Anatomy Reference Practice Thread *SFW with nudity*

[toast]

You did well on that sketch, Demonfyre!

Thanks for all the pointers, Toast! It was really a quick sketch, this time I'm taking a little bit more time.
Here's what I've got for now, are the proportions any better? (for as far as you can see, since I've only drawn half a face)

It is definately looking a lot better The bridge of the nose is still a bit too thick, but otherwise you're doing very well with shading, detailing, and proportions

[Demonfyre]

Thanks for your reply Toast And I'm glad I'm doing the right thing with negative spaces didnt get enough time today to finish off the males so I'll post them up tomorrow and I'll use guidelines and negative spaces to finish them off

[SuperKasey]

I may or may not go through these in order since I'm boring. We'll see. Did the first one in SAI.

SPOILER! :

[toast]

o jeez, that looks great kasey, you really did a good job with colours O:

[Evil_Cake]

berry nice

[Rubisko]

I don't care if you do them in order or not Kasey, as long as you keep on doing them because your practice piece really inspired me to push mine

SPOILER! :

Ok, so I don't know about you guys, but I've been trying to do studies from photographs and from life since February, so what little experience I have I thought that I should share. So I'll explain my method for doing a study. It may not work for you, but I think it works well for me

1. I don't know about you guys, but myself I have a couple of weak personality traits. I'm lazy, proud and a perfectionist to name a few. But someone once told me that even weaknesses can be strengths if you play your cards right. So for several when I have studied for exams, the very first thing that I did was to take an exam used a previous year and sit down and try my best at it. Since I'm lazy I almost always failed this first one, but since I'm proud I also got real angry with myself and studied hard for the real thing, and since I'm a perfectionist I almost always got the highest grade. Huzzah!
Now I've found that this method also works well for drawing studies, so I begin by sitting down and do an initial drawing. As you can see, I missed on everything from figure to proportions, but I didn't notice until I compared it with the reference (I don't show this step, but it's pretty simple: since I'm doing digital I just drag and dropped the reference photo onto my canvas and dropped its opacity until I could see both layers)

2.Ok, so I'm really angry at myself now, and this helps me focus. I do an extensive analysis of the reference, measuring angles and proportions carefully as I do my sketch. This time I'm also in awe of Kasey's piece above, and I'm determined to do something that's at least equally good, so I actually measure really carefully (like every line I drew I then redrew at least 20 times lol). Then I render the forms as carefully as I can. Having a good underdrawing helps, but I'm still super happy about how the torso turned out. In the end, after screwing up on the head and face several times I just made a note that I need to study head and face next week, as I have other stuff to do today (sadly, cause this was really fun), and at that point I hadn't started hands and feet either, so I had to make even more notes on stuff to study.

3. What's the point of doing your homework if you don't learn anything? as I just mentioned I was a little short on time, I'd like to do this step more properly later. But what I want to do here is to make a general approach, because let's face it; I couldn't do anything as nice as #2 without reference, and if we could get a ref photo of everything we wouldn't need to learn how to draw. Since this is a human body I try to use the simple mannequin approach from one of Loomis' books, but I don't think I nailed it from memory. Need to look that up too.

So yeah, that's that. Again, this is just the method I like to use, and if you have any suggestions on how I could improve it.. I'd be grateful yeah

[toast]

I, too, am an extremely lazy perfectionist. However the lazy me usually trumps the perfectionist, which angers me into doing better. : D

I really like the steps you went through however. Like you put down what you thought was the general form, really went into detail by fixing proportions/adding muscles/etc, then the generalization part was awesome and something I want to start doing. It turned out awesomely too, and you also taught me a new study habit lol. Great post!

I actually have Loomis' book right here, which I think everyone who's practicing in this thread needs to take a look at:
http://www.alexhays.com/loomis/Loomi...ure%20Draw.pdf
All of its glory in PDF format

[Demonfyre]

I'm sure his head is too small and that im terrible at this :/ anyway here is the finished version

[Mr_Liebe]

I have that pdf, I'm planning on leafing through it.

[Byakuran]

SPOILER! :

Asian face(done in gb), i saw that the ear/back skull is out of place when i drew the hair (which i rushed -.-;..)
But it was good practice! i like this thread lawl.

Also i'm going to try that Rubisko, thx . I really have trouble grasping anatomy since i never take the time to fully UNDERSTAND. it.

I think next time i'll try to do a grayscale/colour since i still need to understand the forms it makes and stuff. But anyway, gonna go through that pfd Thanks toast.