goombella123 asked: how 2 force myself to study so i can get better at anatomy and posing
pearbuddy asked: Â developing a steady practice? i know the best advice to getting better is to just draw, but i know a lot of people (myself included) struggle with actually making ourselves do it.
cuccosneverdie asked: what kind of practice you did to get good at anatomy? iâm really struggling getting anatomy to look even slightly correct
whereislaurita asked about: Anatomy; ;
elinmeat asked about: FACES. .âŠ. FACES. ⊠.
With regards to anatomy, my favourite book is Figure Drawing: Design & Invention by michael hampton, and lots of tutorials and references in my anatomy tag: http://helpfulharrie.tumblr.com/tagged/anatomy !
Which is all well and good⊠but how do you actually practice these things?Â
âJust draw a whole bunchâ is only about 15% of the story. In order to self study, you need to:
Identify what you are struggling with. Reflect on what it is about your art you do not like so you can improve upon it!
Figure out what direction it is you want to take your art in. How do you want your art to look?
You can find a post I wrote about art direction a couple years ago here: http://helpfulharrie.tumblr.com/post/120523296471/alrighty-then-friends-lets-talk-about-art-styles
Once you identify what you are unsatisfied with, you can figure out what knowledge you are lacking and study it. Read tutorials, books, ask other artists and friends for guidance and critique, etc.!
Then you want to start applying what you have learnt to your art! You can only get so far by reading something, to truly understand it you have to put it into practice and get a feel for what you have learnt.
So lets say, for example, you want to study faces.
Youâll want to seek out some resources that will help you understand the subject, a good place to start would be my faces tag:
http://helpfulharrie.tumblr.com/tagged/faces
But Iâll get you started with two resources that helped me the most!
One: Stan Prokopenkoâs series on drawing the head at any angle:
Itâs a great breakdown of the Loomis Method, a series of guidelines for the face and head created by andrew loomis.
Two: The book I mentioned earlier! It covers the whole figure and I recommend getting it if you can, I do believe there are pdfs out there if you canât get the book.
But! You can see two of the pages on drawing the head here:
http://helpfulharrie.tumblr.com/post/105040269221/from-figure-drawing-design-and-invention
Now youâve learnt some New Stuff, and you need to put it into practice so you can process what youâve been told.
So start finding some references! For faces/hands/feet/the human figure, I recommend visiting https://line-of-action.com/, itâs full of photos you can use.
With your references in and, start by tracing the guidelines over the image. This will help you understand what they represent, and why theyâre there.
This is a good exercise for understanding anatomy in general, letâs say you instead wanted to study giraffes and have no idea how to draw them.
Look for the large, consistent shapes, and those will become your construction guidelines!
Once youâve gotten a feel for your guidelines, try them out! Do a bunch of sketches from imagination.
And when youâre confident with them, try them out by drawing from references.
And finally, go back to your art from before you started these studies, Iâm going to use something I drew in 2013
And redraw it using what youâve learnt!
While youâre doing this, pay attention to the areas you got wrong. Make a note of this, so you donât repeat it in the future.
Now repeat the process of: Identify problem, research problem, study problem, apply what you learnt, and youâll improve for sure. Itâll take time, but the more you learn the closer your art will get to the image you want it to be!
In this post I focused on anatomy studies, but you can do the same thing with anything.
Like for example: colour studies, in that case you would:
find some references full of colours you like, and colour pick out the palette
analyse the relationships btwn the colours based on what you read. What kind of colour scheme is this? how are these colours influencing the mood? etc.
then take an old piece and redo the colour scheme, making note of why you were dissatisfied with the old colours.
The most important part of this is that you experiment with what youâre reading about and being taught, and then going back and seeing where it was lacking in your work before so you can apply it to your work in the future!
Best of luck everyone! I hope that helps nwn
You can always ask me for pointers if you need, and remember! Take pride in what you create, everything you do is a work of art.
Itâs easy to get caught up in the cycle of improve, improve, improve - but donât forget to appreciate how far youâve come.
Lastly, if this was helpful to you, you can support me on Patreon, Liberapay, or Ko-Fi so I can keep writing these posts! Thank you đ
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