3D Week 7 – Anatomy

I’m still about a week behind schedule with my blogposts, so this will be about what happened last week. Bear with me as I’m trying to catch up. We were asked to evaluate our own, and some classmates, knowledge in anatomy, and to reflect and give constructive criticism to each other on what we need to improve. This post will be about my knowledge in anatomy and what I should work on to improve.

I think that I’ve got a good basic knowledge when it comes to anatomy. I’ve always drawn more animals – especially canines and felines – than humans, which shows in my work as I tend to draw that more often, and I don’t struggle as much with snouts and paws as I do with human faces, hands or feet.

The image above contains some of my more animal-related work. This is just a very small portion of the images that I’ve created that contain animals, especially canines and felines as mentioned earlier, and some of the images are more than a year old. The image below contains more human and humanoid images, some of them also more than a year old. I’ve been practicing more with humans lately as I want to improve with drawing humans. Some of these are life-drawings, but most of them are drawn without references, or with just myself as a reference.

I studied 2D-animation for three years a couple of years ago, and that’s really helped me to understand the body in motion. Even though I weren’t that good at anatomy back then, and I’m in no way an expert when it comes to movement, the knowledge I gained during my animation-studies, and my big interest in animation, has helped me a great deal when practicing anatomy and movement in my images, in animals as well as humanoids.

The feedback I got during the class was that those who looked at my images all agreed on that I’ve already got a rather good grasp of anatomy. They agreed that it looked as if I’d practiced more with animals, but thought that my human anatomy looked good as well. I’ve got a good basic knowledge of what I’m doing, but they, as well as I, thought that I could perhaps practice some more with mainly drawing faces, hands and feet, as I feel that those are the areas where I primarily lack knowledge and those are three areas that are very commonly something that needs more practice.

In order to get better and fill my knowledge gaps in these areas I should try to draw them more often. Practice makes perfect, as they say, and drawing more hands, feet and especially faces would help me a lot. I’d like to read up on facial anatomy, and practice drawing more expressions with the face as well as the hands. I’d also like to try and widen my comfort zone with drawing more full bodies and gestures, especially at different angles and perspectives, as well as drawing other kinds of animals, and not just mainly canines and felines. I’d really like to draw more birds, insects and arachnids, as those kinds of animals interest me very much.

Over the next six months I’m going to try and focus on drawing more faces, hands and feet, whenever I get time in-between other work. I’d like to practice drawing more hand gestures during the first two months, getting more comfortable with drawing hands in different positions. I still tend to draw hands mainly based on my own hands, as those are the best references that I’ve got, so I’d also like to try and draw more of different kinds of hands – old, young, skinny, chubby, you name it. Together with the hands I’d also like to practice drawing more feet in different gestures and angles, and as feet are very similar to hands I think that I’d be able to practice those two simultaneously.

After that I’d like to focus more on faces for the next two months. Here I’d also like to become more comfortable with drawing different kinds of faces, from different ethnicities and of different ages. For the last two months I’d like to spend some time working more on whole-body images, and I’d like to do more life-drawings and studies to learn how things look and how they work. I’m not going to neglect the rest of the body whilst practicing hands, feet or faces though, as it’s important to keep it all together. Drawing just good parts won’t make a good whole.

That’s it for now. I hope you’re all having a great week!

/MPh