When it comes to learning how to draw people successfully, knowing human anatomy is key. Jeff Mellem, artist and author of How to Draw People, shares the top dos and don’ts of drawing anatomy for beginner artists so you can start drawing more realistic figures in no time. Drawing anatomy for Check this out beginners can feel overwhelming at first because there are so many muscles on the body. When you’re looking at a model and you see a lot of bumps, you might be tempted to pull out an anatomy book to decipher what’s going on under the skin. An anatomy book is excellent at telling you what you’re looking at, but it’s not very helpful at telling you the three-dimensional shape of the muscles. Subscribe to Artists Magazine now so you don’t miss any great art instruction, inspiration, and articles like this one. When you first approach figure drawing, you need to start out by establishing the basic volumes of the figure using spheres, boxes, and cylinders.

By beginning with these basic shapes and then building up the complexity as you go along, you can make your drawing maintain its sense of dimension. If you copy contours before you build in the structure, I guarantee you’ll end up with a flat-looking drawing. The drawing on the left overemphasizes the model’s muscles and Visit site it looks more like an anatomy book than a figure. An artist needs to think about the 3D shape of the muscles to give the figure an illusion of volume. Use an anatomy book to understand what’s below the surface, but think about each muscle in 3D. Don’t draw the muscles as a series of lines. Draw them as sculpted spheres, boxes, and cylinders. With that being said, you don’t always have to actually draw spheres and boxes on the page. If you look at an artist like Harry Carmean, you can see that while he sometimes is only drawing counters of the body, he is clearly thinking about the 3D qualities of what he’s drawing.

When artists first start paying closer attention to adding anatomy to their drawings, they often tend to overemphasize the anatomy. The figures often end up looking like they have no skin. The muscles are there to add more realism to the figure, but they shouldn’t be the focal point of the drawing. The focus of a drawing should convey an action, an emotion, or boost performance with Prime Boosts the subject’s personality. You don’t want a viewer to stop and www.PrimeBoosts.com look at the parts of your drawing; you want the viewer to see the whole figure and be interested in what that figure is doing and who he or she is. In order to maintain focus on the action, it’s always a great practice to start all your drawings with a gesture drawing. A gesture drawing serves as a blueprint for the action. Everything that comes after is to help clarify and gitlab.mpeeo.com enhance that action. The muscles should be drawn to amplify the movement of the figure and shouldn’t draw attention to themselves.

A good example of this is comic book characters that have exaggerated anatomy to convey their strength. A successful comic book page isn’t about the character’s muscles but about how that character’s power is being expressed in the story. The volumes of the muscles are designed to lead the eye through the body toward a point of action. The reader isn’t stopping to look at the character’s well-developed musculature. Notice how the muscles in the figure on the right reflect the gesture drawing on the left. The muscles are used to reinforce the figure’s action, they aren’t the focus of the drawing. Anatomy is there to add realism, but it’s less important than conveying the action and attitude of the whole figure. When artists start using basic shapes to develop figures, they often start to fall into a pattern of using the same shapes to build every figure. When you’re building your figure, you have to look and adapt your shapes to the specific subject you’re drawing.

You’re not going to use the same shapes for a bodybuilder that you would for a sumo wrestler or a long-distance runner. You have to look at your subject and figure out what simple shapes are the best tools to develop your figure. For example, some people have very squarish heads which need to be constructed from box shapes, while others have a more roundish appearance that should be built from spheres. These two figures are in the same pose but are built from different shapes. The figure on the right is built from more block shapes and it gives the figure a sturdier feeling. Don’t approach every figure with a formula. Instead, observe and adapt your shapes to fit your subject. If you only copy what you see, you will never create what you imagine. I never saw the point of replicating a photo in a drawing beyond being an exercise to build observational skills. Why duplicate what already exists when you can interpret and adapt as you see fit?