Tag: anatomy
Comparison of my arms before and after this month's practice.
Before was with ref, after was done without.
September's Daily Sketches
In this video I go through all the sketches I did this month and some new methods I used to practice.
If you have a tablet and are interested in trying 3d sculpting, I would suggest Sculptris which is free and very easy to use (also look out for Zbrush Core which is supposed to be an easier affordable version of Zbrush, all 3 are from the same company, Pixologic). Just note it's not meant for point modeling (that is for very geometric shapes like the rib cage). It's more like sculpting with clay, for point modeling you need something like Blender but it has a huge frustrating learning curve.
Week's Worth of Figure Drawing Practice
The image is just the thumb. I'm not scanning 100 pages. I go through them all in the video.
For the references I used a mix of pixelovely, quickposes, and characterdesigns, hence why unfortunately I did not have very early poses that repeat later. I have saved a few of my favorite poses for next time so hopefully there will be more to compare.
The anatomy book I like to use is Classic Human Anatomy by Valerie L. Winslow. If you can only afford one book get this one. The only downside is it's all drawn but I have found no other book so well done.
As for Michael Hampton who I mentioned, he has a wonderful blog full of sketches that I found very helpful. He often shows his reference and I recommend you first attempt to do the pose from the reference, then look at his approach for help/comparison. He also has a book (Figure Drawing - Design and Invention) that looks very good.
The lightning bold figure drawing method I mentioned can be found here.
Oh also, this is kind of unrelated, but I fixed the noise on my microphone! I'm using an iPhone with a mic app plugged into my computer and I thought the noise was just a side-effect of the cable or being so close to my fan, but turns out it was all Windows. I had microphone boost turned on because otherwise I couldn't use the computer mic before without it, turns out this just seems to introduce hideous amounts of noise.
Drawing Some Hands
I’m trying out something slightly different. I want to do more video but the editing always takes so long I avoid it. So I’m thinking of doing videos like this one, possibly even more concentrated (one hand at a time) because it’s so much easier to edit. Then maybe once I get the hang of it (and a proper mic - 50% of is getting the iPhone audio bits in sync) I’ll start making longer ones. Anyways enjoy.
Some Notes on Ears - Part 2
You can also find this post as an Instructable.
I finally got around to complete Part 2 of the Ears video. I’m still having some recording issues. If you have any questions please comment. Feedback is appreciated. I worked on cutting down the time to 15 minutes this time. Currently working on trying to sound less monotone.
First Part: How to Draw Ears - Part 1 - Structure
The two ears used for reference in the video where:
“Mean me” by Pierre Vignaue used under a CC-BY 2.0 License / Cropped
“Backlight 2” by Travis Pawlewski used under a CC-BY 2.0 License / Cropped
- = Optional
Some Notes on Ears
I was doing a very realistic portrait from scratch and I was having some trouble with the ear so I thought I’d do some ear studies and record it while I’m at it. The best way really to learn how to draw something is to draw it until you can draw it without reference. There’s no way around the hard boring work that studies can be. Looking at videos and posts will help guide you on what to observe and pay attention to, and mistakes to avoid, but nothing can replace practice.
A great place to get reference images for studies is morgueFile. You could also look around Flickr and such for CC licensed images but if you’ll be posting your work anywhere, those require crediting. morgueFile was made with artists in mind, as long as you modify the image you can do whatever you want with your work and that can be useful so you can just worry about doing your study and not whether you can share it later or you have to attach a giant list of credits.
Update: Part 2 is up!
I planned on talking about how to paint the ear and how it can be lit up from behind (subsurface scattering), but the video was too long already. I’ll do a second one and repost this post when I upload it. I’ve got some cool stuff ready for that video.
I think, I hope. This video was kind of nightmare to make. My computer was throwing blue screens. Turns out the damn video cache was in the wrong place. Also my internet sucks and the files are huge. Just want to mention this because I discovered this cool site called clipchamp that compresses your videos extremely well. I mean, it’s kind of astonishing. Even set on high quality it shrunk a 380MB file to 60MB! (ignore the estimate they give it’s way off). And you can queue the YouTube upload, so you can leave it to do the whole process overnight. I’m sure Premiere can probably compress as well, but I’m not very familiar with all the export settings and this is super easy.
Figure Drawing Practice - Reference: Croquis Cafe
Figure Drawing Practice
I don’t remember which Croquis Cafe number it was, sorry. If you’ve never heard of Croquis Cafe it’s a youtube channel that films live models so people at home can practice “live” figure drawing.