February has many things: cold weather, spring-hating groundhogs, Valentine's Day sugar rushes, Presidents Day furniture sales and the most recent addition... a month chock full o' figure drawing!
I'm not sure when it began, and I'm too lazy to research it, but within the past few years a handful of websites have begun promoting a February figure drawing challenge as Figuary. The one I'm familiar with is Croquis Cafe, they have been around for a while and I've posted about them here throughout the years.
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| No felonious figure freeloaders! |
How it works
The challenge of Figuary is setting aside time each day to draw. The goal is to show you, the artist, how daily practice can improve drawing skill. Luckily, it isn't that big of a daily time commitment with most figure drawing sessions running just shy of 15 minutes in length. Each morning in February a new video is posted to Croquis Cafe and breaks down like so:
- (3) 1 minute poses
- (2) 2 minute poses
- (1) 5 minute pose
If you want to see the Figuary videos you'll have to subscribe. Croquis Cafe used to be a free resource entirely supported by contributors but last year they moved to a subscription based model. This is no doubt due to lousy bums not supporting them on Patreon (I did support, I swear!).
The drawings
On quite a few of these I left my 1 and 2 minute pose drawings as is, without adding more details, so they just capture basic movement and figure construction. Typically on the 5 minute pose I would pause the video after 5 minutes and spend an additional 5-15 minutes refining the pose.
As far as medium goes, I hopped between digital and traditional pencils throughout the month and I even threw a bit of ink in there for good measure.
Enough with the backstory, let's get to the drawings! Enjoy the Figuary festivities below...
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| Day 1 |
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| Day 2 |
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| Day 3 |
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| Day 4 |
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| Day 5 |
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| Day 6 |
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| Day 7 |
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| Day 8 |
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| Day 9 |
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| Day 10 |
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| Day 11 |
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| Day 12 |
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| Day 13 |
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| Day 14 |
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| Day 15 |
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| Day 16 |
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| Day 17 |
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| Day 18 |
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| Day 19 |
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| Day 20 |
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| Day 21 |
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| Day 22 |
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| Day 23 |
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| Day 24 |
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| Day 25 |
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| Day 26 |
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| Day 27 |
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| Day 28 |
Whew! That's a lot of figure drawing! In fact, I'm pretty sure that is more figure work than I have done in the last couple years combined. The added step of inking made some of these take way longer than I hoped, but luckily I can put that practice to good use on the upcoming Venomized Hulk page!