u/No-Payment9231

Whenever I do a timed figure drawing session, I do 10 1-minute gestures and those look fine but once I get to 2-minute or 5minute like I’m showing, I just don’t know what to do, I’ve tried constructing like Michael Hampton’s book teaches and even trying to copy contours but my drawings just always look worse than the 1-minute figures.

I don’t really know what to do to improve, I’ve been at this for 3 years now and I still don’t know how to use gesture and structure together to make a finished figure drawing.

For clarification, first image is the redraw, second is old version, 3rd is reference of my room.

So to elaborate, I’m not at all confuse about perspective, I know the basic rules of it. But I’m very confused on how exactly I’m supposed to set the size of my drawing and what I’m supposed to include/exclude from the drawing.

I try measuring but whenever I move my head, my view of the room changes so I don’t even know what to put on my canvas.

Honestly I feel like I’ll never be good at drawing from life I’ve watched so many tutorials and even checked out the wiki of this subreddit and got nada from it…

I just don’t get it… I use reference, I do exercises like cube rotation and gesture drawing, I’m take the time to finish pieces (a single character like I’m showing takes me up to a week or more each)

But I’m just not getting the results I want, my characters are bland, I have no distinct or cool art style and worst of all, nobody seems to understand what my characters are unless I explicitly tell them through labels.

I want to be a concept artist, I want to work in the studios and make a career creating cool characters but I feel like I’m loosing my mind grinding exercises and watching tutorials and courses to only receive nothing. Meanwhile everyone else skyrockets past me from the same amount of work or even less. What am I supposed to do?

Apologies if this seems kinda ranty but I just want to explain my situation fully.

If you want, you could ask random questions about her and I’ll try my best to answer them.

I don’t really understand why, I add line weight but my lineart always looks so boring and amateur.