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elfs(Content Warning: I tried to find SFW examples for photomanips and renders, but the sidebars on DeviantArt make no such promises. Also: Some people may consider this under the topic "body horror.")
Since I'm on vacation this week, I've decided to try and draw for an hour every day, in the hopes of rebooting one of those one non-talents that I have. I've been using an older book, Figure Drawing, Design and Invention, by Michael Hampton, after several people whose pin-up art I respect recommended it as the book if you want to learn how to draw naked people.
The book is really about learning the ratios between the eight major masses of the body: head, spine, ribcage, pelvis, two arms, and two legs, and then figuring out how to pose them in space. He starts with a pretty good description of gesture and, bless him, undoes all the damage my earlier art teacher did by saying that gesture has nothing to do with trying to "access your feelings" or flailing about on the page; it's just about trying to outline the motion inherent in the static image you're currently drawing. I practiced for a while, and I discovered that Pinterest is a pretty good source of poses when you don't have a live model to work with.
After doing about twenty two-minute gestures, I wandered off in search of something, er, different. Two fun sources of "different" are renders and photomanips. Since Hamptom mentions that gestures are where animators start with a 3-D rig, it's entertaining to work backwards from a final render and see if you can find the rig, but when the image isn't quite human(SFW), doing a gesture gets a little weird.
Of course, it's no surprise that I'm a furry and into centaurs and naked people and so the humantaur photomanipulations amuse me to no end-- if you're into feet, a sexy woman with four is a bonus, right?-- but trying to draw them started to seriously reveal limitations and anatomical complexities. Most of them are probably due to the way photomanips are done-- most are done by fetishists with little regard for anatomy, so the whole "where do the spines meet, what's the forward ribcage built like, how does this all fit together?" questions are rarely asked. It's just played with until it looks "good enough," and it rarely is.
But it's been an eye-opening experiment in learning how to draw. Because once you try to actually, you know, do anatomy, doing unearthly anatomies starts to make you really question how evolution put us together in the first place.
Since I'm on vacation this week, I've decided to try and draw for an hour every day, in the hopes of rebooting one of those one non-talents that I have. I've been using an older book, Figure Drawing, Design and Invention, by Michael Hampton, after several people whose pin-up art I respect recommended it as the book if you want to learn how to draw naked people.
The book is really about learning the ratios between the eight major masses of the body: head, spine, ribcage, pelvis, two arms, and two legs, and then figuring out how to pose them in space. He starts with a pretty good description of gesture and, bless him, undoes all the damage my earlier art teacher did by saying that gesture has nothing to do with trying to "access your feelings" or flailing about on the page; it's just about trying to outline the motion inherent in the static image you're currently drawing. I practiced for a while, and I discovered that Pinterest is a pretty good source of poses when you don't have a live model to work with.
After doing about twenty two-minute gestures, I wandered off in search of something, er, different. Two fun sources of "different" are renders and photomanips. Since Hamptom mentions that gestures are where animators start with a 3-D rig, it's entertaining to work backwards from a final render and see if you can find the rig, but when the image isn't quite human(SFW), doing a gesture gets a little weird.
Of course, it's no surprise that I'm a furry and into centaurs and naked people and so the humantaur photomanipulations amuse me to no end-- if you're into feet, a sexy woman with four is a bonus, right?-- but trying to draw them started to seriously reveal limitations and anatomical complexities. Most of them are probably due to the way photomanips are done-- most are done by fetishists with little regard for anatomy, so the whole "where do the spines meet, what's the forward ribcage built like, how does this all fit together?" questions are rarely asked. It's just played with until it looks "good enough," and it rarely is.
But it's been an eye-opening experiment in learning how to draw. Because once you try to actually, you know, do anatomy, doing unearthly anatomies starts to make you really question how evolution put us together in the first place.
