Anatomy
This week we worked on human anatomy. This is an essential part of character drawing.
There are several ways to tackle drawing anatomy depending on the project at hand.
One method is Gesture drawing, where the artist will create a quick sketch based on a reference photo or live. This method focuses on the pose and the attitude rather than strict anatomy. It’s very good for creating expressive artworks but due to its quick nature, often 30 seconds to 5 minutes, it’s not very refined.
There are several ways to do a more structured approach, this will be done over a longer period of time and involve more measuring. One method is using your pencil and your finger, you hold your pencil up to the reference, from where you’re sitting, and use your finger to mark how long it is on the pencil. From there you can draw it anatomically on the page. If you follow the measurements you take correctly you’ll get an anatomically correct drawing. You can do a similar method but by holding up your finger and comparing things from the reference to your finger. These methods are fine and can work, but only tend to work on smaller canvas sizes due to the fact you are limited to the size of your pencil or finger.
If you want to do something more fantastical and not directly from a reference or life drawing there are several methods for structuring the human body in your artwork to help it be anatomically correct. Here I used the heads method, this is based on the fact a fully grown human is roughly 7-8 of their head size tall. Here I used 8 heads and then developed the character.
When drawing the character I realized the anatomy was a more curvy and feminine body shape so I decided to stick with that, to make it different from my other characters I decided to make the fashion more modern. I referenced modern streetwear. I also like birds a lot so I decided to match her colour scheme to the Loriini bird, to fit with the bird theme I also added texture to her jacket, I referenced some jackets like the one Joey Batey wears in Netflix’s The Witcher as I thought that jacket did it very well.
Turn around
A Turn Around is often used in the game and animation industries to show a character or object from multiple angles so they can be drawn accurately and consistently.
For my turn around, I decided to do a more masculine character, I based it on a character I already own. First I sketched him facing forward and then duplicated the sketch, and erased the inside lines, flipped it horizontally then draw the inside lines again but it facing backwards. This allowed me to do it very quickly and consistently, it also meant the only thing I had to redraw was his shoes.
I did the same technique for the diagonal angles.
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From there I set the sketch layer to “Multiply” and added colour on a layer below, then merged them together.
I used a hard brush and neatened the sketch to something presentable.I did this by making the edges hard by drawing over them and using the colours from the sketch layer to emulate linework. I often use this method as this style is often desired in industry jobs but I have a shakey hand so I can’t draw cleanly off the bat, I find it a lot easier to clean up something afterwards.
In some places, where it’s big blocks of colour, I used hatching to add interest or to emulate shadows.
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