Crankshaft's Sketchbook

More anatomy studies.

What do you use as a basis for these studies and what's your aim with them? As I think you've mentioned yourself, your technical drawings are at a much higher level so all this practice is no doubt good for you. Also I'm no arts teacher and I can't really tell what the best way to improve anatomical skills is, but I can't help but wonder if you don't need a better grasp of overall anatomy before you try to capture gestures and poses? Personally I'd suggest just spending time trying to draw one pose (at a time) from reference, and just focus on the general anatomy and proportions. For the quickies perhaps stick figures would be more helpful at this point, to capture gestures. Then again I could be all wrong...

Charlotte wrote: What do you use as a basis for these studies and what's your aim with them? As I think you've mentioned yourself, your technical drawings are at a much higher level so all this practice is no doubt good for you. Also I'm no arts teacher and I can't really tell what the best way to improve anatomical skills is, but I can't help but wonder if you don't need a better grasp of overall anatomy before you try to capture gestures and poses? Personally I'd suggest just spending time trying to draw one pose (at a time) from reference, and just focus on the general anatomy and proportions. For the quickies perhaps stick figures would be more helpful at this point, to capture gestures. Then again I could be all wrong...

To be honest, I'm sitting on the fence on whether I should focus 100 % on technical studies rather than anatomy. I've asked a few people whether it's important to know everything or if I could just be good on one field...Regarding your question I use pixelovely to do quick 1 minute gestures. They're actually fun and I feel like I'm learning landmarks and proportions. But I'd rather draw vehicles, props, architecture over anatomy any day

I don't know many artists who can turn their hand to everything, so I would recommend focusing on what you are good at.

Practising in weaker areas is a really good idea though and shouldn't be neglected. Simple anatomy studies, like the ones you are doing will help. It is far more productive and helpful to draw the whole person though and not just the outline (or just stick figures). It will help enormously to use various landmarks within the structure of the body to work out your proportions and anatomy.

That's my thinking anyway!

Dom's right - we can't be great at everything but a bit of practice never hurts I'd like to be good at everything, too, but I can't for the life of me paint mechs, or cars...

For the anatomy studies, if they're not going to be your field of focus, the most important thing is to have fun with them, but you might want to try somewhat longer times. A character can be important for scale, for instance - even if just a silhouette - so I wouldn't give them up entirely.

Charlotte wrote: if they're not going to be your field of focus, the most important thing is to have fun with them...

Absolutely agreed!!

Thanks guys for the advice! Now that I think of it, I think it's still important to learn anatomy and how to draw organic stuff as well since a world full of just machines and no people would be quite boring Having people would also make the technical stuff more believable eg to establish scale. I think I'll just stick to Loomis anatomy books instead of the gesture drawings

I'm taking a different approach to anatomy. This time I'm going to try and draw most of the figure to get the proportions and landmarks understood and hopefully memorized. I find these studies to be quite fun and I feel like I'm really improving. Also they're quick and easy and I can focus on seeing the body's "forms," such as where to apply shadows etc.

Along with the flashlight I'm also working on a technical door located inside a factory. Here are some rough initial thumbnails and references to show how I got my ideas.

Finally finished the flashlight still life! Spend long but meaningful hours on it. Learned lots about lighting and color (occlusion shadows, specular highlights, warm/cool hues, reflected light, color saturation, value just to name a few I also learned how to use Photoshop more efficiently. The reference photos don't really represent what my eyes see but they'll do for now. The last picture is the finished one. The picture looks dark but I put lots of detail into it.

Everything is really looking great crankshaft. The sketch of the guy and machines is awesome, the pose and anatomy of the char really looks good. The factory one is cool, lots of detail and color, did you do those two pics with 3D? The flashlight looks really well done too.