Do you have any recommendations for life/figure drawing resources?
Oh I am probably the wrong person to ask haha. I've kinda approached art from a weird backwards way, admittedly I've only started taking drawing seriously very recently. I feel like figures are my weakest point, I used to mostly focus on faces/expressions and cartoons so this is new-ish to me. I'm also a huge hack, a lot of the stuff I draw for this blog is slapped together on sleepless nights and I sometimes just trace poses.
Social anxiety that has stopped me from doing any kind of art classes or life drawing, so I usually draw from photographs. I have a lot of books of vintage photography and pinup illustrations that I like to redraw in my sketchbooks. I'm a huge sucker for midcentury cheesecake, and that's a lot of what i draw lol.
I've never really bothered with posing 3D models like the ones in clip studio, they can help you lay down the base pose but don't reflect how muscles move under the skin. Which is i guess fine for anime, but not how I want to draw.
I think it's really important to learn how to 'see' things and translate them to paper. I remember "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" being very helpful for this when I was in high school. The left/right brain theory is pseudoscience junk but the drawing techniques were sound.
I'm making my way through "Dynamic Anatomy" right now, which I find very helpful, if a bit intimidating. In general I started by figuring out some of the bigger muscle groups, and I'm slowly learning the smaller details and working them into my drawings. Really a lot of my references are things I find through google images. I am currently looking into paid lessons, if anyone has some good ones let me know ha!
Always free and available, you have yourself and a mirror! If it's reasonable i try to make a lot of the poses and expressions I draw. I'm always referencing my own hands, and touching my face to see how things are spaced out.
If you find anything hard to draw, focus on it. Struggle with hands? You need to draw a lot more (realistic) hands. Expressions? Get a mirror out, it's time to learn how face muscles affect each other. It's important to always push yourself, art isn't always fun. If you want to improve you have to do the hard stuff.
Unrelated to your ask, but I think it's also really important to draw on paper. I've found that most skills you learn with physical media will translate well to digital, but it doesn't go the other way. I really like a heavy, coil-bound mixed-media sketchbook and Faber-Castell Polychromos.
Also adding the best piece of general life advice I've ever seen: There will always be someone better, younger, and hotter than you. Don't focus on what other people are doing/have done, you won't accomplish anything by being miserable. The only person you can compare yourself to is yourself.
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