I suck at drawing people, Tips?

I try to keep my people as small as I possibly can without making them unrecognizable. This way, I don't have to give them as much detail.

The witch I drew here is small, so I didn't really need to give her fingers or anything like that.

http://drawception.com/viewgame/z6FHxZP3Pp/tessa-warzard/

I zoomed in as much as I could to give her a big nose and eyes.

My "Dr. Haus" here also has no fingers if you notice:

http://drawception.com/viewgame/swNHsKjfX9/its-lupus/

I think I'm in the same boat as you. When I try to add fingers and detailed ears noses and other extremities, I don't feel I execute as well. See my drawing here:

http://drawception.com/viewgame/smLKLPx5Cg/dragon-quest/

I don't think I did a great job drawing that person's body, especially the fingers.

I guess my advice would be less can sometimes be more. :)

I just resort to cartoony people. If given, you know, 30+ minutes, I can draw a nice-looking portrait with one exception: noses. They have been the bane of my drawings for over 10 years. (ex: http://drawception.com/viewgame/CQsHak18Bx/andrew-scotts-beautiful-eyes/ )

This will have a better representation of people I normally draw: http://drawception.com/player/195622/melissarocks/games/1/?sort=points

If you have trouble with fingers, just do people from the shoulders up, then you'll have more room to work on ears and eyes.

Remember that ten minutes is a good amount of time. Never submit until you feel comfortable with the drawing...I should probably listen to my own advice.

OH! Drawing people! http://realcolorwheel.com/human.htm I don't know if that helps. I have problems drawing your species myself.

Anatomy has been my enemy forever, both human and other animals. I always find something very wrong whenever I try to draw a recognizable human. I try to do the "ball+stickman model then fill it in" if there's time, but the problem is usually the "fill it in" step.

In this recent disaster http://drawception.com/viewgame/CrDekqaRKn/conan-the-barberian/ I spent so long trying to figure out the torso that I had to rush on the arms, and in the end he seems to be missing his right forearm.

It also doesn't help that I don't have a good grasp of lighting/shading so it's hard to draw features on faces due to the limited colour palette.

AnonyMoose, I hate to disagree, but 10 minutes is hardly ever enough for me to draw a person. If the prompt is JUST "Harry Potter," sure. But I get things like "Harry Potter in a breakdancing battle with Sonic while Princess Peach eats pie" or whatever. I am guessing that's why the character limit is so low for text prompts but it still creates quite a time crunch.

I, personally, have gotten a lot better at not submitting things, though. I'll work on it for 5-8 minutes, and if I know my remaining time won't help at all, I just skip and hope I get it again to do better.

The way I draw people is probably the wrong way, but it does produce okay results. First, I start with the upper clothing (shirt, sweater, blouse, bare torso...), branching out at the shoulders to form the arms (which go down longer than the torso). Then, I stick a neck on there, put an oval on it, put another oval in the back for the rest of the head, and indent the face slightly at the eyeline.
After placing the facial features onto the face, I add the hair, starting somewhere around the face oval and encompassing the rest of the further back oval. Then, the legs. The first section is nearly twice as long as the space between the arm end and the torso, second time not counting hand length. The second section is pretty much the same length as the first, though most likely shorter. The feet are mapped out by first anchoring a ball to the end of the leg, making a small oval where you want the foot to end, and then connect those ovals in a bent motion above, and a straight motion below.

It also helps to draw "wireframes" to try and glean something about the three-dimensional form that you are trying to render in this two-dimensional space.

http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e188/shinyjiggly/wireframe.png Here's something to stare at.

Note that often times, I won't really follow most of the proportions, like a horrible student. in this picture, the arms were much to short, and there were no real elbow sections. Also, the face was squashed and the shirt/torso was too tiny. Anyone with a real artistic education would berate me more than I ever could on my sorry attempt to assist. But that isn't important here. What is important, is to get the idea across in an appropriate manner.

When running low on time, remember this: The face is important, but the body needs to exist!

Throw down some thoughtful blobs and chisel them down accordingly, while shading to improve the implied form. If you remember all the pieces and put the in the right spots with the right sizes, likely you will have an okay looking person in your drawing.

@Ellix I have a poor grasp of shading as well, I just normally get the detail brush and go around the edge of objects. I know that's not how you do it but I honestly can't see myself doing anything else

I had problems drawing people, especially when they had to be recognizable (that kept me from drawing many a good prompts). A few days ago I discovered a video by Ackter that I have adopted to a certain degree of success.

Instead of going for a realistic rendering of a person, it's a guide on how to draw cartoon figures, and with a bit of thought, you can adapt the approach to your needs. By choosing colors correctly and adding key traits to help identify the individual, you can get the point across in a few minutes.

http://ackter.geekngamer.com/2012/05/10/how-to-quickly-draw-cartoon-people/

The time limit is one reason you'll find that I often "cheat" a bit by framing things so I'll only have to draw part of a face. Doing an entire figure at this resolution is very difficult, even if you know all the old proportioning tricks that show up in most basic figure drawing books.

My main advice would be to:

1. Learn the basic shortcuts, like working with shapes, the oval for faces, the fact that the eyes are on the midline... stuff that shows up in most basic figure drawing books and also in the pages that others have linked.

2. Practice, take on a lot of drawings and don't be too hard on yourself. After all, here, especially, you can always say you ran out of time, got interrupted, or mistakenly approved a drawing you wouldn't have in retrospect. Frankly, hardly anyone but you is really going to care that much, so you're only being hard on yourself. The more you do it, the better you'll become.

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD23C979C823A21BC&feature=view_all