Official Anatomy Thread

[Helm]

well I can't parse the pointing at the skies body language, emotionally. What does it mean? Who does this? The pose is not connected with something actual for me and therefore I can't really suggest those poses. If you care to explain what you're going for perhaps I'll see it.

[Helm]

The backstory's all well and good but your concern is how much of this communicates - or can communicate - in a single picture. I couldn't tell she was pointing as a specific thing in the sky until you pointed it out to me just now so yes, definitely go with the difficult pose (the top left one) where we can at least see the Aurora. Make the hand point to IT with foreshortening and not directly above (where there is nothing) and if at anything attempt a more 3/4 look with the girl on the side of the image so we may see a bit more of her than her back while she points.

[Helm]

Well you can communicate that the character is surprised by an environmental effect that occurs and is pointing towards it in amazement. That's I think, pretty fair.



Does this help? The little graph next to the picture shows how the points of interest are placed in the plane, and bigger is more important. A pleasing construction on this level will help the picture later on much.

[Helm]

Well first of all this is much better than before as it is. Yes, pull the whole scene down and have more space than ground. Space is alright being empty because that's what... space... is. The pose is quite alright. It won't be an easy thing to draw, but you certainly can do it. Keep in mind this: When you're done with something and finally finished with it, it stands on its own merit and almost always that merit is something you could never believe would be there when you're doing an early sketch like this. Stuff... happens, when you draw a while thing like this and you'll be pleasantly surprised with yourself if you go along with it.

[Akira]

Do you point at things when you're alone? Pointing is used to convey information to another person. I'd suggest you change the gesture to one of surprise. Then emphasize the aurora to show that it is the cause of the surprise.

[JJ Naas]

IMO you can have trees, bushes and stuff on the edges of the picture to help frame the scene, but the problem with the tree on top of the highest point of the hill we can see is that it makes the pic unbalanced, too many heavy elements on the right side of the picture. I think you have too many elements here as well. This is clearly an atmosperic pic, so get rid of all the elements that are not necessary for the picture. If you want to have buildings in the pic, you don't need to show every detail of the buildings, just specs of light in the windows or the roof. The mountain in the distance wouldn't have any details visible either, just the outlines. The campfire may be too much as well.

Were you considering the golden ration when composing the picture?

[JJ Naas]

Well, here's my take on the scene. This one's not about the anatomy but the general composition of the image. The tree's still there, sort of framing the image on the right side plus there are some bushes on the left side for framing as well. I moved the tallest mountain to the left to counterbalance the heaviness of the right side. The attention is on the sky, so I brought the horizon down more. The buildings are only hinted.

[Jad]

I don't know what the golden ration is. I just threw things together that I thought might make sense or look good. I'm really only used to drawing figures/humans. Landscapes, wildlife, and buildings confuse me. I don't know where to begin or how to do them. I've even screwed around with point-based perspective and nothing's ever come out looking good. This is ending up like every other drawing idea I've gotten.. starts out cool and somewhat exciting, then as soon as my pencil or stylus hits the page/tablet it all goes to hell.

[edit] I am thankful for the help I've received.. I don't want anyone to think I'm being ungrateful. It's just a matter of personal disappointment. I guess I'll try my hand at it again later today.

Actually, with the amount of verbal disappointment of yourself that you often drench your posts in, I actually thought you were all enormous amounts of talk about stuffs and no skill. :O

So srsly, that's obviously not the case at all, since your skills are actually good. It's really that disappointment in yourself that hinders you from actually completing your images. Actually, if you just took the first sketch with the sitting girl and tried to flesh it out a bit, that'd be good enough. And now you're actually improving on that, that's even better! So just hang in there, guy

[tocky]

This is essentially the reason why JJ Naas's composition works, I think:

Big ol' swirly line.
Generally, people start from the top, find something that goes somewhere, and follow it. If that's a clear path that leads past all the focal points, and lands somewhere interesting, that's about the best you could hope for. There's more to the edit than just that, but this is a really useful trick, and it's dead simple, so I figure I should mention it.

[Argyle]

These are scans from a page of Richard Williams' The Animator's Survival Kit (by the director of animation of Who Framed Roger Rabbit), a book which I cannot recommend to enough people.  A while back I was ambitious about getting better in my drawings enough to go to the local college's life drawing sit-ins to draw nude models.  Although I only got a chance to go about 2 or 3 times, the studies drastically improved my knowledge of how a body should look and understanding what separates a drawing of a character from looking like a hunk of ridiculous ground meat shaped like a stick figure.

Drawing from picture references helps out a ton in the understanding of anatomy.  But drawing a model in person with time restrictions for poses ranging between 5 and 20 minutes is invaluably helpful in getting your mind trained to cut to the core of defining a body's truly defining shapes and restrictions without becoming overburdened with spending 20 minutes making sure the eyes look nice and pretty on your picture while the rest of the head looks like a melon.

Anyone seeking to pursue a study of drawing human anatomy should seriously consider looking up life drawing sessions that are hosted in your area.  I plan to look into going back and doing more of this regularly for a couple years in the future (after life settles down... moving in a week and our first baby due at the ending of October ).  This thread was just the driving inspiration that reminded me of this goal.


If the recent flood we had didn't destroy my old huge sketch pad I'll look into snapping some photos of the sketches from the sessions later on tonight.  I have not done much studying of anatomy in the 5 or so years since I did them so some critiques should still help me learn more