Saturday, January 31, 2009
Head for a head, and I don't know how to draw a body?
Well, the title says it all...I've focused so immensely on drawing the human head, I feel that any sort of ability I used to have on drawing the human body is fineto! That being said, does anybody know of some good books to help learn the human figure?
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4 comments:
Stan Lee's "How to Draw comics the Marvel Way" will help you get some basic concepts down, for more advanced anatomy check out Burne Hogarth and George Bridgman.
The best thing to do is to draw people sitting and standing in front of you as often as you can.
It doesn't sound like much fun, but your work will improve a lot if you sketch from life. Just spend a couple of minutes on each sketch. If you don't get both legs in the time allotted, move on and try again. Don't linger on one sketch. You learn and get faster only by repeating the process, not by redrawing one sketch.
In school we had some 4-hour classes where we would do 5, 3, 2, and 1-minute sketches for the whole period. It was brutal, but it made you learn a lot.
You could also find out really quick how much you love drawing or not. If you'll keep drawing when your arm feels like it's going to fall off, you love it, LOL.
Hope that helps,
~R
Thanks Randy! In regards to your book suggestion, a while back me and a friend of mine (my friend, to which I refer, is a WAY better and seasoned artist than I) were talking he said how he didn't like MARVEL's book.
When asked why, he basically said it was because it did a good job showing you how to draw the stick figure and what it should look like when it's done, but it didn't do a good job showing anything in between... As in, what lines to connect. Does he have a solid argument, do you figure?
Well, there are a number of books that Marvel has put out, so we might not even be talking about the same one.
But for where you're at right now, I think the book I suggested would be really helpful. If you want to draw characters quickly, stick figures are where it's at.
Right now, you need to work more inside-out. That's where your work needs to grow, so stick figures will help you a lot. They'll help understand posing, without bogging you down in details.
I can agree that the middle step is somewhat lacking in the marvel book, though I hadn't thought of it quite that way before. However, there's not really a way to know what lines to connect unless you know the pose you want and the anatomy that goes with it. The marvel book isn't an anatomy book, it's more of a posing book.
You can also dig up some of the "how to draw the bruce timm 'batman animated' style" books which are very basic, but have more of a focus on how to do the middle step in that particular style, though they won't really teach you anatomy so much. That style is actually really influential in my work, and so those books were helpful in getting me through that second step, until I could get ahold of good anatomy instruction.
Anyhow, whatever you do, keep drawing. Gotta keep practicing to get better.
~R
Thanks bro, I needed that.
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