Hello, I love your artwork, especially everything from TFTGS, and I was wondering, how did you learn to draw human anatomy? It’s something I struggle with a lot and I’d appreciate any pointers you may be willing to offer. I feel like you capture the characters so well, especially without a defined reference photo. I have a decent enough understanding of how human anatomy works and if given a reference I can work decently well, but you draw book characters flawlessly, I almost envy it!
Anyways sorry if I’m rambling, and you don’t have to answer but I’d be delighted if you did!
woof- difficult question to give a solid answer to that doesn't include "keep practicing" which everyone says. But its just true tbh.
Learning how to draw and keeping that skill honed is like working out a muscle. The more you practice the more you get the feel for it and your body remembers the motions.
For me personally everything up till college was just practicing on my own, finding something I really liked and then I just kept drawing those things. If you aren't doing something you enjoy its gonna be a lot harder. In my case I really liked to draw characters, thus I practiced drawing bodies and expressions a LOT. During college I did also take life drawing. Those classes did help- but it was cuz the majority of those classes were again practicing drawing bodies in motion for 6-12 hours each week- just this time we had live models and a teacher pointing out crit on what we should improve on. Plus we needed to follow steps instead of just free handing(that came later):
You start with a the gesture what way a body leans/ what the major line of motion is.
Add the major shapes of a skeleton (rib cage, hips, head, knee and elbow joints, boxes for hands, triangles for feet, in that order).
-note: we did the ribcage and hips first with a line for the spine cuz that is your center mass and shows what way a body leans as well as makes it easier to keep a full body on a page more rather than starting with the head and having the legs get cut off cuz you ran out of room (though this is less of an issue digitally still helps a ton to start with center mass first)
Add the major structures for muscles on top and now you have what looks like a body, or if you are drawing a more curvy "fuller" character draw the shapes for how fat falls on the figures skeleton
The absolute last step is any detail work on the exterior, that's where you add the clothes and the expressions and the hair but all figures start out looking like ken dolls, not naked just unfinished.
everything starts as fancy lil stick figures just like that, then you build on top of em
and i was doing hundreds of these^^^
Once you get that down its kinda just reading into a characters personality, their body types, general "vibe", all their lil details. once you got your lil list you can use any base to then draw them on top of. They are all that same basic stick figure under there.
Also whoever says tracing to practice is cheating is a liar- never do that for paid work yeah, but if you are just learning how to break down a figure into basic shapes tracing helps you get the motions. Eventually you should push yourself out of that because without a challenge you will stay stagnant. Once you can do that basic structure its just repetition and everyone will still use references- I STILL USE REFERENCES. Always split my clip studio screen with the ref page on the right and whatever I'm working on on the left. Its not cheating, its not a crutch, its data I need to keep on track. Try drawing a bike from memory then go look at a bike when you are done, see how much you miss without using a reference (one of our teachers actually made the whole class do that to prove a point, no one could draw a bike that looked like it could actually function from memory).
In the end just keep going, no matter how imperfect you think your art is right now you will always get better if you keep at it.
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