#i've recently been studying cat anatomy more and using references

[pine-arten]

play colors

[freebooter4ever]

Hi! I really love your work— do you have any advice for someone who doesn’t have a lot of experience drawing human forms/anatomy? I dont really know where to start 😅

Thank you!!!! ^_^

So first off, bear with me, I'm going to point you to some of my old old art. In general, any 'progress'/tutorial type stuff i post goes into the "wip" tag: freebooter4ever.tumblr.com/archive/tagged/wip

The rest of this discussion is going under a cut lol

I've been drawing since i was a kid - as my grandma likes to tell it i would sit quietly at the card table next to her and make her draw with me because "everyone can draw, grandma". Sometime around high school i got it into my head that i needed a 'class' to understand anatomy, as if it was just this magical thing i would suddenly understand. (college was useless) The truth is i didnt start getting better until recently, when i gave up trying to 'learn' anatomy and just started studying bodies. That sounds weird, but i don't know how else to describe it? If someone told me ages ago that i could learn anatomy the same way i self-disciplined myself into being able to pull out computer science concepts at the drop of the hat, i feel like i wouldn't have wasted so much time but anyway...

Check out any doodles before my mchanzo era for drawings that i did prior to getting serious about practice studies: freebooter4ever.tumblr.com/archive/tagged/mchanzo. Terrible anatomy. Atrocious. (with one exception that i still like which is a poster on sasha bees' wall hey bees if you're reading this) 2016 ish.

THEN 2017 i lost my job, moved away from pittsburgh, missed my DJ friends, watched a documentary on netflix about st*ve aoki (after watching everything vaguely DJ related on the streaming service lol), and the aoki drawing era begins: freebooter4ever.tumblr.com/archive/tagged/steve%20aoki. I joke that the way I learned anatomy was by becoming obsessed with a DJ who contorts himself into very strange positions and has photographers that take photos of him from LITERALLY every angle and who tends to walk around half naked an unusually large amount of time but like...that's literally what happened. Not that im saying you have to start drawing half naked DJ's...just find a subject you dont mind drawing hours of studies from and it makes it a lot easier.

When I'm doing 'studies' I tend to do two separate drawings. Initially I literally just 'study' what I'm looking at - I put it in photoshop and trace the lines that I see. I don't OUTLINE it, there is a huge difference. A lot of times the lines that stand out are not the outlines but rather a dominant shadow or sharp edge. After I feel like I've got a good handle on it, I do another drawing of the pose freehand. Then I take the original photo and put it underneath that drawing and check where I've messed up. If I'm completely off I throw it away and start again, lol. If there's a few errors I fix them. More and more lately I find that the freehand drawing is fairly accurate with anatomy unless it's an unusual or challenging perspective. I break this down more in this post using joe as an example: https://freebooter4ever.tumblr.com/post/633653906052923392/its-been-a-while-since-ive-posted-one-of-these

Those study drawings rarely see the light of day. I just delete them when I'm done because i didn't have an...aim...? For the drawing. They just were to learn.

The doodles that I post on here? Some of the simpler ones are practice sketches from gifs - i will have a gif running next to my drawing and will try to draw what i see, freehand. Some of the more complicated drawings/portraits are from photos - but there's usually something i see in the photo that i want to convey? Like light? or a specific part of anatomy? I dunno, i make shit up as i go.

AND THEN there's my favorite, when i have done all this practice and i can do shit like drawing characters from my imagination. Like kenny hugging his cat. These don't have any reference - im just relying on my memory of anatomy i've drawn in the past.

I dunno. Dont let bad anatomy get you down, just keep trying. My anatomy hero - a sculptor ethan idolized and i idolize by default - even said himself that he doesn't feel like an 'expert', and he's in his 40's and has been doing this shit for decades. Just draw!!! The more you do it, the more you'll start to see what you like, and how you can make it how you like even more. I still think my anatomy is bad, im still embarrassed by it. But i also know i've gotten better because i can see it now.

ANYWAY this is long, im exhausted, i have to go to bed now :) and i was serious about scheduling an abs livestream. Maybe this weekend if im ambitious.