i having a hard time copying from anatomy booksi

[pencilgeek]

i cant copy my anatomy books lots of stuff is over my head im not so good at eye and hand coordination im ok at drawing from my imagination its not so easy to draw anatomy lol i want this so bad but its so hard.

[BlightedArt]

I'm in the same boat as you. After looking at some of the books I have, it can be very hard to interpret just what muscles the artist is drawing and even harder to understand how they function.

When you look at a body part in the book, arm for example, tense up the muscles in your arm and feel the muscles etc yourself, and try to associate your arm with the dissected arm in the anatomy book you are reading. That sometimes helps, also moving one of your body parts (again your arm for example), you can try focusing on which muscles you can feel contracting etc, and use that to try and understand just what is in the book.

I wouldn't start with the hand or the shoulder etc, instead try starting with the forearms, or the chest, or maybe even a part of the back, then go to the body parts with more complicated joints. The problem I had with my Bridgeman book is that it threw the suggestions and descriptions of the wrist and fingers before anything else, which was a little too complicated for me to start with.

The important thing of course is to keep practicing, don't study one night then get to the next night thinking "Well, I learned quite a bit last night, tonight I can have a break", that's an easy way to forget what you've just learned, keep revising what you've done while trying to take in more.

Hope this helps.

[EmmDoubleEw]

I'm in the same boat as you. After looking at some of the books I have, it can be very hard to interpret just what muscles the artist is drawing and even harder to understand how they function.

Yeah that's the problem with restricting yourself to working from anatomy sketches is that the reason those look good and correct is because the artist knows what he's doing, but that knowledge doesn't transfer over if you're just copying them.

It's not a one step process. You start with the books and the sketches, then you try to draw from life if you can, photos if you can't, and you keep going back to what you've learned and to those books. Then you practice... practice...


and practice...


You're saying you're having problems with hand-eye coordination though. Really it sounds like you need to start at the begging and draw something less complex than the human figure. Try this: take a simple cube shaped object and set it in front of you, then sketch it. Get it as accurate as you possibly can, be extremely critical -- you'll be surprised how hard it can be. If you don't get every angle and every proportion 100% correct, why try to draw people?

Painful road is the one that actually goes somewhere.

[cgaddict]

I used to have a similar problem when I first started on anatomy; I highly recommend you purchase a book titled "(The New) Drawing From the Right Side of the Brain"; It teaches you how to copy what you see correctly, and I highly recommend it to anyone that's serious in drawing. It's going to change your perception on drawing completely, and you'll be a better artist because of it.

[MsetG]

The thing is, you shouldn't just be copying. As BlightedArt said, you have to learn the functions of the muscles, how they contract, where they attach to and so on. You have to learn it by heart, so when you draw you don't need to look at reference all the time, you just know how it looks and works together.
It's a lot easier said than done though. Good luck!

[me_art_and_animation]

me too have the same problem. actually i found that more or less all has this problem, i thing learning anatomy is really boring. i prefer video lessons more then that of a book. again i try to feel all muscles that i read about and also act on them. i generally try to draw from imaginations after studying this conforms the learning.

[AndreasM]

Also, since you are just starting out, label EVERYTHING. Learn the names of the different locations of the bones. Many of the names of the muscles indicate their origins and insertions. The name sternocleidomastoid (neck muscle) indicates its origin on the top of the sternum, inner (medial) third of the clavicle and it's insertion to the mastoid process (on your skull just behind your ear). Learn the names of mayor landmarks on the skeleton, where large musclegroups are located. If you line a circle around the torso, at the bottom of the pecs, it should line up with the bottom of the deltoids, bottom of the scapula (where the origin of the serratus and the teres mayor can be located). The bottom portion of the deltoid marks the upper half of the humerus and the bottom of the humerus marks the 10th rib of the ribcage (or was it the 12th?). The main thing (obviously) to go for when you copy the plates, is getting the right proportions, but once you have established in your mind an idea of how the large, individual bone masses are related in proportion, you have come pretty far. From there, it's all about the muscles origins/insertions morphology and mass. Remember to always focus on the relationships between big shapes/proportions, and keep in mind that you are constantly dealing with solid, complex masses placed in space that are affected by gravity.

At least, that's what mama told me!

[rpace]

All drawing is hand-eye coordination.

Yeah, it's hard, but I really don't think you'd expect to run a marathon after lacing up your first pair of shoes so you should try to have some patience with this part of the process.

AT this early stage any drawing is good drawing experience and, when coupled with some discipline and hard work will lead to quick gains.

Approach it like a workout -- spend 15 minutes on anatomy study a day. At the end of a month you should really start seeing and feeling results. The next month, do 20 minutes a day, and so on. Don't expect instant rewards and don't toss the pencils in frustration.

You find yourself getting angry or frustrated, immediatly draw something within your comfort zone so you can feel in control again before returning to study.

Do not make study the whole of your drawing - -keep drawing for fun, even if the content has nothing to show of your hard work on anatomy.

Good luck,

~R

[pencilgeek]

thanks guys for all the info.

[BlightedArt]

Some awesome advice here, really opened my eyes. Thanks very much guys. :)

[Stoat]

I hated copying from anatomy books, too. But you sure learn faster if you make yourself do it. And faster still if you try to think about what a muscle does for a living.

Here's the secret: figure out which muscles push and which muscles pull...




Heh. Okay. I'm wuffin' you. ALL muscles pull. So think like "if this bone was a stick, and the muscle was a rag I tied around it, and I pulled the rag...where would the stick go?" It gives you a key to why some muscles are the size and shape that they are.

The biceps pull our forearms up -- you know that from watching somebody do a preacher curl (gyms and bodybuilding sites are great for learning stuff. I hate to draw gym bodies because they look wrong, but gym rats know ALL KINDS of stuff about muscles). Humans need to do a lot of lifting in that direction, so the biceps is a pretty large and developed muscle.

The triceps -- that roundy one on the back of the arm -- is the opposite. It pulls the arm straight again. It's a smaller and more compact muscle because...how often do you need to pull your arm straight with great force?

Thinking about the work a muscle has to do makes it much easier to remember where and what they are -- and under what conditions they bulge, and what conditions they relax.

[rpace]

The triceps is actually a larger muscle group than the biceps -- the only time the biceps is bigger is when someone builds them out of proportion with weights.

Other than that, Stoat is pretty much right on. Knowing what actions the muscles do in addition to their simple placement is a great boon to learning correct anatomy.

One of my big problems with Nicolaides-based drawing programs is that the understanding of the structure of the body is left so late and touched on so lightly (in 25 sections, anatomy is first dealt with in section 15 -a once-a-week for for one hour study of bones, section 18 has gesture studies of anatomy, section 21 adds muscles to the once-a-week bones session). Structure should come first. Beyond gesture, blind contour and a handful of exercises, Nico should be tossed in favour of better sources of information anyway. I digress. . .

There's a pair of reasonably cheap books, Strength Training Anatomy and Women's Strength Training Anatomy by Frédéric Delavier that show the muscles involved in specific exercises. They can be helpful for the student struggling with understanding what all these red striated masses look like in action.

~R

[dose]

What do you want to get so badly from your anatomy study?

[Flake]

Remember that you have 24/7 access to a complete set of human muscles and bones for reference.
I found I was constantly prodding away at my forearms , legs whatever to find which muscles flexed in which positions, where bones are visible on the surface etc.

Also, we're symmetrical, you only have to learn half of them.

[Nadesican]

Since you are looking for a book that describes where the muscles connect, I suggest the book by Bridgeman (though I forget the name). Its full of technical info..which..honestly makes me zone out a little..but the diagrams of muscle connections are solid.

And AndreasM...holy cow. Thats a lot of technical stuff to memorize o.o

[feifeicreate]

I'm in no way an expert on human anatomy, but here's what works for me.

I don't copy from Anatomy books...other than required the home work assignment from school. What I did (and still doing) is work my way back wards. I observe human figure first, look at the shape and form, and how it moves as the figure moves from position to position. I draw from life to the best I can, and then I check with my Anatomy book, try to figure out which bump is created by what muscle, and how it works with bones and tendon. And then I'll go back to my work, and see if there's anything I missed, and there's always something I missed. So next time, I'll pay more attention to the area that i got wrong last time. And over time, when you look at a figure, you don't just see outside forms, you start to see the muscle group, you start to see the born structure, like an x-ray eye (LOL, i'm no where near that good, but I know people can do that).

Sculpture helps too. I built several born/muscle model at art school, and I'm not major in sculpture.

Observe first, and apply knowledge and logic to your observation. And don't push yourself too hard. Human figure is the hardest to draw, after being in art school almost 10 years and 3 degrees later, I still suck at human form (I'm not being modest, I suck at human figure, my proportion is always a bit off, and I can never get muscle group right without reference...). So cheer up and have some fun with drawing real people. Real life is a lot more fun compare to books. go out there, watch and draw.

[pencilgeek]

wow thanks guys and girls for all the info.

[Profil]

People don't usually prefer to learn in the same was as others, so I don't know if this will be helpful or not but take it for what it is.

As people have written, before you start to copy the muscles, you first have to understand you should not strive to merely copy the images, like Vilpu said, analyze instead. Try to appreciate the form of the muscles, try to simplify it into boxes, spheres etc and see how much the muscles differ from those simple forms.

A "formula" I have used lately when studying anatomy (and it has proven to be pretty successful) is learning the shapes (planes and such), the proportion of the shapes, the angles of the shapes (angles relative to something else, mostly this means that I simplify the bones/muscles into the simple previously mentioned shapes, and then see how much the planes go "out" from the shape or "in" the shape. For example, I simplify the ribcage into a box and then derive the angles from the reference. The sternum in profile, for me, goes out 20-30 degrees etc). It can be mentally tough to keep all this in mind when studying and I'm not by an means perfect at this, but it's useful at least.

Edit: shit, I forgot your main question. Harold Speed has a very good method of copying in his Science of drawing book (find it for free on the gutenberg project, google the site). Basically, you try to project a vertical and horizontal line onto the line you are trying to copy, in order to accurately copy that line. That was a pretty shitty explanation but trust me, it's really worth to read that part, (I think it's in the first pages of practical drawing or whatever the name of the chapter is), especially when it's for free.

[AndreasM]

Yeah, check out harold speed, he's a great teacher. Aslo, get everything by Robert Beverly Hale.

[pencilgeek]

if you guys can look at my sketch book i have some anatomy drawings any help will be appreciated...thanks for all the info you guys your great.

[TheComicFilmBoy]

i must thank ya'll as well, for looking at bridgman's books is pretty much giving me the same problems, although The Human Machine is a bit more accessible for me.

if only I could start a sketchbook lol

[Stoat]

I think one reason I hated copying from anatomy books was, no matter how good a job I did, it was still just a copy from an anatomy book. I couldn't call it my work.

There's a sort of noob impulse to treat every mark you make as sacred, and every drawing as a potential masterpiece. Whereas you'll get where you want to go SO much faster if you reconcile yourself to the idea of studies. That get thrown away.

[BlightedArt]

Also, since you are just starting out, label EVERYTHING. Learn the names of the different locations of the bones. Many of the names of the muscles indicate their origins and insertions. The name sternocleidomastoid (neck muscle) indicates its origin on the top of the sternum, inner (medial) third of the clavicle and it's insertion to the mastoid process (on your skull just behind your ear). Learn the names of mayor landmarks on the skeleton, where large musclegroups are located. If you line a circle around the torso, at the bottom of the pecs, it should line up with the bottom of the deltoids, bottom of the scapula (where the origin of the serratus and the teres mayor can be located). The bottom portion of the deltoid marks the upper half of the humerus and the bottom of the humerus marks the 10th rib of the ribcage (or was it the 12th?). The main thing (obviously) to go for when you copy the plates, is getting the right proportions, but once you have established in your mind an idea of how the large, individual bone masses are related in proportion, you have come pretty far. From there, it's all about the muscles origins/insertions morphology and mass. Remember to always focus on the relationships between big shapes/proportions, and keep in mind that you are constantly dealing with solid, complex masses placed in space that are affected by gravity.

At least, that's what mama told me!

Actually just dropping by this thread to give kudos to AndreasM. Not long after reading his post I started looking up the names of muscles and how they're named, it proved already to be a great help in studying anatomy. Try this link for starters:

Kansas School Naturalist: Muscle Names (http://www.emporia.edu/ksn/v42n1-january1996/names.htm)

It helped me out to get started even if a couple of the terms are different to what you read elsewhere (though the varying terminology is often similar enough to tell they mean the same thing). This little e-book site sort of explains WHY the muscles are given certain names, and what the parts of those names mean. It should help you quite a bit.

Thanks again AndreasM. :)