front of you, but rather try to understand what it is you are drawing. Be conscious of the perspective, understand the volumes, draw through and construct it in a way where you can do it again from imagination.

>>2621209
ye, and you can do that by drawing from real life, what better way is there to understand and remember how an object looks than by being able to draw it with all its dimensions and proportions.

>>2620328
Dude. The goal of precise life drawing isn't to create an artist who'll do that shit for a living, it's to improve your eye/hand coordination and patience. Scott Robertson suggests doing ink typography to train those things that can be later applied to anything, even a very stylized cartoon.

tl;dr: It's an exercise for precision. You can do it using intuition instead of precision, but then you'll also be training intuition instead of precision.

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>>2621229
So do you feel that every illustrator/animator should also be able to create very detailed still life drawings like pic related?

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>>2620369
This is a good start.

As far as realistic rendering goes, its incredibly important to help sell the gesture. If you understand how values sell something at a complex level, it'll only help when you break it down to a simpler language.

You could also help Richard Williams' animation projects.

>>2621251
It certainly doesn't hurt, and learning the way the shapes turn to shadows can help you learn form very easily.

The important thing is to look at it as an exercise. You aren't trying to be the premier still life artist in the world. Just like how an artist on a cartoon may be able to put together an elaborate house interior but certainly didn't study to be a purely interior designer or architect. Or how a life drawing artist may be able to make a basic animation but didn't learn specifically about animation. It's because they can adapt their knowledge to other mediums, because they got a good grip on fundamentals.

The goal is flexibility. Still life helps you learn the basic things to think about, the basic goals to accomplish, and the clear idea of what a final product should look like. It's all about how you get from A to B, not about how beautiful you make B.

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>>2621229
>Accurate measuring is vital to become a successful artist

>>2621209
>Measuring is completely pointless. Instead just draw from life by recreating the volumes

>>2620336
>Actually just forget life drawing altogether

Not even sure what to do at this point

>>2621428
give up

>>2620359
Sticks and stones
May break my bones
But you're still not going to make it

stay mad

>>2621209
>measuring is useless
said no decent artist ever

art is an excercise on comparision

>>2621540
I didn't say it's useless altogether, I said it's pretty much useless for someone whose goal it is to do animation work from imagination like what OP said he wants to do.

If you want to be a fine artist and get really good at copying what's in front of you, then by all means, measure as much as you like. But for anyone else, it is far more important to UNDERSTAND what you see, not focus on recreating it perfectly through fine art measuring techniques that are worthless when you want to apply it to drawings from imagination.

That doesn't mean you can't use some quick guidelines to establish relationships and negative space between objects, it just means your focus should always be on understanding the forms and how they sit in 3 dimensional space. When you focus on sight-size measuring what you see, it's very easy to forget about those things and just mindlessly recreate what's in front of you as perfectly and neatly as you can. That might produce a nice end result to look at, but has very little value as exercise for animators.

>>2620331
I always see this kind of drawing propped up on some atelier's homepage as "look what our 2nd year students can do," am I a tinfoil hat if I think these are exclusively copied from photos and took a semester to make? Because you rarely see working artists get to this level of photorealism, and if they do they're usually photobashing shit in or tracing or whatever other trick, for practical reasons.

>>2621672
I attend an atelier and no it's not from photo. These are always still life drawings/paintings.

But the contructs are done picture-perfect and every step of the drawing is measured carefully against the pose.

So no they are not photocopied because the artist does consider form. But yes they can easily take a semester(or longer) to finish

Figure out yourself.

>>2621595
If you don't know how to measure how do you even expect to connect the frames properly?

Not to say that if you can't even comprehend what's in front of you, it will be very difficult to achieve anything resembling what you have in your mind

The thing about sight-size or whatever has nothing to do with what I said. Even when drawing from imagination you're comparing to stuff you already know, there's no such thing as spontaneous creation

>>2620328
All animators practice life drawing. Disney hires models all the time when they they make a new character for a move to just walk around the studio naked and doing poses.

This guy did a talk about it and it might help you out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZOdOGu-Q60

>>2621718
How can it take a semester if it's life drawing? Do you have a sitter resume the exact same position for months?

>>2621459
KEK

>>2620328
If you want to become an animator, you should be focusing on animating, with lifedrawing on the side. You're putting a lot of thought onto this side thing instead of actually animating

Also true for a lot of /ic/. You guys endorse practicing the fundamentals but never apply it to anything.

>>2621672

I attended the best atelier in london part time for about 6 months.

That looks impressive, but its not. They are using something called sight size or comparable measurements.

Imagine just looking at someone in the same pose for 6 hours a day for 5 weeks and measuring every pencil mark you do.

>>2622189
Yeah that's what I was talking about. I really dislike sight-size because it does the opposite of constructive drawing, it's a very mechanical way of painting but ateliers seem to indirectly push it as the product of knowledge.

>>2622130
Literally yes. There are markers on the floor so the model can resume the exact same pose over and over for weeks/months at a time.

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"We don't copy the model, we analyse the model. Now feel it faggot."

-Vilppu

>>2621993
I 100% agree and I already know life drawing is important.

My question is HOW do I actually practice life drawing?

Should an animator follow the atelier style of perfect measurement from the model? Or should the animator be more concerned with gesture, forms/volumes, and exaggerating the pose?

We're already in agreement that life drawing is vital. I know that Disney's artists get to attend life drawing sessions as part of the job.

But when an animator attends a life drawing session, what exactly do they draw? How much detail?

Will an animator take away any value from pinpoint accuracy in measuring? Or is that not as useful when trying to draw cartoons/stylized illustrations?

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>>2622050
Wow awesome video thanks!

>>2622218

Depends whether you're doing it the academic way or the vilppu/steve houston way

>>2622220
Life drawing is about understanding what you see

Not until you understand the outlines you're able to place your lines correctly
Not until you understand the color shapes you're able to render properly

Where did you get this idea that you cannot learn both gesture and proportions at the same time? You're in front of a model for hours, you can investigate any thing you want

>>2622566
I know I can learn gesture & proportion simultaneously.

The question is a matter of detail. Is perfect measuring necessary? Or can I do it all by eye and still learn enough that way?

My question here is not a matter of if life drawing is useful. My question is how detailed life drawing must be to learn enough from it.

>>2622968
You can never learn enough from life drawing

If perfect measuring with grids and stuff is not your interest you can test measuring with the pencil, by eye, or any other way

This idea that doing life drawing is all about capturing the perfect detail and proportion is not healthy

>>2620328
Draw from life as much as it is needed to be able to draw the type of style you want.

I don't think the artist for My Life as A Teenage Robot knew how to draw from life as much as the people who animated Ghost in the Shell

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>>2622990
AKA just draw

Why do you think /ic/ wants to help you get better at art?
Why do you think /ic/ can help you get better at art?