Table of Contents:
- The Body’s Proportions
- The Chest: Bones & Muscles
- The Back: Bones & Muscles
- The Arms: Bones & Muscles
- The Shoulder
- The Elbow
- The Hand: Structure & Proportions, Simplifying & References
- The Hips and Legs: Bones & Muscles
- Male and Female Bodies: Musculature & Fat, Face, Rib cage & Shoulders, Breasts & Hips
- Poses: Simplifying, Weight, Balance, Movement, Gesture Drawing
- Exercises
Before we start, I’d like to point out that knowledge of human anatomy is not a replacement for studying the body from real life or photos. So keep cranking out those sketches! (And hoarding those Victoria’s Secret catalogs and similar magazines. Strictly for reference, of course.) But it will help you to recognize the features you are drawing, and it will certainly come in handy when you don’t have a perfect ref to work from.
We’ll start with the largest bones and muscle masses. It’s not enough to make you a surgeon (well… a successful one at least), but you’ll be able to identify most of the bumps and bits on the body, and understand how they work. Then we’re going to take a look at poses, and ways to abstract the body. And gesture drawing. Ah, so much to do.
I would also like to apologize in advance for using the Latin names of the bones and muscles. You don’t need to know their names to draw them, you can’t impress your friends with it, much less pick up a date, so what’s the use? If you are asking for critique, it is very likely others will use jargon when explaining what you could do better next time. It’s also useful to cross-reference this tutorial with other sources.
(All illustrations in this chapter are referenced from photos that were taken from large distances, x-ray images, and [Gold], [Gray], and [Barc])
