Studying to get better at anatomy

by Jimijimo, August 13th 2021 © 2021 Jimijimo
Bray101

You have gotten the angles. It appears that your strokes are short instead of sweeping. Focus on strokes and line of action.

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Jimijimo

Hey there and thanks for taking the time to critique me! may I ask what you mean by short instead of sweeping? I'm fairly new to this so I don't know the terms! thank you!

Aunt Herbert

Well, for example, the line from knee to hip is one slightly curved line. You weren't sure about the curvature, so you drew a short line, then corrected the curvature and added another short line, and so on. This will always be visible in the result, and will look insecure.

There is the idea of "line quality", to try to use long, determined lines. It is related to "line economy", the idea to use as few lines as possible to communicate.

If you look at a drawing and immediately have the impression: "Oh, that looks very clean and professional", you will often find, that it is drawn with very few lines.

To achieve such a result, there are several steps of training.

a) you need to practice to actually draw long lines. You have learned using a pen by learning to write, but when you are writing, you are only using your fingertips and your wrist to direct the pencil. If you want to be able to draw long lines, you will actually have to practice to draw from your elbow and even your shoulder.

Practice drawing long straight lines, with a determined start and end, without a ruler. Practice drawing parallels. Practice drawing curves, with a controlled curvature.

You can check out drawabox.com to find some good ideas for training.

b) You need to learn to find the simple, big long lines in your reference. As beginners, we usually try to draw one detail, then add the next detail, and so on. Before the drawing is finished we change the scale of each detail a bit, and suddenly the relations between all our tiny pretty details no longer match.

Those quick studies, that this site offers, 1 minute, 30 secs, etc,.. are meant to force you into using as few lines as possible to portray the entire pose. That way you start out each drawing with a sound structure, which you then can later embellish with details, instead of trying to assemble the image out of a puzzle of details, that you can only hope, that they will fit together at the end.

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Jimijimo

I see! wow this was very helpful! I seriously thank you for taking the time out of your day to provide a newbie with valuable advice thank you!

Polyvios Animations

Nice job on your proportions, spaces, edges and speed, jimjimo. Way to go on who quickly you roughed out your gestures.

I've got one littler nitpick for you. I love your lines of action and rhythm, but some of those lines have too much hair in them, and the flow is far too stiffest. Would you please loosen up your hands with 30 minutes of 59 second poses, from your custom timer here? (1800 seconds/59 seconds=about 31 quickest figure poses) (all flipped vertically)

The reason is because of two things: first of all, to get you best aquainted with your right side of your brain. And second of all, to help you out on refining and polishing up your lines of action and rhythm. For even more information, be sure to look up on our interactive drawing tutorial on this site, if you're new around here, if you haven't already.

Cheers to you.

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Jimijimo

Got it! very helpful I'll work on those aspects!

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