Official Anatomy Thread

[CodeGeorge]

I don't draw.  I stopped when I was a kid.  That said sadly I'm in graphic design lol.  I sprite too.  Sometimes I need to draw!  So I decided to take it up again.  Before I'd just heavily rely on proportion charts and stuff and spend way too much time on my work that had to do with realistic anatomy.  Instead of taking all day on drawing a hand I've decided to actually do this stuff again.

So again, I don't draw...  not with a pencil.

Here's my first (unfinished) attempt at female anatomy:




I was keeping the pose simple since it's my first time.  It's done in photoshop entirely.  No tracing, just like 10 references.  I've still got to memorize proportions and stuff...  I actually drew a lot as a kid and drew stupidly well for my age at the time.  I kind of wish I didn't ditch it. 

What's the best way to learn this stuff? 

[0xDB]

I'm still not sure what I'm going to achieve by all this line by line eye to hand to pen translation process but if my eyes don't fool me, I think I'm making progress, getting better at eyeballing at least.

[Helm]

Yes, yes you are making a LOT of progress like this. The idea is to eventually start to do more work without the reference and then checking with the reference to see where you went wrong. I suggest you look at a pose for 5 minutes and then not look at it while you draw it. Then check where you're off. I guarantee that if you do this for a few weeks you won't believe how much better you've gotten at working without reference.

[0xDB]

Thanks for the suggestion Helm, sounds like a good plan, I'll start doing those "5 min. peek - hide - draw - check" exercises soon, after a couple of more days of copying.

Here's todays results (some 30 second sketches and another slow copy):

[Dex]

Ahh! Pracitcing and studying anatomy has been the biggest thing I've been doing these past few months.

You can see my full journey from start to now http://www.punaji.com/topic/adams-art here.

Here's some of the most recent.












I'll throw up some bone structure drawings and some underlying muscle ones up later, hopefully

[crab2selout.png]

Some of those are using Bridgman's as a base, right? I like that you aren't just trying to copy line for line, but you're adding and interpreting as well. It seems to flow with the advice given by this guy on what he thinks you should be doing when copying Bridgmans
http://deadoftheday.blogspot.com/2009/07/perspiration-anatomy.html

I really like the curving lines of the female seated figure on the 4th drawing. It's a nice, relaxed pose.

The yellow/orangey lighting is kinda harsh on your pics, though. Isn't there a photshop filter for fixing that sort of thing?


I think I'm going to try out that 5 minute thing Helm suggested. I kinda feel like my short term memory has gone to hell since I started using the Internet. Like I'm not exercising it as much anymore.

[Jakten]

During school we had some life drawing classes but they were fairly basic, they basically just told us to draw the person in front of is with various exercises never teaching us how to understand what's really going on. Lately I've been watching some videos on how to draw anatomy. I figure I need to get back into trying to understand the body in this way as I know it's a lot more important than my reluctant, lazy mind keeps telling me.

I drew two heads and some noses with some reference previous to watching the video. This is mostly just my notes but I'm quite proud of how much more I understand the human skull now after only about an hour. The lower skull I drew as notes along with the video, the upper skull was one I did about 20 minutes afterward on my own.


One of my new years resolutions is to study and practice drawing every day, so good start to the new year so far!

[Gil]

Which video did you use Jakten?

[Jakten]

I've been using these DVDs by Glenn Vilppu. I had never heard of him before and someone randomly suggested him to me. Quite helpful so far though.

Edit:
I decided to try and use this method to draw a face and this is what I came up with, I pasted the head reference over top of it to show how close I was in terms of proportion. I almost got it, some areas are off a good amount and it doesn't really look like her but I think it turned out well. Her eyes are too far apart, the ridge on her nose isn't high enough and her jaw isn't wide enough.


Much better proportions than I usually draw though.

[Gil]

Ah yes, I have a book by Vilppu lying around, I should try to look into it.

I'm still doing Loomis exercises right now and I plan on reading Hogarth and Bridgman next.

In terms of animation I've gone over most of the disney material for study (Robin Hood and Sleeping Beauty are very simple and good to study) and some of the flexing tubes era. I also found it nice to study how anatomy and muscle deformation is handled by more recent cartoons, such as the pretty decent "Spectacular Spider-man".

I'm making progress, but I still have trouble putting it all together. I might search for some new life drawing classes in '10 to apply the newly learned techniques on live models. When I was doing life figure drawing, I was still in my contour drawing stage.

What you describe about your life drawings class seems to be contour oriented too. It's good to learn how to interpret masses to contours before starting the theory. That's why the beginner classes in life drawin tend to leave you to your own devices, so you can get acquainted with contours. It's not advisable to do volume study before you know most of the theory, so shading should be left out of those exercises.


As for the drawing you posted, have a look at the mouth area. You oversimplify the way the mouth connects the chin. You can draw a triangle from the mouth corner to the middle bottom of the lips to the chin. That part forms a plane that is not represented in your drawing. Here's an wireframe construction of the nose and chin areas that might be interesting. The nose area I did is not really correct, but still, look at the indent in the middle. There's a fat mass there that needs attention, which runs into the mouth area (represented in green).