Hello! I love your work, I aspire to be as good at colors and anatomy as you... and so I wanted to ask, because I mainly focused on various animals for the entirety of my drawing life, how did you learn human anatomy? (I guess that'd apply to bettering any animal anatomy too) I see a little bit of conflicting info on where to start and where to go. Some say learn all the muscles, some say start out with just basic 3D forms and add knowledge as needed...
hi, thank you so much!!
i would definitely not recommend starting from studying anatomy extensively from a medical standpoint 🤔 the human body has eight billions bones and muscles, if you start from that you will only get overwhelmed and discouraged. my advice would be to start with studying proportions! especially from photographs of real people, not artist guides. a lot of the latter insist that the ideal human has a 1:8 head to body ratio and that’s silly as heck (my own head to body ratio is exactly 1:6.5 and i have perfectly average height for my demographic, hell if i’ve ever seen an artist guide that suggested this ratio for an adult person) (btw the taller you are, the smaller that ratio is, i.e. i might have that 1:6.5 ratio but a 190cm tall person might very well be 1:8 or even lower)
so yeah, studying proportions from real pictures is very important, bungled proportions is what sets me back in some pictures even when all the other stuff looks pretty good. people in my earlier pictures look suuuper long because of silly proportions, and silly horizontal proportions specifically! it looks cute and obviously sometimes it’s part of a specific art style, but in my case it was 100% not intentional so it just didn’t look natural.
(what is also really important to do is to train your eye for size/distance/various shapes/etc, as well as hand coordination. being able to draw a straight line in one line, a circle that is very close to being perfect, a right angle, two lines of the same length relatively far away from each other — all of those things will help you with understanding human proportions and are great for your overall drawing skill too. also very easy to train, you just draw a bunch of circles and stuff, a lot.)
then definitely drawing from reference, also a lot, and from real life too. and i think it’s really important to study and practice proportions before & at the same time with that because if you don’t you won’t know how to break down and analyze your reference and might end up with something that looks like an unfortunately copied photograph.
i personally think that drawing from reference, and making sure you’re not just copying the picture but Studying the 3d shapes, will help you more in the beginning than studying tons of muscle anatomy in detail, cause if you only do the latter your drawings might look really really stiff. anatomy atlases also absolutely do not account for fat & skin, which everyone has in various amounts and it heavily influences the plasticity & gravity of the body that in turn depends on the pose. photography and real life will give you a great idea of the natural lines and shapes of the body.
however, studying anatomy in small bits together with studying photographs of real people is good! i would say that looking up muscle and skeletal structures in conjunction with drawing from reference is the best strategy. just like keeping in mind your proportions, it will help you understand your reference better. for example, if your drawing features naked collarbones, it’s a good idea to look up the skeletal structure of that shit to know how exactly they connect to everything else, what their shape underneath the skin and muscle is, etc.
tldr: memorizing all the muscles and bones is very helpful as you’re refining your drawing skills, but i don’t particularly think it’s super helpful at the beginning of your journey. start with studying the proportions of the human body, then study the natural shapes of real people with various fat&muscle&skin structures, reinforce all of that with looking up muscle and skeletal structures to better understand what’s going on underneath the skin and the fat.
i have no idea if all of this is helpful, and keep in mind that different people might find one strategy more useful that others, but this is what has worked pretty well for me!
