Tips for Drawing Body Structure
Drawing Beefcake for Beginners, Learning the Ins and Outs
When it comes to learning how to draw people successfully, knowing homo anatomy is key. Jeff Mellem, artist and author of How to Draw People , shares the top dos and don'ts of drawing beefcake for beginner artists so y'all tin start drawing more realistic figures in no time.
Figure Drawings excerpted from "How to Draw People" past Jeff Mellem
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1. DON'T think similar an anatomy book
Cartoon anatomy for beginners tin can feel overwhelming at first because there are and then many muscles on the torso. When you're looking at a model and you meet a lot on bumps, y'all might be tempted to pull out an beefcake book to decipher what's going on under the skin.
An anatomy book is great at telling yous what yous're looking at but information technology's not very helpful at telling y'all the three-dimensional shape of the muscles.
DO call up in unproblematic volumes
When you commencement arroyo effigy drawing, you demand to start out with establishing the basic volumes of the figure using spheres, boxes, and cylinders. By simply showtime with these basic shapes and so building up the complexity as you become along, you will exist able to brand your drawing maintain its sense of dimension.
If yous copy contours before you build in the structure, I guarantee you'll end up with a flat-looking drawing.
The drawing on the left overemphasizes the model's muscles and information technology looks more like an beefcake book than a figure. An artist needs to think nigh the 3D shape of the muscles to give the figure an illusion of volume.
The Takeaway:
Apply an anatomy volume to understand what's beneath the surface but call up almost each muscle in 3D. Don't draw the muscles equally a series of lines. Draw them as sculpted spheres, boxes and cylinders.
With that being said, you don't e'er have to actually draw spheres and boxes on the page. If you lot look at an artist similar Harry Carmean, you can see that while he sometimes is merely drawing counters of the torso, he is clearly thinking well-nigh the 3D qualities of what he's drawing.
2. DON'T make muscles the focus
When artists first start paying closer attention to calculation anatomy to their drawings, they often accept a tendency to overemphasize the anatomy. The figures oftentimes cease up looking like they have no peel. The muscles are there to add together more than realism to the figure, but they shouldn't be the focal point of the cartoon.
Exercise apply muscles to reinforce the activeness
The focus of a cartoon should convey an activeness, an emotion or the subject's personality. You don't desire a viewer to stop and await at the parts of your drawing; you want the viewer to come across the whole effigy and be interested in what that effigy is doing and who he or she is.
In gild to maintain focus on the action information technology'southward e'er a great practice to start all your drawings with a gesture drawing. A gesture drawing serves as a pattern for the action. Everything that comes later on is to help clarify and raise that action.
The muscles should be drawn to amplify the motion of the figure and shouldn't draw attention to themselves. A good example of this is comic volume characters that have exaggerated beefcake to convey their forcefulness.
A successful comic volume page isn't about the character's muscles merely about how that graphic symbol's power is existence expressed in the story. The volumes of the muscles are designed to lead the middle through the body toward a signal of action. The reader isn't stopping to wait at the graphic symbol's well-developed musculature.
Notice how the muscles in the figure on the right reflect the gesture cartoon on the left. The muscles are used to reinforce the figure'due south action, they aren't the focus of the cartoon.
The Takeaway:
Anatomy is there to add together realism simply it's less of import then carrying the activity and mental attitude of the whole figure.
3. DON'T describe every figure with the same shapes
When artists start using bones shapes to develop figures they often start to fall into a blueprint of using the same shapes to build every figure.
DO discover and adapt to your effigy'due south unique build
When you're edifice your figure you have to expect and adapt your shapes to the specific subject you're drawing. Y'all're non going to employ the aforementioned shapes for a bodybuilder that you would a sumo wrestler or a long distance runner.
You have to look at your subject and figure out what simple shapes are the best tools to develop your effigy. For example, some people have very squarish heads which needs to exist synthetic from box shapes while others have a more roundish appearance that should be built from spheres.
These two figures are in the same pose but are congenital from different shapes. The effigy on the right is congenital from more cake shapes and it gives the effigy a sturdier feeling.
The Takeaway:
Don't approach every effigy with a formula. Instead, observe and arrange your shapes to fit your subject.
4. DON'T copy what y'all see
If yous only copy what you lot see you will never create what you lot imagine. I never saw the point of replicating a photo in a cartoon across being an exercise to build observational skills. Why duplicate what already exists when you can interpret and conform equally y'all see fit?
Practise recreate what you lot see on the page
Observational skills are of import only not simply for copying what you see. Use your observational skills to analyze your subject's unique shapes so yous can reinterpret it on the page. That means yous aren't copying counters of the body. Instead you're recreating a figure on the page from the ground up.
You get-go by capturing its movement in a gesture, rebuild the figure three-dimensionally using basic spheres, boxes and cylinders, and then sculpt those simple shapes into anatomical forms. This is a very dissimilar process than simply replicating what you see.
You're combining what yous see with your 3D cognition of anatomy to recreate the figure on the page. This will non only assistance y'all to develop drawing that accept a sense of mass but likewise will let you to arrange and modify the figure to create something new.
This is merely a fun drawing to assist illustrate that you need to empathize the 3D shapes of a effigy and then yous can reassemble them on the folio. This is a different manner of thinking than simply copying the contours you see.
The Takeaway:
The job of an artist isn't to replicate what he or she sees. Information technology is to interpret what he or she understands. When drawing a figure, yous bring in your knowledge of anatomy and volume to draw a figure rather than just copying contours and values.
five. Do pay attending to proportions and anatomy
To depict a realistic effigy, you need to pay attention to accurately capture the figure'south proportions and beefcake. This comes from both studying anatomy and having practiced observational skills.
DON'T be overly rigid.
Beefcake and proportion are of import. But lone, they don't brand for an interesting drawing. A figure drawing that feels like it has personality or appears dynamic is going to be more interesting than one that is technically correct.
Let the anatomy and proportion take a supporting office to the underlying gesture drawing. Every step of your cartoon should exist to create a unified effigy that has energy and attitude fifty-fifty if that ways altering the figure'south proportions or anatomy to meliorate emphasize that action.
This figure has exaggerated proportions – similar to those used in fashion drawing. It doesn't matter that it's non correctly proportioned if the determination to exaggerate is purposeful. You can discover many examples of artists who misconstrue and exaggerate proportions for stylistic reasons.
The Takeaway:
Drawing slap-up anatomy helps artists create realistic-looking figures that appear to have actual mass and volume. However, the beefcake needs to add together to the sense of movement of the effigy and not distract from information technology. You must accept the skill to be able to draw the muscles in 3D in order to change and conform the shapes and emphasize the motility and personality of your subjects.
More Resource on Drawing Anatomy and Figures
- three Mistakes You Make When Drawing the Figures
- Figure Drawing Methods of the Masters
- Cartoon Dynamic Human Figures
- Train Your Eye With Figure Sketching
- 5 Figure Drawing Tips
Source: https://www.artistsnetwork.com/art-techniques/beginner-artist/drawing-anatomy-for-beginners/
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