Weiiird Week

Studied everyday but it was a struggle. I’ve mentioned wanting to tackle perspective after anatomy. Well, I figure if I’m so afraid of it, fuck it, started on Friday. Tackled Scott Robertson’s How To Draw. The same book and topic that pretty much made me stop drawing for three months lol. I can report that I fared much better this time. Made it 4 chapters into his book by Saturday, either I’m dumb(probably) or this book really glosses over perspective basics and is structured very strangely. He’ll instruct you to construct something on page 31, that he doesn’t explain how to contruct until 50 pages later.

Anyways, wasn’t fucking with the book at all, so I went to a often recommended perspective book, Perspective Made Easy. Faaaaaaar more digestible, Robertson comes off as a robot in comparison. I don’t know if I’ll do perspective studies for weekends or mix them in throughout the week. We’ll see by next week I guess.

Anatomy Studies, turns out like all other anatomy, legs and necks are tough as fuck:

Scott Robertson stuff

Perspective Made Easy stuff:

4 months in

Haven’t given up yet. Not much else to say. Torso’s still tough, started on the neck. Speaking of the torso, it’s really the 3d form of it that kills me. Like someone bending over might be the most intimidating pose ever lol. Anyways, 141 hours of study in April. Lets see if I can top that in May.

I like this face.

April’s Coming to an end.

The grind continues, I wanna say I’m almost there when it comes to understanding the torso(the densely packed muscles in the back are giving me the most trouble), but eh, time will tell. Also, unless I breeze through the head, hair, lower body, hands, feet, perspective, rendering and clothing I’m probably not going to “make it” this year. I’m actually fine with that, I’m just hoping to keep the consistency up. The only way to really speed things up would be to study 6 hours after work, I don’t know how feasible that is :/

I don’t believe i’ve ever detailed my study plain/guide. Basically I want to grind anatomy to the point where I can replicate all the bone and muscle groups from memory. After that, I’m moving on to perspective. When I’m at the perspective stage, I’m planning on having half of every study session be perspective studies, then the other half be figure/life drawing. As Richard Williams says, Life drawing is the antidote. It will expose my weakness(and with anatomy knowledge, I’ll know what to fix precisely) and I’ll also be able to explore stuff like gesture. After all, I wanna do mostly character stuff if I ever go pro.

After gaining a basic knowledge of perspective, I’m hoping that will help me with simplifying figures in 3d space. Rendering/lighting/painting after that, the final frontier. Also grouping composition in that as well.

We’re almost 4 months into 2020. So far so good as far as my art journey. Anyways, here’s this past week’s studies:

This Weeks Studies + UNPLUG

The Little Grey Notebook — Why animators should unplug when ...
I’ve seen this image floating around before but didn’t give it much thought. But seeing it after looking up William’s work and more importantly reading that opening chapter in The Animator’s Survival Kit detailing his training and experiences with other godlike draftsmen(Like Milt Kahl, pictured above), it hit different. Tried it Monday through Thursday last week, and I don’t want to hype it up too much but the difference in focus and amount of work I did after going back to listening to music/twitch streams was very noticeable, so I think I’ll stick with it . Studying to music has made me hate every song in my library so that probably helps too lol.

More torso stuff, god this stuff never ends.

Bonus Sasuke

Torsos are hard, yo

Shout out to AvoidingThePuddle’s for helping to fill the time while studying because I’m starting to hate every song in my library T_T

I’m better at torsos, abs and obliques still fuck me up, will probably study the shoulder girdle this week, but still need to work on torsos. Frustrating.

New Approach, Maybe?

This past week, I’ve changed my study approach a little bit. Normally when I’m going through this Bammes book, I’ll study one body part or muscle group for a couple hours, then go on to the next one the next night. Not sure that’s been working out. What I’ve been doing this past week, as you can tell from the gallery below, is dedicate more time and more focus to single body parts before moving on. This week was arms.

So, the first step was drawing the arm bones, which happen to be deceptively difficult. So the approach, grind the bones until I could somewhat accurately draw the arm bones from memory, then study bones even more so I can understand the attachments and really understand the anatomy, rather than replicating an angle that was studied. Then apply that same mindset to studying the arm muscles.

The reasoning behind the approach, my brand of dummy science. The way I see it, when you’re first learning how to draw something, most if not all of your brain power is dedicated to getting your drawing to look like whatever your drawing is supposed to look like. It’s hard to think about understanding the mechanics or why shapes are shaped the way they are when you just want your arm bones not to look like dogshit. After getting comfortable with the subject, I.E drawing the arm bones over and over again, you don’t have to dedicate nearly as much brain power to replicating the reference, because you can do it from memory. Now when studying, you’re actually understanding the anatomy.

Maybe that makes sense, maybe it doesn’t. I don’t know, I feel like I’m better at drawing arms(still probably going to dedicate most of the week to the muscles of the arm). Either way, I definitely busted my ass this week. 40 hours at the day job, 33 hours studying.

Closing words? fuck forearm muscles. To death.

Beginning of March

March Goal : Study more than I did in February. So far, I’m on track after the first week or so of the month.

Still going through Bammes and probably will be for a while. This past week I started a bit on hands and then struggled through the knee. Knees are hard yo.

The more I study muscles, the more important studying bones become. lol.