question about human figure

[kenny313]

hi im drawing from some time and ive got question... i can draw human figure(body, head) from front, back, side, 3/4 perspective but when it goes to drawing human figure in different perspective or some difficult pose i cant draw them from head. And my question is... how can i draw difficult poses from drifferent angles from head? do i need to look at the photos with different poses and draw them countless times until i remeber them or is there an easier method ? somthing like an techniqe that i need to learn to draw human figure from any angle and pose? thank you in advance

and sry for my ang

[jfrancis]

Well, just my two cents - If you study anatomy from someone like Vilppu you can rough in a simple gestural 'skeleton' and muscle it up pretty accurately from memory.

[purb36]

i personally recommend bridgman, but you should find some anatomy books and study the individual parts lots, and draw parts in many different orientations (poses) many times, and largely from your imagination. you'll get better and better with the more you do, just make sure to check them against some reference. practice these lots, from your imagination, cause that's the best way to learn to do it...practice practice practice. g'luck!

[kenny313]

so the best way to learn and remember this is to study skeleton/muscle parts separately than just remembering whole human figure yes?

and btw i was styding human form from different photos, sketches, drawings ( i never studied from only one artist or real life) so is this a good way?

and thank you very much :)

[purb36]

i'm not claiming that it's the "BEST" way, it's just something that's worked for me. i find it's easier to understand the whole body by breaking it down into smaller, more manageable parts. i mean, each part is soooooo complex, trying to deal with it all at the same time can be quite overwhelming. learning things part by part (for example, the hand, or the forearm, or the leg, or something like that, not necessarily studying each individual muscle by itself) and putting them together as larger and larger groups until you get the whole body has helped me. each part also effects each of the other parts of the body. even raising your arm above affects the whole body even down to your feet, because it changes the balance, which changes the whole posture of the body.

i personally discourage studying burne hogarth for this, because his "dynamic" anatomy generally disregards the whole "balance, coherence" thing and just goes for flailing arms and legs and things that are not physically possible or have the body in coherent positions that make sense. i much more recommend bridgman for this, cause he at least keeps this in mind in all of his drawings and explanations. i also think vilppu is really good with this, um...kevin chen's stuff as well, glenn orbik, frank reilly, rebecca kimmel...you should check out their stuff. hope this helps; g'luck! :)

[ask maurice]

Drawing the Head and Hands (http://www.charlieharper.net/loomis/drawing_the_head_and_hands.pdf) Large file .pdf (ebook download)

Pose Maniacs (http://www.posemaniacs.com)




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[the_jos]

The body can be broken down to parts that can't bend any furter.
Bones, skull, chest. You can draw them as boxes.
They are joined together by moving point with certain limitations.
For example, the elbow or knee can't bend past 180 degrees (except when overextending). The neck cannot bend backward very far. It's easy to test the limits, you always have a reference body with you.

Learning the limitations and some basic box drawing will help you a lot.
Put reference lines through the shoulders and the hips to determine their angle relative to the horizon.
I think this subject is covered in one of the Loomis books, could be the book Ask Maurice is referring to (drawing the head and hands).

[leandroloaiza]

Realy I dont tink that you need more learning about drawning human figure from poses or images, maybe you need take of all your presets about coping figures from references, start taking the image that you want create and draw just the first volumenes and try to feel the volumenes, nothing fancy or stilised yet, when you have a good proportion, then remenber all that you now about draw from coping figures from reference and start to draw al fancy things in your draw......

is just a sugestion..........:mod:

[Arshes Nei]

This is a really "stupid" tip but can be helpful for some beginners.

http://www.anime.net/~arshesnei/tutorials/twolinesandarrowp01.jpg

The book this is from is called "Figure Drawing Workshop"

http://drawsketch.about.com/cs/figuredrawing/fr/kraayvanger.htm

http://books.google.com/books?id=xYvrQeZ00bIC&dq=figure+drawing+workshop+allan&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=K-oNSuT5OYiQtAOrptGRAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4

The author's art style isn't great, and this is more of a read than "look at the purty pics" book. However, if you can find it at your local library give it a check out. There's some helpful exercises that help beginners that often feel overwhelmed and intimidated.

There are a lot of other books I recommend in terms of learning anatomy over this one, but it has an interesting start with tips I haven't heard mentioned elsewhere. So it's a good checkout book versus purchase to own.

[kenny313]

First of all thank you all for answers an about brekaing body down to parts hmm i think this isntthe best way for me coz i prefer to learn the whole rhing rist then separate elemnts if needed. about limitations i can say than i know something about them i mean its not so hard for me coz like you The_jos said ive got my own body :)

leandroloaiza the way u mentioned is good for me i use it a lot but, the problem is i dont only want to memorize body i want to better understand it(why this looks like this etc)

Arshes Nei:
This little tut u showed with arrows i think it could help with drwaing but not understaindg :)

I looked into vilpuu "library" and i think i try to get dvd's from him

BTW. Sometime ago i watched some of the movies from serries "Drawing the human figure from mind" for the first time i saw it it looked very promising and full of "good" tuts for me, but when i watched it more and more it just bored me i thnik this is becoz it was about drawing all bones muscles separetaly. And ive got a question does anyone know if vilppu's videos are about whole human figure, or seapretaly parts (different angles poses etc.) ?

And again thank you all!

[Arshes Nei]

Arshes Nei:
This little tut u showed with arrows i think it could help with drwaing but not understaindg :)



Kenny,

The tutorial is about placing a major part of the figure down correctly or at least the sense of where the angle of the body is. Some artists will tell you to only start with the head, others the torso. The reason some ask you to start with the torso is because it's a very large mass that will define where the rest of the body parts fall into place.

It's not about knowing what the name of every muscle is, but about it's spacial relationship in place of the picture you're making. Does studying muscles and anatomy help? Of course, however, you have to look at the body as a big shape, than break it down to little ones.

You're worried about the parts more than the whole. Porpotions help break down major areas, torso, head, arms...legs feet. But knowing the body as a whole helps.

Then you break down each part of the major known shapes, head, torso, limbs, into recognizable large shapes to understand their relationship as a "3d form"

[George Abraham]

I second Jfrancis.

Use container's or space frames, draw out the body in gesture first then fill out the gesture in space using dimentional volumes, sqares and cylinders. What makes cylinders so great it has a bottom edge and a top edge and an axis. Cubes and speres you need to indicate what parts are the fronts with a center line. For a noob starting out like me I would suggest getting a real sense of accomplishment for being able to render those primitives in space to conform to perspective and your subjects gesture/idea.

That is how I work now, I havn't gone super perspective yet where I can draw cylinders and stuff in seconds flat but you can more easily re-work a cylinder untill it fit's in perspective perfectly than reworking the complete upper arm.

Once you have your space and gesture defined in space you can fill those in with anatomy, and you can even use your anatomy books or ref photos to fill in the stuff you don't know from the top of your head.

Villpu has turned me on to the whole Gestrure, Suggestive rendering and suggestive desighn idea. That is the way to go if you want your ideas to end up on the paper. vilppu's simple exercises of cubes, cylinders, spheres, overlap, elasticity are the most essential stuff I have found to this date. Overlap and rythm even ends up being a good catalyst for environmental desighn.

[kenny313]

Arshes nei:
"You're worried about the parts more than the whole. Porpotions help break down major areas, torso, head, arms...legs feet. But knowing the body as a whole helps."

I writed i am worried more about the whole than the parts:)

"It's not about knowing what the name of every muscle is, but about it's spacial relationship in place of the picture you're making. Does studying muscles and anatomy help? Of course, however, you have to look at the body as a big shape, than break it down to little ones."

Um i know this already, by understaindg i dont mean names but why this goes here, what happens if this moves etc.

zaorr:
u have maybe some free tuts with cylinders etc? and what do u mean by "gesture" or "space frames"?

Thank you.

[George Abraham]

A big one for me was to draw a cylinder's zigzagging in space down the length of the page. One receding one coming forward, one receding one coming forward but as if they are pieces of a pipe but you are not drawing the tight corners of the pipe only the straights.

Kind of like the torso and the pelvis. But you have to remember that these shapes starts above the eye level and then move down below the eye level so the ellipses on their ends, what surface you see(Top or bottom) slightly change in perspective as they go from top to bottom.

The thing that made me click something is how the cylinder shows off its orientation and a sense of space because of being able to see its bottom or its top and how much of it and seeing those two together as in a torso tilted forward and a pelvis tilted back was magic.

This feeling of dimension when you realize how close it is to gesture lines will just correct everything and push you in the right direction of development. You need to feel their mid lines.

The vilppu training manual have these type of exercises, but vilppu has another excellent one that I still need to do a couple of million times.. Draw a line that represents the axis of a tube, make it wild and rhythmical across the page, and now draw intersections around this line as if it has disks on it like beads on a string. Keep in mind that the disk has to have a 90 degree relationship to the axis line and remember that their appearance get’s affected by perspective.

You can make a simpler exercise out of drawing a flat line on a 2d page surface and without it being dimensional draw short lines across it as you follow it, these lines are supposed to be the disks being viewed from a perfect top flat perspective like viewing the line from above while it’s laying flat on the table for example. These lines should be the same length on both sides of the midline, and because this is not a perspective drawing you need to literally try and make them be square to the points they are intersecting. You will end up with something that looks like a centipede’s legs. This exercise and keeping square to the midline is a important feeling translating from gesture lines to dimension.

Once you do that one a couple of time pop to the previous exercise again but this time you need to feel the squareness to the midline, you need to try your sense of perspective.

Drawing these cylinders around a line that makes a dimensional ellipse or circle seen at an angle is also a good one, you end up with a torso shape and that feeling of how the disks makes that fountain feeling from that arrangement is an important thing to experience.

There are hoards of these still to be done and I need to design a few personal exercises that targets my weak areas. I’ll be sure to share them.


Gesture is the feeling of action you get from looking at a rhythmical being; it’s a series of lines to capture the flow of these rhythms.

Space framing is a word I created for myself because of the confusion the idea of the manikin creates. There are two models of the manikin or the way they can be used, The one is a skeletal manikin but I feel lot's of people miss the point with it because it lacks the feeling of "blocking in space" that will be occupied by the object you are drawing. This is also called "boxing" but a box implies something really simple and primitive. You can design a "container" manikin out of boxes and cylinders that show's each piece of space all the limbs in their relationship to perspective will occupy. The diff's is that the arm for instance doesn’t need to connect or share anything with that cylinder apart from the space you have allocated. The loomis skeletal manikin creates an idea that you somehow need to attach all those muscles one by one to the bones and I think that idea is an erroneous one and a time waster. The loomis manikin is most effective being used for proportion alone and being able to place the bony landmarks where they need to be.