Figure Drawing Practice 004

      Knowledge of some anatomy is always valuable. But even if one has a very limited knowledge of it, one can still draw a good figure drawing. The key to a good drawing is drawing good shapes.

      Here's the steps I've taken in creating this drawing.  Firstly,  I established the overall shape and proportion of the figure, with the use of the Reilly head construction and some muscular anatomy markings.   Secondly, delineating and darkening of the shadow shapes, while being mindful of the anatomy underneath.  Then adding the whites in areas that are lit. For the final look, I decided to thicken the outline for a bit of design. 

     Here's the final look.

Model reference photo by Hong Ly
(characterdesign.com)

Figure Drawing Practice 003

Here's another figure drawing,using photo reference from Croquis Cafe.. 

Figure Drawing Practice 002

Here's another figure drawing focusing on the back muscles.   Learning artistic anatomy has been an ongoing effort and it really helps in recognizing all those muscle shapes and bumps that can be quite confusing especially in the shoulder blade area.  The challenge with this drawing was deciding how much muscle anatomy should I show and still maintain the feminine quality of the model.   There's not really any way of  learning how to judge this except to just keep practicing and let my artistic taste evolve to what's pleasing to the eye. 

Figure Drawing Practice

     One of the fundamental skills I should have learned by now, considering I was once a traditional animator, is figure drawing. But due to various reasons, I haven't done much of it.  As a former traditional animator, the emphasis of  our figure drawing exercises had been in capturing the gesture quickly, and pushing the pose for a quick read.  And so most of my figure sketches were sketchy, loose and unfinished.

      And so, for this year, I decided to focus on figure drawing and learn  how to finish it.   For this effort, I signed up and just recently completed  a figure drawing crash course and will further my learning in another course for a long pose figure drawing  The method is very similar to the previous head drawing course I've taken, by learning how to do the basic figure construction using shapes.

      And so, while waiting for that course to start, I did this figure drawing  and will compare this later to what I'll be learning in that upcoming course.  So here's my first post for 2019.

      Using a photo reference from Croquis Cafe, I drew this in Clip Studio Paint, using a Wacom Cintiq 13HD pen display tablet