#jesseblue draws

Happy Valentine’s Day, Lotura fam! 💖💜

Would you like a sip of quintessence before bedtime? 😉

Who’s the purplest of us all?

Confused? 😄 Is it… Lotor? Or… Allura? Maybe both?

Meet Helenor, the savage daughter of Allura and Lotor, who wants nothing but the truth from her poor lonely father and who would pierce through realities to pry it out of him.

Just a little teaser of my work in progress Lotura art for Valentine’s Day 💜💖

(But Voltron doesn’t have a Purple Lion!)

Hey people of Tumblr! I've created a lot of art, fics and metas in the past few years. Although I dab into other fandoms too, VLD remains the focus of this blog - in the form of illustrations, fanfics and metas (some artworks are still available as prints in my Ko-fi shop). This is an updated masterpost of links to the most representative artworks and fanfics, as well as every meta I've written. Yup, a lot of Lotura. :)

There are many drawing techniques out there and lots of pose reference sites; a very simple technique is to view all body forms as simple 3D geometric figures. Yes, that is a good way to establish the general forms and their proportions in relation to each other. But my recap does NOT start off with this:

Instead, this is my go-to method:

The old, classic anatomy… The hardest to master, but once you understand the skeletal structure and how the muscles and tendons overlay, then the drawing starts to make much more sense. This is the foundation for best art.

Halloween just passed, but some of you might still keep outside those fancy skeletons. Some of them are anatomically quite accurate. If you’re looking for a way to learn to draw, you might discover that it’s been there all along. 😉

Wondering what those red arrows and lines mean in my above drawing? Those are anatomical landmarks. They are my clues to where everything is situated underneath the skin.

Without entering into crazy bone names like scaphoid, lunate, capitate, etc (which I used to know by heart a long time ago - but reciting their names doesn’t really help me with actually drawing them), just know that besides the finger bones (the phalanges) and the metacarpal bones that make up the palm of the hand, there is that cluster of tiny bones right at the base of the hand. These guys basically create the connection between the hand and the bones of the forearm (radius and ulna). Depending on the angle of the hand, they give lots of reference points to an artist, along with the radius and ulna extremities, which form the base of the joint (top two arrows on the drawing).

The anatomical landmarks are the key to mastering human figure drawing.

One important thing to remember is that no finger bone is like the other. If, when you’re drawing a hand, you begin to “count” the fingers like twigs, instead of drawing them as unique elements, that’s a sign that you lost the anatomy of your drawing. Each finger is like a different person. It has a different character. Sure, they’re all related, like siblings in a family. You won’t see a hand with two pianist fingers and three lumberjack fingers. They have common traits, but they are not quite the same. And that’s because the bones underneath the skin are not the same. In the drawing above, I highlighted the way the knuckles and the joints of the fingers align in concentric arcs (which are not necessarily parallel). They don’t align in straight paths. Whenever you draw a hand, keep that in mind.

Below, I added a few pics of my own hand as a drawing reference. Although my hand is not the best at depicting anatomy since I don’t have very evident joints, there are still discreet changes in the contour lines that indicate where there are bones underneath the surface: the ulna, the radius, the metacarpal joints, etc.

Here are some more pics with various angles. Notice, again, the subtle transitions, suggesting the bone structures underneath.

There are as many hand types as people on Earth. Not one is like the other, and that’s determined genetically and by the amount and type of physical activity - because the bones underneath are reshaped by the pull of muscles and tendons. So studying a hand is basically like studying a portrait.

A good way to practice learning how the bones align underneath the skin and muscles is to study x-rays of hands. You can understand the relationship between the outer shape of the hand and the internal structure. Sure, there are muscles and tendons that further refine the shape, but the bone landmarks will always be right where they are supposed to be. Draw, draw some more, practice a lot, repeat. Study the differences in bone length from one hand to another, from one finger to another.

No plastic skeleton model? There are some really cool apps out there; I’ve never used them, in fact I just downloaded one today to play with it and it’s really cool. Search for “anatomy 3D” and you’ll find lots of apps, some of them include body movement.

So here are three steps (I won’t say they’re easy, because anatomy is complex) to get better at drawing hands (and by extension, the whole human figure):

Best is to start with basic images with the palm laying flat, like the x-ray image above. Draw the bones and the outer shape of the hand. Examine the ratio between the length of the fingers and that of the palm, the width of the palm vs the height, etc.

Then transition to more complex models, like the anatomical 3D models I mentioned before, so you can see how the bones look from the lateral view, and so on. Draw from many angles, see how the bone shapes look in perspective.

Last step is to use a real-life model (your own hand is the easiest), and knowing where those anatomical landmarks are, start practicing. Again, simple poses first, more complex afterwards as you get better and better. NB: there are lots of landmarks on a hand. I pointed out the less obvious ones. There are also the knuckles, the finger joints, and I have not discussed at all about the palmar side landmarks (the inside, or the palm of hand) but you can find them in the apps I talked about. As a rule of thumb (pun unintended), there are landmarks wherever there are joints between two bones, or where the bone has a protuberance. Some are discreet, others are more evident. Palpate your own joints to better understand what is underneath the skin.

I’m in the mood for pencil and paper lately, so I left the iPad aside for a while and befriended my old sketchbooks again.