I have a friend who asked for some thoughts about his drawings. It was gonna be pretty public anyway, so once I realized that I needed half a dozen pictures to make my point, I asked if I could put my reply here.
I am qualified to say things about drawing because I am mediocre. Being mediocre is the best qualification, because it means I've had to really work to learn to make a nice drawing. Naturally talented people make poor teachers, because they haven't made all the mistakes. I've made plenty of them, and I'll make plenty more, but I am slowly mapping the minefield.
I'm gonna skip basics, 'cause you've heard them. (If you haven't, try reading Andrew Loomis: Drawing the Head and Hands, and Figure Drawing for All Its Worth; and Betty Edwards: Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. The first two are free online.) Rather than say the same thing that every drawing book says, I wanna say the things that no one ever told me. I'm also gonna skip the complement sandwich --- you're doing fine. Your instincts are good. You don't need my praise. These drawings don't contain your heart and soul, I hope --- they contain some brawny guy you've never met.
So the very first thing you can do is to fix two things about your bio-mechanics.
Number one is super-easy: make certain that your line of sight is orthogonal to the page. There are lots of ways for that to go wrong: if you slouch, or if you're using a horizontal desk, or whatever; I can't say why you're not directly facing the page, but I can see in the drawings, particularly the portraits, that your head is considerably below and to the left of center -- probably even below the left corner of the page (that makes me suspect you're a righty, yes?). Because your eye has that steep angle to the page, the whole drawing has a sheared effect -- your circles aren't round, verticals are off-plumb, and so on. To prevent that anamorphic distortion, you've got to put your eye right where you want your viewer's eye (or the camera's lens, or whatever), and keep it there. Here are your heads:
See how everything sort of leans to the right? This effect can work in your favor, once you know it's there -- see Pozzo's ceiling in St. Ignatius. It's also fun to wander around museums, trying to decide where the artist stood while they painted, given these distortions.
Number two is harder, but: you've got to use your whole arm. Before you start drawing, draw some big, flat arcs, rotating from the shoulder, then from the elbow, then from the wrist. Shoulder arcs move near-to-far from your body; elbow arcs move side to side; wrist arcs halfway between those two. They'll also get progressively shorter as you move down your arm. Finger strokes are damn hard to make longer than a centimeter or two; so the more you move the pen with your fingers, the more you get uncertain, fussy lines. I find my eye accepts a confident line, in the wrong place, far more easily than a tentative line, even if perfectly placed. Using your whole arm will mean making much bigger drawings, but you'll also be able to go much faster; 10 minutes will be time enough to start working on fine detail.
You said:
"...if I try drawing a face with "core shapes"
first, it turns out ugly. (As I am not practiced
in the method) However, if I go with my
'normal' technique draw shadows in relation to
each other, while ignoring the 'core' shapes --
the end product is much better. I guess you
could say that I try to draw the shapes of the
shadows. "
That's a problem that plagued me for, like, 4 or 5 years. I bet you can fix it in two days.
Today, I like to use a ball-and-plane construction for the head, but the method isn't too important. The mistake that I made (and still make sometimes) was to plaster features straight onto the simple shapes. The marks you make for construction don't go around the details; they're just layout, like a grid. Then, on top of that grid, you do exactly what you said worked well: draw the shadows. The layout just makes sure the shadows are in the right place, and (importantly) appear to have depth. If you don't draw the light and shadows, it will look ugly. If you don't use the constructions, it will look flat.
On the left, plastering features straight onto basic shapes. On the right, drawing shadows on top of a basic-shapes layout.
When I trace the two primary lines of the face, on your 'constructed' versions, they curve, like they have 3D form. They're not as face-like, but they do have depth. The shadows-only version is flat. (Personally, I'd guess you cheated a teensy bit on these -- perhaps the first two sketches were drawn from life, and the last one was drawn from the photo you showed me? If so, naughty naughty. It makes them hard to compare :). If they were all from the same photo, read Loomis pages 15-29, at least).
Here are your gesture drawings. Someone else made the comment that the torso doesn't seem to join in on the motion, and you replied that there isn't really much motion -- the model was static. True -- the model wasn't moving. That doesn't mean there was no tension in the torso, though.
Here's an annotated version of the figure reference you were using:
Most readings, when they talk about gesture drawings, tell you to start with the so-called action line of the figure, which I've marked here in blue. It is, more or less, the spine of the model. I think the action line is hard to see, and sometimes lies. If you want to make an extremely rhythmic drawing -- say, of a nude woman dancing ballet -- then damn, you better use an action line. If you want to draw something more solidly constructed, I recommend the lines I've traced in red. They have some big advantages: their height and acuteness help divide male from female torsos. They are visible -- action lines are guesses; these are right there to be observed. They'll eventually be drawn anyway; action lines convey a lot of useful information, but they have to eventually be concealed, or left as visible signs of construction. Get those two angles right, and then you'll probably properly place the ribcage and the hips. Build out the limbs in terms relative to those angles, and you have an excellent layout to start drawing in light and shadow. Then, 5-10 minutes puts you here:
A perfect thing of beauty? Naw. Not even -- I drew his shoulders very broad, which lost me the telling arc of his neck :( Still, it is a pretty firm record of what the model was doing; if I wanted to use this gesture later, I have everything I need.
I greatly appreciate your input. I'll be trying to address the problems you mentioned. You correctly surmised my right-handedness, and my poor viewing angle.
The first two sketches for the elderly gentleman's face were constructed from different photographs in the same set. I had wanted to set down three different angles for the head, then try adding some minor detail, but my first two "failures" frustrated me and so I went with my normal technique for the third sketch.