11-03-2014, 02:58 AM
Yo Adrian, thanks for the comment. Got a few thoughts for you
First, concerning Bridgeman. You were wise to fact check other sources to learn the muscles, Bridgeman's books are actually full of inaccuracies. Matter of fact, if you've got "constructive anatomy" turn to page 151 and you'll find he drew the pinky toe on the wrong frikken side of the foot.
Don't go and throw away his book though, Bridgeman has some techniques worth learning. He's especially good at finding the plane changes in muscles, which makes it easier to make shadow patterns that explain the anatomical forms. He's very useful for painting and understanding complicated muscle groups as simple forms, but don't use his book as an atlas or you'll go crazy.
Next, about the kinds of figure drawings you're doing. You're definitely improving by doing them, but it's not really clear what your goal is in doing them. It seems like you do them pretty quickly, find the gesture and then draw contours where you try to get the muscle shapes right, then sometimes draw those contour rings around the limbs. I think those are three different approaches that can go hand in hand, but I think you could be getting more out of the studies.
I'd recommend doing studies where you only focus on gesture, then focus on form, and then focus on anatomy.
First find the gesture, just a very simple expression of the action or motion in the pose, shouldn't take more than 30 seconds to do. Try drawing a bunch of thumbnail gestures of a figure and change things around until you get a gesture you're happy with, then draw it larger and use it as a foundation for a longer drawing. You shouldn't be concerned with getting the proportions right or what shape the muscles have in this stage, just getting the pose down. It can be fun to try to exaggerate the pose, make the gesture a little more extreme than it really is, unless you're doing a very precise long study. Some books that would help a lot with this are Michael Matessi's FORCE, Proko's gesture videos, and Walt Stanchfield's Drawn to Life books.
Second find the forms, instead of those quick contour lines think very hard about what direction the masses of the body are turning, what's closer to you and what's further way, and draw the entire body using spheres, boxes, and cylinders. Try to get the perspective perfect, the lines straight, the ellipses getting thinner or thicker in the right way as the forms turn. Glen Vilppu's drawing manual would be fantastic for this, as well as a lot of Ron Lemen's tutorials and videos.
Third, focus on the anatomy, putting in the bone landmarks where the skeleton shows up on the surface of the body and using those to help place the muscles. It could be useful to get tracing paper or a new photoshop layer and draw over the form/gesture sketch, adding in the skeleton like you were doing, then drawing the muscles on top of that. For this step Bridgeman, Michael Hampton, and anatomy apps/atlases will be helpful.
Eventually you can fuse the steps and find different figure drawing methods that work for you, but I think it would help you now to focus on gesture, form, and anatomy separately to improve at all 3. Good luck!!!
First, concerning Bridgeman. You were wise to fact check other sources to learn the muscles, Bridgeman's books are actually full of inaccuracies. Matter of fact, if you've got "constructive anatomy" turn to page 151 and you'll find he drew the pinky toe on the wrong frikken side of the foot.
Don't go and throw away his book though, Bridgeman has some techniques worth learning. He's especially good at finding the plane changes in muscles, which makes it easier to make shadow patterns that explain the anatomical forms. He's very useful for painting and understanding complicated muscle groups as simple forms, but don't use his book as an atlas or you'll go crazy.
Next, about the kinds of figure drawings you're doing. You're definitely improving by doing them, but it's not really clear what your goal is in doing them. It seems like you do them pretty quickly, find the gesture and then draw contours where you try to get the muscle shapes right, then sometimes draw those contour rings around the limbs. I think those are three different approaches that can go hand in hand, but I think you could be getting more out of the studies.
I'd recommend doing studies where you only focus on gesture, then focus on form, and then focus on anatomy.
First find the gesture, just a very simple expression of the action or motion in the pose, shouldn't take more than 30 seconds to do. Try drawing a bunch of thumbnail gestures of a figure and change things around until you get a gesture you're happy with, then draw it larger and use it as a foundation for a longer drawing. You shouldn't be concerned with getting the proportions right or what shape the muscles have in this stage, just getting the pose down. It can be fun to try to exaggerate the pose, make the gesture a little more extreme than it really is, unless you're doing a very precise long study. Some books that would help a lot with this are Michael Matessi's FORCE, Proko's gesture videos, and Walt Stanchfield's Drawn to Life books.
Second find the forms, instead of those quick contour lines think very hard about what direction the masses of the body are turning, what's closer to you and what's further way, and draw the entire body using spheres, boxes, and cylinders. Try to get the perspective perfect, the lines straight, the ellipses getting thinner or thicker in the right way as the forms turn. Glen Vilppu's drawing manual would be fantastic for this, as well as a lot of Ron Lemen's tutorials and videos.
Third, focus on the anatomy, putting in the bone landmarks where the skeleton shows up on the surface of the body and using those to help place the muscles. It could be useful to get tracing paper or a new photoshop layer and draw over the form/gesture sketch, adding in the skeleton like you were doing, then drawing the muscles on top of that. For this step Bridgeman, Michael Hampton, and anatomy apps/atlases will be helpful.
Eventually you can fuse the steps and find different figure drawing methods that work for you, but I think it would help you now to focus on gesture, form, and anatomy separately to improve at all 3. Good luck!!!