It's may be an odd question but do you think you could maybe post a couple tips of anatomy and/or proportion that helped you sometime? I notice I have a hard time learning from videos or guides, but sometimes when I learn on my own or hear someone else's personal experience it just clicks and it's nice.
I know this may sound strange, but for me it was a class I took with Matt Faulkner, who had a very refreshing approach to mark making and drawing from life. We did have a live model, and drawing people from life teaches you two important things that books cannot: textbook anatomy is idealized, not everybody will look like that and foreshortening and perspective are things that are easier to see in person (at least, for me they were).
As you draw things like that over and over, you will build a mental library that will help you draw those tougher perspectives from imagination. I still use a reference, because the human body can bend and distort in a lot of ways and I am nowhere near having all of that memorized, and WE DON’T HAVE TO! If it gets committed to memory, great! But artists should never feel shame from using a reference because that is how we learn and that is how we improve. Even professionals use a reference.
The mark making that Matt taught us was a little different than some of the other classes I had been through in the past. I typically would draw a human with basic shapes and a “wire-frame” skeleton for my foundational rough sketch, but Matt would have us start drawing our figures with different lines. Contour lines, is just drawing the outside of what you’re observing, while periodically flashing your eyes at the paper. Blind contour would have us looking only at our subject and drawing what we were seeing without ever picking up the pencil (some of these actually turn out pretty cool).
Volumetric drawing was the one that I had never come across before. Matt uses a lot of crosshatching and volume lines in his work. See the below example:
The way this applies to anatomy is that his way of volumetric drawing is helpful in finding the space that your figure takes up. Sometimes Matt would have us draw our figure with ONLY volumetric lines. It would look like a tornado person, but this practice wasn’t to make something visually appealing, it was to help us train our brain and our eyes to see the volume. In that volumetric study we would be wrapping lines in a width and curvature that followed the subject. Here is a visual example of a volumetric drawing by Monika Zagrobelna that shows what I mean:
The volumetric drawing helps to grasp how much space something takes up, whereas the wire-frame doesn’t really convey that kind of information. A lot of people reference the Andrew Loomis books and Figure Drawing For All It’s Worth [ISBN: 978-0857680983] is a good resource to learn from. But Loomis does idealize the standard figures in his works and books. I am not saying don’t draw like him! There is nothing wrong with his style! Just don’t fall into the assumption that every body type will align exactly with the proportions and measurements that he covers. For example, he usually has a standard height that male and female figures are drawn at and certain points where knees are expected to reach and other body part milestones:
It is a guideline, and it is useful, but I found that the best exercise that you can do is to do a study on separate pages. No one taught me this, I just did it out of curiosity to see how it would go. Set one aside for male and one for female. First, draw your standard Loomis figure, then get five other male/female reference photos (or drawn from life if you can) of people with different body types. Try drawing them from observation and see how much of the Loomis concept applies to them. You’ll find that you can bend a lot of the Loomis ideas to fit, but you have to throw out some things entirely in order to accurately portray your subject (like the number of heads tall something has to be, or posture, for example).
Hopefully, despite that being a little long-winded of me, you found this experience helpful? Everyone learns differently, so I feel your struggle. I am a big visual learner and need to see what is happening with something to understand it. I also learn best by struggling. So what were the “aha” moments for me, may not necessarily work for another, but it is here if you can find any value or use in it.
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