#art study tips

I get that it's important and all but I can't practise effectively if I have no idea what the hell. I'm doing wrong and the only thing I'm getting from yt vids is 'JuSt kEeP prActISiNg! YouLl GeT iT evEnTuALlY!!!!!'

dude i haaaaaate when people say that and don't give any actual advice so here's my biggest thing I've done:

You can't understand anatomy if you don't understand the basic shapes. So you're going to draw boxes and rectangles and cylinders for hours upon hours until you can draw them in any perspective. Because those boxes can give you this:

Obviously drawn very fast but you get the point here. The version on the left where you start putting on muscles and fat can't come into existence properly if you don't have your box-man (or a version like it since some people will tell you box-man doesn't help, but I like him). This step is important because you're going to need to build up your mental library for perspective and the mental library is IMPORTANT. We have to observe every part of our surroundings all the time and go "how would I put this on a grid? How would I show the shadows and light? How do I simplify it's most basic shape?" There are plenty of tutorials on box-man that can give you the first step to understanding Box-man.

This is where I tell you to go to Line Of Action dot com, a great source for poses of all kinds. Set the time to 10 minutes. You're not gonna box-man yet. You're gonna draw squiggles of the pose- a loose stick man figure. Go back to childhood roots. Once you think you've gotten the energy of poses, you're going to box-man them. Same settings, just the box man. Don't try to add anything else to it yet.

Now look at your box-mans and think "Ok, but how do I give him his human flesh" You gotta give him bones. Check out a medical book at the library and start with the skeleton. Understanding what is and isn't possible for the human body to do before you ever start breaking the rules is also important. Again, we're back at this mental library. You draw skeletons and you draw skeletons and you draw skeletons.

And now's the fun part: muscles. Your sketchbook should be filled halfway full of shapes and box-mans and skeletons by now. Muscles are about to take over the next half. You have to study these medical books still, redraw the diagram and memorize the names of the muscles. Go back to your skeleton and try building the muscles on top of it, and then do that over and over

These are all from Line of Action here. I like to take my time, really slow down when I'm first learning and (this is THE most important part): really think about where my next line is going.

line confidence is your best friend. if you're hestitating and chicken scratching, you're not really thinking ahead your next move (of course there are some people that can freestyle like that but this ain't about them.) Before every line, you have to KNOW where you want it to end up and think about the shape and negative space around it. And i hate that this sounds like i'm breezing through this but it's so hard to do this on a text post ahhhhh

When you think you've gotten a decent enough grasp on copying these poses, you need to start thinking "Ok, now how owuld this pose look if I changed the viewing angle?"

GOD... this changed my life. Now i'm thinking about the pose I just drew, and I'm pulling up my mental library of the bodies i've been studying, and Im forcing myself to imagine it from another angle. And then I try to draw it. Your first attempts are probably going to look awful- trust me, when I get home I'll try to find the pages n my sketchbook where i practiced this and you'll see how pathetic it was. But keep going at it. Some of the poses on that other example are line of action poses that I thought about from a different angle.

BUILD THAT MENTAL LIBRARY!! That's truly the only way. Don't just look at other artists and try to copy, you need to look at real human beings. Why does that muscle only buldge when they lift their arm? Why does stomach fat fall like that? What happens when we lose our balance and why is it that an arm falls forward?