AuthorTopic: Official Anatomy Thread  (Read 403877 times)

Offline 0xDB

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Re: Official Anatomy Thread

Reply #320 on: November 27, 2012, 12:34:57 am
Hm... but if I try to loosen up and not pay proper attention to the construction, everything ends up oddly distorted and out of proportion again:


After that I fired up Blender to make a small model which shall aid me in constructing the basic ball and jaw. I can use this to peek how circles wrap around the flattened ball in 3D and how the basic jawline appears from different angles:

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Re: Official Anatomy Thread

Reply #321 on: November 27, 2012, 10:47:02 pm
Acquired some new pencils today, ranging from 5H to 5B. It's a lot easier to draw the soft construction lines (almost invisible and easy to remove) with a hard pencil.



edit (some sloppy fixes, addressing feature placement issues, utilizing the 3D model)
« Last Edit: November 28, 2012, 09:45:53 am by Dennis »

Offline Helm

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Re: Official Anatomy Thread

Reply #322 on: November 28, 2012, 12:42:13 am
It's really inspiring how much work you're putting into this. Not often are people this for real when they say 'I'm going to study'.

Here's a token of my support for the inspiration you've given.



The work you've done with noses shows. The thing I had to edit less was the nose. The volumes are there. You probably understand noses better than I do now, the rest is just draftsmanship.

But do you see what you have to do next? You have to learn how to de-symbolize eyes, lips, ears, eyebrows, hair etc all of that next. Step by step, get to a more solid understanding of a face. The way you do lips specifically look like mr. potato lips because you haven't gotten the hang of lips being part of the skin. You append them on the face. But they're just folds. Blood-red folds with lots of nerve endings. By far the most difficult part of the face after the eye to de-symbolize and draw "as it really is". I am not even halfway there either, but it's a useful middle step to look at.

I am awful at necks, just completely invented, but again, perhaps it's an encouraging middle step between where you are and where someone who really knows how to draw would do it.

Please carry on with your studies.

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Re: Official Anatomy Thread

Reply #323 on: November 29, 2012, 12:42:38 am
Thanks a lot Helm for your encouraging words and for that edit. It may or may not be interesting to note here that in the head you'd chosen to edit, I drew the nose first right into the empty space and then bogus'd the rest of that head around it, trying to skip most of the construction.

It is true that I must concentrate on beating wrong habits and symbols out of my head. Your description (and edit) of the mouth as folds of flesh is very helpful (along with the video Ryumaro linked to earlier). I tried to pay special attention to that in today's practice drawing and it seems like a huge improvement over how I drew the mouths before.

I also tried to vary line width and line darkness a bit here. Before I went back to drawing today however, I created another 3D model in Blender which is supposed to help me getting the angles of the construction lines for "Loomis Ball And Plane"-method right. I added some simplified ears, nose and lower jaw and teeth guidelines on top of the basic ball and middle line construction.

Today's drawing was done by first eyeballing the construction lines from pose E9 in the chart below and then adding the features on top of that. I left most construction lines intact and the neck is made up as well since I haven't started taking a close look at necks yet.



Offline Ryumaru

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Re: Official Anatomy Thread

Reply #324 on: November 29, 2012, 03:11:13 am
The model is shaping up, and is a great tool to use and process to go through.

The latest drawing has an issue with the length of the nose in perspective. You will see that the length of the brow to bottom of the nose is about the same as the bottom of the nose to the chin. Usually, these measurements are roughly the same front on, but in this foreshortened view, the former should be much smaller.

You are doing a good job of thinking of the eye socket in 3 dimensions. Immediate improvement in that regard.

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Re: Official Anatomy Thread

Reply #325 on: November 29, 2012, 11:05:34 am
The foreshortening works different in an orthographic projection though as opposed to a perspective projection where objects of equal depths which are closer to the camera appear bigger than those which are further away. As can be observed on the 3D model (rendered with an orthographic projection) the distances between brow-line <-> nose-bottom and nose-bottom <-> jawline are always exactly the same.

Placement of the features was still somewhat off as the following overlay edit reveals. The result after replacing and aligning the features still looks odd. I wonder if that's because of the orthographic projection or if there are other major flaws.

Offline Ashbad

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Re: Official Anatomy Thread

Reply #326 on: November 29, 2012, 07:32:13 pm
I hate to drop in with no studies to post (yet), but I've started doing quite a bit of drawing practice, including many portraits from life (friends at school).  The likeness with many of their subjects is usually somewhat decent (they look alike when put next to the subject, but away from the subject you can still tell who it is), and usually gets that "wow" factor from everyone watching nearby (they aren't very great in my opinion, but I guess when one draws realistically and is actually somewhat successful, people see it as black magic).

Anyways, to my point: I'd love to start anatomical studies -- after doing these portraits, I'm extremely interested in the human face/head in particular, which would probably be my first subject of study.  This might have been asked before, but since many people have seemingly found many great new resources over time... what would you suggest I study from that has worked best for the majority here?  Thanks in advance!  I'll be sure to eventually contribute some of my beginning study results soon.  I'm willing to work as hard as needed, so don't hold back if you're thinking of suggesting "the hard way" to begin studying.

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Re: Official Anatomy Thread

Reply #327 on: December 01, 2012, 03:17:47 pm
Ashbad, the hard way would be to be a creeper and draw people from life outside (Public transportation works well for that but be prepared to get some angry looks when you stare at people analyzing their features. If you wear headphones and listen to loud music you can at least prevent them from actually starting to talk to you. After some time you can move on to sketching them in your head, still being a creeper staring at them but without the additional awkwardness which arises from them seeing you scribbling down lines into your sketchbook while you keep looking up and down.)

Other than that, others have suggested studying Loomis which is what I'm currently doing, reading "Drawing The Head And Hands". I'm still at the beginning of the book but already learned a couple of things which helped improve my head drawings. Of course, posting your drawing on the web and receiving critique is also a good way to learn. Avoid family and friends for critique for they tend to be mild on you and dishonest in that they won't point out your flaws because they're too afraid to hurt your feelings.

----
Today I tried to make an arbitrary construction without looking at the 3D model. This time I started with the ellipses which form from the sliced off sides of the main ball of the head and then constructed the head around them. Afterwards I looked at the 3D model and picked the orientation which seemed to match it most accurately (which turned out to be D3). Based on that I found too many flaws and after a bit of trying gave up on correcting all of them which leaves me with the abandoned version on the far right:


(this proves once more that if the construction is flawed, no amount of tweaking and screwing around on the individual parts afterwards will be sufficient to make it look right as a whole)

My mind seems to be controlled by some strong force of habit which always wants to go back to rendering the face from a straight symbolic front view and it also refuses to accept that some things are hidden underneath others and thus should not appear in the drawing at all, it's like the mind does not like leaving out anything and wants to spread out and draw even the things that lie covered around and behind an edge. This becomes most obvious whenever I get towards drawing the mouth and chin region.




Offline Ryumaru

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Re: Official Anatomy Thread

Reply #328 on: December 01, 2012, 10:52:47 pm
Dennis, if you are not aware of it, you should know that our brains are wired to see symbolically just as you are describing, which is why it is natural to you. Trying to draw un-symbolically is actually a very unnatural thing for one to do, and is compounded when we are working from imagination and do not have a solid model infront of us to tell us something is "wrong".  I would actually recommend taking the time to work from life or photographs right now, as I think you need to build up a mental library of how different features look in different angles so that you can inject that information into your imaginative studies. It's very easy for things to look " fake" or plastic or otherwise off when you are only going based on the knowledge of construction and not the knowledge of how fleshy faces look like.

Offline jengy

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Re: Official Anatomy Thread

Reply #329 on: December 02, 2012, 01:14:11 am
I would actually recommend taking the time to work from life or photographs right now, as I think you need to build up a mental library of how different features look in different angles so that you can inject that information into your imaginative studies

I would definitely agree with Ryumaru on this idea. Drawing something that exists in real life from the imagination is extremely hard, and there are plenty of online resources available to draw from. Most professional artists, if they are seeking realism, draw from resource. And if you are just practicing, then there is no reason to draw from imagination if you can get better faster drawing from life or photographs first.

This not only instills confidence in yourself, but it also teaches you to see something as it is--abstract, 2D shapes that represent 3D forms.

From what I'm seeing, you're trying to do battle with 1) perspective 2) proportion 3) imagination drawing 4) identifying enclosed shapes. Reducing these problem solving exercises to one challenge will may help you grow faster in that area and understand it more.

The main thing I would recommend trying to get better at is seeing abstract, 2D shapes that every drawing is made of. The book "Drawing On The Right Side of the Brain" has a lot of techniques for this, such as flipping the canvas and using a grid system to determine placement. I made a short gif with tips on how to draw from an image.

Here's a short gif with some tips (here's the png if you prefer: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-oC4DXkd3uSo/ULqps1TrPvI/AAAAAAAAE0M/WTqmTMmjYJw/s1600/fordennis.png):


And good luck! :) Art is hard, but if you are open to trying new things, you can really grow your talents and technical skills. Try everything until something works for you!
« Last Edit: December 02, 2012, 01:15:51 am by jengy »