The importance of knowing anatomy

While I've always purported the importance of knowing anatomy, telling nearly every young artist I meet (and many older) to take at least one life drawing class at some point in their life, I've never really taken my own advice and studied anatomy truly in depth until rather recently. It's one thing to look in a mirror and to draw what you see how you see it. It's another thing entirely to understand the structure of bones and attachment, bulge, and flow of muscles and fat.

Or as Matthew Bernier put it to me (and I'm paraphrasing): while the artist in you is busy thinking about composition, flow, and dynamics, you can halve the burden by giving a part of the work to another part of your brain.

Or in neurology terms: by studying art from a logical perspective, you're freeing up some of the blood flow in the visual cortex (at the back of the brain) and the right side of your brain (which manages all your spatial problems) and diverting it to the more logical, organized, word and language driven left hemisphere.

And in computer terms: While the brain is a parallel processor type organism (processing multiple tasks at once), it struggles when memory gets backed up trying to use the same sectors at the same time. So by using two strips of memory instead of one, you process the same amount of work in half the time. Yeay for multi-DIMM SDRAM!

So anyway, while I've been between toning gigs, I'm working on the next two lessons in my print series, and using that as an excuse to research all the things I'm terrible at.

Like legs.

And feet.

And anatomy in general.

Okay. Not TERRIBLE at. I've seen worse. FAR worse. But I've taken a realistic approach to anatomy lately, and it seems the more realistic I get, the easier it is to tell mistakes, forms feel off or stiff, or the body language isn't QUITE what I may have had in mind. My original style in "Steady Beat", heavily influenced by manga, was much more forgiving to mistakes in general anatomy. It was a style based on outlines, not structure. Not so much now. At this point in my knowledge, I should have no excuses for not working on a pose until it's correct.

Anyway, so I thought I'd post a sample of a pose I spent most of last night and this after noon on. The body is like a series of weight and balances, pulleys and levers, a pendulum ticking back and forth, held in delicate balance. When you pull at one end, EVERYTHING shifts. Understanding the mechanisms of this complicated machine we call a body helps to understand how.

From my third lesson in the series, "The Halftone Cell": (click on the image for an animated gif)



Even now, I can see some corrections that still need to be made (mainly in the right knee and ankle), but you can see how gradually everything shifted, how things as little as minor adjustments of feet, legs, hips, back, shoulders, etc, can throw a picture in an entirely different direction. And how knowing the muscles of the legs actually helped as it twisted in different directions. I have a problem with feet, so I busted out my anatomy book and studied the bones of the feet. That would be the difference between the third and the last one. For the rest, notice how the hips, butt, and the back shifts and moves, even the most miniscule amounts and how that affects the balance of the rest of the pose.

So. STUDY YOUR ANATOMY. No matter how frustrating it is. There were several times I threw up my hands in savage annoyance, and I may have walked away for a bit, but I always went back. And I still am! These are just the pencils (bluelines, actually, but converted to grayscale for ease of reading and loading), so there will be even more corrections when I go in and ink. I don't like to get TOO tight when I pencil, so this is enough.

Sometimes it's tempting to just draw a poofy fifties skirt and be done with the worst part of my anatomy learning, but that's just lazy. Don't skimp on yourself!



-----------------Life Side Notes----------------
Lordy is it hot in Texas right now. I normally like the heat, but this is just too much. Global warming is le suck.

To compensate, I've started composting. IN goes all my organic matter (coffee grounds, orange peel, chicken bones, egg shells, etc ... I'm not sure about paper though because that has glue in it) and out comes yummy mulch for my potted plants to gobble up! To speed up the process, I've been putting everything in a blender in water and pureeing. Heehee. The less wait the better! And my little three-year old mango tree agrees!