PLAYTIME W/ JAKTRAYTER

[Amit Dutta]

Jaktrayter
Amit: ah man, that's cool! You think  drawing an idea to the best of my knowledge, finding where I hit a wall and studying accordingly a good idea? Any suggestions? And YES I WILL FINISH SOMETHING FOR SUURE! soon haha

Yeah pretty much. It's a good way to test yourself every so often and is a key skill often ignored...finishing!  A finished rendered illustration or design will require pretty much all your fundamentals to work well (except colour if you are going to just use pencil) and it will become very apparent where you struggled the most. Also finished pieces means more fodder for your folio over time. A common mistake I see is that people do all this focus study, and then go on a 3month - 1 year binge of "CREATING A FOLIO". Pressure!! The more you are comfortable with that process, and do it a bit more consistently, the wider you will spread the load.

And a note about drawing "from imagination"   This is, I believe quite often misunderstood to mean you can't use ref, you shouldn't look up anything if you are struggling and to not rely on any outside info.
Bollocks. You simply cannot draw something new, well, that you haven't done before without having seen it and analysed it or something similar to it. That's the purpose of ref.

I prefer to use the term personal work. It's not the same as doing a study and then immediately trying to replicate the study without the reference. Instead just use what you need to do your piece, and rely on all the reference in the world that you need. 
Analyse afterwards and get crits to help you figure out the biggest most fundamental issues that you have!

OH and question: I can draw remember poses via shapes and their relationships to each other (basically symbols)  but it's harder to draw things from an anatomical standpoint... Is this bad? How the hell do I fix this? Do need to fix this, necessarily?

Well I'm not sure what you mean exactly because that's pretty much what all drawing is, shapes in relation to others. I don't see huge problems, but you have mostly only done outline sketches and a few muscle form studies which don't look too bad.  But definitely start going more in depth with specific anatomy and musculature studies if you feel unsure. Check out the Crimson Cadavers group. It's not running at the moment, but Tristan laid out some documents that while not complete are a good approach to really nailing anatomy.