Any good, useful drawing websites?

My people always end up with chicken bone noses!

I don’t have personal experience with sites for drawing, but there are loads of them out there. Here’s but one:

http://www.figuredrawings.com/

One standard book is Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards.

Go to a live drawing group with a model. A website won’t help you. If you have no drawing groups in your area ask friends to pose for you. If they are also artists you can trade being the model. Models can pose clothed or unclothed. To get the best sense of the figure unclothed, leotards, or swimsuits the best. Draw a lot of hands and feet. These are parts of the body most beginning artists draw poorly because they dont find them as interesting as faces and torsos, but a well-drawn standing figure needs to be well grounded on legs and feet that are believable. And hands are very expressive and beautiful. Draw your own other hand or your feet or yourself in a mirror.

Your school yearbook comes with a complete set of unique faces. They also hold still. Try drawing those.

@Jeruba I think it is important to draw the figure or face from something three dimensional. Drawing from something already flattened does not allow one to really experience and learn to see the curves of the forms in space.

I’m not disagreeing with you one bit, @anartist. But you can practice and get some of the basics in going from two dimensions to two dimensions—how far the inner eye really is from the bridge of the nose, what makes hair look shiny, how wide the neck is in comparison with the face—even if you’re not ready for or can’t afford an art class. My answer is in the spirit of making the most of what you’ve got. I learned a lot of basic face and figure components by studying the realistic comic strips in the newspaper—all gone now, but there used to be quite a few. I’m still an amateur, but I’m not terrible.

@Jeruba “how wide the neck is in comparison with the face” that was a hint to the mystery in the movie “The Crying Game”

PoseManiacs is a great site I’ve used for a while while doing drawings of people; it’s a great reference. It features images of males and females in various poses; they have no skin so you can see the musculature of each figure, and the images can be rotated 360 degrees so you can draw them from any angle you want.

They also have a tool called “30 second drawing” where it gives you a random image for 30 seconds, forcing you to make a gesture drawing and capture the essence of the pose in just 30 seconds. This is an excercise I did very often in all my figure drawing classes at my college, so it’s definitely a great asset to learning how to make convincing poses!

For some general advice: don’t focus right away on the details of how to make a convincing face, hand, etc. First become comfortable with drawing the figure as a whole, showing how weight is distributed on the body, etc. Once you do this, you can then go in and practice how to more realistically draw individual body parts. No point in being able to draw a perfect eye when you can’t make a whole face look remotely normal, you know? This is coming from an art student who used to do just that, so please don’t take any offense!

I myself am a artist and i just LOVE to draw black and white portraits of random people, celebs, and etc…I kinda learned on my own so dont really have a go-to website but I can give you some tips. When i start i ALWAYS start with the eyes and work my way out. Most people draw the picture first and then go back to shade and add detail. I shade as im draw, I let my shading create the lines. I know it sounds weird but it really works! IDK if i helped at all but i wish you the best of luck….heres a video of a few of my drawings… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MK23v3zoGlY

thanks yall