Sketchboo!

Being older now and having an art job it’s…kind of essential. 

So: a quick primer for those of you who are like ‘ok but how do i actually go about doing this warmup thing.’ 

1) you may be tempted to do ‘a warmup drawing’ which is just a drawing that will take longer than it needed to and probably be frustrating and kind of bad because you didn’t warm up first. It’s tempting but always a trick your brain is playing on you! Do not trust! 

2) warmups will vary based on what feels good to you/what task you’re about to do/what motor skills you want to practice. That being said, some good standbys:

a) circles. Just a whole page of circles on whatever drawing surface you’re going to be using, whether that’s your tablet or your sketchbook or a drawing pad on an easel. For these circles you should make sure that you’re drawing from your shoulder and not your wrist. In fact, you want to be drawing from your shoulder rather than your wrist most of the time! forever! your wrist is delicate please preserve it! 

In order to ensure that you’re drawing from your shoulder, when you’re holding your pencil or whatever drawing tool you’re using, the only part of your hand that should be touching the drawing surface is part of the last two fingers–some people prefer the finger tips, but I tend to favor the first knuckles. Either way, the fingers should really be ghosting over the surface, providing guidance rather than support. 

I usually start with big circles and then go to smaller circles and lines of ellipses, and then try to fit circles and ellipses inside other shapes i’ve already drawn as a precision exercise, but i don’t do that unless i’m feeling loose

b) spirals! i don’t always do spirals, but if i’m stiff and the circles just aren’t cutting it, spirals are a good fall back. I start from the center and work outward, going both clockwise and counterclockwise until i feel comfortable with the whole range of motion. Some people really care about getting perfect spirals but for me it’s all about making sure i’m comfortable with how i’m moving so who really even cares about how the spirals look. Not me! 

c) lines! straight lines! in parallel! i do a mix of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal. These are often more from the elbow than the shoulder, especially if I’m working on a smaller surface. For this exercise, I recommend holding the drawing tool perpendicular with the surface

d) connect the dots. This is a precision and accuracy exercise and takes two forms. The first is to draw two dots and then draw a straight line between them. The second is to draw three dots and draw the curve that connects them. This sounds a lot simpler than it is in practice. Take time to ghost over the line you plan to draw before actually committing to your line. (I don’t always remember where I picked up my warm up exercises, but I’m pretty sure I got this one from Scott Robertson. His how to draw and how to render books are very technical but also accessible and worth checking out)

e) cubes, spheres, cones, and cylinders. These help get your brain into a more volumetric space. I draw multiples of each, rotating the forms around, and I’ll often take the time to do some rough shading on at least a few of them

f) spidermans! This one is really good if you’re going to be storyboarding or working on dynamic poses. Just fill a page full of spidermans doing all sorts of acrobatics. 

g) beans. I don’t do beans too much anymore, but I know a lot of people like it so I’m mentioning it here. Fill an area with different size bean shapes without lifting your pencil off the paper. 

h) short medium and long line repetition. draw a short, medium, and long line on your page, and then draw directly on top of them 8 to 12 times, doing your best to exactly trace what you’ve already drawing. Repeat with a wavy line. I’m bad at this one, which means I probably need to do it more. 

And there are lots more options too! Hit up youtube to see what other people recommend, put together your own go-to list, mix it up when you’re getting bored, etc. 

This is a long list, I know, but I usually don’t take more than 10 to 15 minutes to warm up, and I can warm up one handed while I’m drinking coffee, so, multitasking hurrah. 

Sometimes I’ll advance to a precision warmup and find that I haven’t loosened up enough yet; it’s totally ok to go back to an earlier exercise! Also, all of this has the added benefit of kind of ritualistically getting you into the drawing mode so even if I’m not feeling it before I start, by the time I’ve gotten to the end I’m usually Ready For Drawin’. Brain hacks. 

Bibbity bobbity boo!

a very quick self-reflection comic for the new year talking about being raised by my dad ig

How to Draw Legs – The Adductors

We’re done having fun with butts. This lesson isn’t as stinky, though it’s close. We’ll study the inner leg muscles – the adductors and sartorius.

They’re in the upper inner part of the leg. The inguinal ligament separates them from the abs, ASIS to pubic symphysis. The long sartorius muscle separates the adductors from the quads diagonally. The border in the back is not as obvious. It fades away into fat and then suddenly it’s the hamstrings. Though in certain poses and mostly on athletic people, you might see where the adductor magnus pops out at the top. It can separate the form of the adductors from the hamstrings.

This little section is called the femoral triangle and has nerves, veins, arteries, lymph nodes, and the adductor area in general is prone to having more fat. All this stuff softens the inner leg muscles. This is actually good news for us because in most cases we don’t need to know the individual adductor muscles, just their overall form and occasionally some tendons toward the top. In premium, we’ll go over the anatomy of each adductor in more details because sometime it can be useful.

So, let’s get familiar with the simple forms. You know I love simple forms…

Simple Forms

Up to this point in this course and the figure drawing course, we’ve been drawing leg’s as simple cylinders, maybe with a bit of taper, getting thinner toward the knee. And that’s fine for starting our drawings. But now, since we’re learning leg anatomy, we need to be able to take that cylinder and make it into… a leg!

Let’s say we have this seated pose (see below), legs coming at us. Looking at a cross section, we’ll see three main muscle groups. Quadriceps, hamstrings, and adductors. This video is about adductors, so let’s group the quads and hamstrings into one large mass. Now, let’s look at how a leg is different from a cylinder.

In the middle everything is very meaty. You start seeing that indent on the inside where the adductor group attaches to the quads. The front plane is tall and round as the quads project out.

Near the knee, the leg isn’t cylindrical at all. It’s more boxy. The top is meaty, with the quads, and the back is tendinous, with two powerful hamstring tendons on the sides. So, the corners of the box are sharper in the back. It’s like a slice of bread.

The main mass of the quads and hamstrings is boxy and short at the knee and grows much taller and egg-shaped at the hip. The adductors are like a secondary mass that attach on the inside, shaped like a cone or a wedge. You can see how it’s separate from the rest of the leg mass especially in a seated pose like this. The adductor mass hangs down off the leg. The long sartorius muscle actually rounds it out a bit. Without it, the indent between these two forms would be even sharper. Also keep in mind that this area is a major fat storage area. So, that adds to the form and softens the borders.

The sartorius is a great rhythm diagonally across the leg. You’ll see it as as an oblique side plane. So, when we look at it with Bridgman glasses, the quads are a front plane, the sartorius is a side plane, and then the adductors make a triangular front plane, and another side plane is they wrap around to the back. We have 2 “steps” when we think of the front of the leg planarly.

A Few Details

The sartorius and the TFL we learned about last time create a hollow triangle into which the quads dive in to. Sometimes you’ll see this as an indent, but usually just as a flat vertical plane. Remember that the leg cylinder doesn’t start at the ASIS point of the pelvis. We need to drop this vertical for the TFL and sartorius, and then start the leg cylinder a few inches down.

The inside of the leg gets this double curve. Look for that when you’re designing the flow down the leg. Remember how we talked about asymmetry in the limbs. The contours zig zag down the leg. Because female pelvises are wider, the adductor origins are farther apart. So thin females may have a “thigh gap”. Here’s a good example of it.

Like I said, the simple form is the most important thing to learn about the adductors. There’s just a few tendons that you’ll commonly see. Usually when the legs are spread apart, thinning out the fat and pulling the tendons tight. You’ll see the tendons of the adductor longus and adductor magnus.

Assignment

Your assignment is to do quicksketch drawings of the legs from the model photos I’ve provided in the description below. Start with the gesture then focus on drawing the forms of the muscle groups, especially the adductors. We haven’t studied the others yet, so you can keep them as gestural lines, or cylindrical. But don’t just copy the contours. In premium, I’ll show you how to draw all the assignment photos, so you can check your work.

Post your work in the Anatomy for Artists Facebook group.

Unknown in a Gurren Lagann-esque style!