thank you so much for the kind words! a standard answer here is to do figure drawing, esp 15-30 second ones, several times a day. it really really does help. part of the exercise is to help you understand how to capture form and find the line of action, but for me it's a fundamental part of how i draw. it's great at loosening up line-work, especially if you tend to be more rigid in your mark-making.

while i'm rendering over a sketch, i try to keep as much of the original shape as possible. there's a certain... oomph...? or a vitality that can disappear quickly if you're not consciously holding onto it. a base understanding of anatomy is also important to keep things looking proportionate (enough).

i'm always on the hunt to create appealing shapes. for me, a good-looking shape is both straight and curvy on its sides. lots of Ss, Us and Ls everywhere, especially in the human body. i like squares and straight lines too. you can learn a lot from exercises where you simplify a form/composition to its basic shapes. as you're checking for the shape language in your fingers, you can start to expand to assessing the overarching shape in the hand and the arm and eventually the entire body and the composition as a whole.

i'll talk more about hands below!