Whooo goes there?

Foundational Stuff for resources, whatever artbooks you have will probably cover a bunch of foundational stuff already, so giving them another lookover is ideal. I've been using posemaniacs for over 10 years now, highly recommend starting a habit of doing 1 or 2 30-sec gesture drawing sessions, at whatever rate your schedule allows. doesn't have to be gestures of human figures either. you can use still lifes and change the position and angle of anything every 30sec-1min.

gestures were probably the most solid of foundations for me to work on, because it's an area where one doesn't have to worry about making loads of mistakes :) (at least, try not to worry) *the higher the quantity of gestures you go through, then the more consistently the quality of your figures in a normal drawing sesh will eventually go up.

Advanced my approach for studying anatomy is a combination paid 3D resources, youtube, wikipedia, and the library of pose packs that I've accumulated over the years. I'll try stick with free resources.

I search up an image of a shoulder, and pick an anatomy part. Let's pick the acromion.

I head to wikipedia and search up Acromion. There's usually a nice amount of animated gifs at the bottom, and they include how the appearance can vary too, which can be helpful when making different body types. I read up and usually download every one of these files into my own resources folder

And normally I go and draw them from the downloads and write down what I've learned.

Then I would go to 3D models next. Here's one from Sketchfab. Draw it in as many angles. Then, a very important step: draw it without reference

Then usually I would go to Youtube, search up acromion, and draw from the videos. I pick any, like this random one, but esp the ones with real people in them, so you can start to identify where that bone lands on a person. You can also try feel it on your shoulder.

When I've done this a few times, I will go usually go and see what kind of muscles are connected to the said bony part and repeat. I always do reviews the day after of what I learned.

Paid Options If you're curious here's the paid options that I'm using currently (recently, in fact) I do the same process as above, but instead of a free 3D model website, I used a rigged one. I use two for Blender: Blenrig Skeleton and Ecorche Rigged (they do have a regular standing one that's way cheaper. - I like the Blenrig skeleton because it has flexible rib-cage (for breathing) and mostly accurate skeletal articulations. I have basic rigging experience, so this rig is actually a marvel to me to pose. So many delightful stuff I want to try in my own rigs. - I like Ecorche because they label every muscle and bone in the rig. If I were to pick one to keep, it would be this one. Since you can hide each muscle and skeleton and also lower the opacity of the muscle and see the skeleton while posing. The rigging is very basic though and not as delightful, but holy moly it's amazing.

You gotta know how to pose models in Blender, so if you aren't familiar yet: Youtube tutorials! when I do gestures, sometimes I find a pose interesting. So I will pause there and pose my skeleton or muscle rig, and follow the same steps as previously mentioned above. Lots of different angles, lots of iterations. Review the day after :)