My First Art Class since University: Anatomy
- Mantha_Creates
- Sep 16, 2024
- 5 min read
Monday, September 16th, 2024:
Back in 2022, I had purchased some animation courses, which I worked on the first one to much success. Due to this, I purchased more courses from the same place but due to focusing on my senior year, I never gotten around to actually working on those courses. Today, that finally changed. Quick note: I am not getting any paid commission or promotion for these things, this is based on my actual experience in real time.
This had given me some time to consider where to start, which I decided to start at the true foundations of art; anatomy. You may wonder, why am I saying anatomy is the true foundations of art? This is because you learn much more about the skeleton, the muscles & all of the inner workings of the human body, but this can be applied to animals and many other creatures. The course comes from Aaron Blaise called How to Figure Drawing: Drawing Human Anatomy. I will have the course linked below under my "resources" for this blog entry. I also do not like to gatekeep information regarding art as I would want all artists to get this information as well.
The course comes in a variety of lessons, although I am focusing on two main lessons for my first week. These would be lessons 2 & 3 as lesson 1 is just a brief introduction to the course. I have reviewed lesson 2 in the past, so for this week, it will be apart of my reviewal material. I decided to focus on lesson 3 for my first lesson. First I review the lesson, at my own pace. These lessons are not too terribly long & I am usually trying to follow along for the course so I create a page on my tablet using Procreate. Procreate is my primary digital art software. What I like about the courses being self paces is that I can always go back to review them at a later time. This makes me easy for me as this is the best learning method for me is self paced. It is less stress on me to get the work completed by a deadline. I give myself a small deadline just to hold myself accountable.
Now, I do not want to share my note pages for the courses as I do not want to reveal too much information about the course itself. However, there is no concern sharing my homework pages because this is my own artwork & there is no important notes that could reveal too much information about the course. Especially since the courses are copyrighted, it could be a potential legal issue that I do not want to get myself into. I hope you as the reader understands this information & if they are interested in the course or any courses or resources that I talk about, I hope that they could free feel to check them out themselves.
Enough yapping, let's get into the meat of this. I started out by following along the 3rd lesson of the course. This was about an hour of my time to just take notes, draw along, & soak in the information that I was getting. I have learned a lot of new information as anatomy was not really something that my university taught when I was enrolled. I was taught life drawing, but not the deep foundational aspects of how to better my work. Once I was finished with the video lesson, my next task was to begin my homework.
My self assigned homework was that I was to find a YouTube video of faces that you can draw. I went for drawing 5 faces for today as my homework to practice what I just learned. This was also noted to be used for 90 second intervals as well for timed drawing.
I, however, decided to forgo the 90 second intervals & just focused on the material that I was just taught. I was able to sketch out three different faces (labelled 1-3). After this, I decided to stop for a little while which is good to take breaks from drawing. I decided to stop at about 1pm. I came back though at around 8pm at night to work on an additional 2 faces (labelled 4-5). I could see how the information was still soaked in. My final face pose was much more difficult as it was a completely different angle. Here is my homework image below:
I believe that this was a successful first homework attempt. In my opinion, my best face is number 3 as it seems to have the most realistic looking compared to the model. My second best is number 4 as it is close to the model, but I still see some imperfections. Following that was number 1, still some imperfections but I do see how I was able to achieve that likeness to an extent. The ones that were more poorly were numbers 2 & 5. Number 2 I believe may have been the angle along with the hair that the character had & how the image was more in black & white as opposed to color like the other models were. Five was the worst because five also had the most detail which also included a difficult angle to accompany how the character was posed. With these notes considered, I would give myself the following:
Number 1: 85 out of 100 (points taken off for the facial structure not matching well to a woman's face as that was the model).
Number 2: 60 out of 100 (points taken off for jaw being too protruded out, the left eye being too off compared to the model, & the eyes not aligning well)
Number 3: 95 out of 100 (Missing an eyebrow in black pencil)
Number 4: 95 out of 100 (Some small proportion issues - though haven't covered that material yet, still grading as if I have)
Number 5: 70 out of 100 (Some proportion issues - though this one was also a difficult angle)
In total I have gathered 405 out of 500 total "points" for this homework attempt. In an actual grade, this would be an 81%, which is considered a B- but this is not at all bad for an initial attempt at anatomy. Especially, when I was not educated much about anatomy at all during my time in school. I also am noting that a big issue of mine is the angle of how the faces are aligned. Noting this information, I am going to plan my future homework to be focusing more on the different angles as well as researching other methods for drawing faces. I am only working on head proportions, which I am thinking of the following homework:
Working on different face angles
Working on the simplfied verisons of head proportions
Review of this homework assignment towards the end of the week.
I can not wait to continue my head proportion homework!
This is Mantha Creates signing off.
RESOURCES
Anatomy Course ($60.00):
YouTube Timed Drawing Reference (Free):
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