Pandoramic

Pandoramic

Human, artist, animator, writer, doer of tries.

How did I do?

Goals:

  • Male Full Body: 132
  • Female Full Body: 117
  • Hands: 77
  • Feet: 77
  • Profile Heads: 50

View it all on DeviantArt View it all on Artstation

Take-aways?

Well, first and easiest: I need to do more studies. In the future, I’ll probably see about making some time to follow along with Proko’s Anatomy Series, which I’ve run through as a chill morning wake-up-over-breakfast deal, and found to be conceptually useful. Particularly because I’ve tried to follow along with some “anatomy for artist” books in the past and left feeling frustrated and not very much better informed about the forms.

Second: It’s a little difficult to find pinnable reference for full-body stuff, and the FOV on a lot of hand and foot reference is kinda wild. I’ve built up a fair stock of useful full-body ref, but it’s looking like I should be taking hand reference from images that aren’t necessarily focused on the hands themselves.

For my dude studies, I found that I was in the habit of drawing narrow shoulders, wide hips, and soft shapes - and that my sketches looked better when I felt I was going overboard in the opposite direction. Weird, and difficult, but worth. It seemed like the most important parts to nail were the external obliques and the pectoral-shoulder area.

Women were more of my artistic comfort zone, so my focus here was on trying to get a hang of the specific muscles - which I sort of did, and sort of didn’t, given the 5 minute limit for each study. I did come away with stronger skills in the area, but they’re not very specific yet. One thing I did get better at was knees, and a lot of the hard work for the female studies generally went into getting the waist/hips to read.

Hands are sorta wild, too, and I don’t think I’m settled yet on a good way to construct them. I think that the fat/folds and knuckles are what sell hands, more-or-less, once you’ve got the structure down (which I don’t think I do). Fingers are still a little weird, in that they’re almost tubes, with flat tops and fingernails that suggest perspective. The connection between the thumb and the rest of the hand still troubles me.

I went into the foot studies feeling a lot of apprehension, since I’ve basically been faking it for the past few years (lol), but I found that my basic-ass construction was more-or-less what it needed to be. Individual toes are less intimidating now that I know I can place them very easily by drawing little circles for the ends of them. The real points of interest for these and future studies are the outer and inner sides of the feet, since they’re squishy but they have a fairly predictable shape, and connect consistently to the rest of the foot in a way I haven’t quite driven home yet.

The profile head studies did a bit of double duty, in that they were practice both for my weakest head angles and for likeness - and damn, likeness is hard. After getting through a few of these, I realized that a lot of my struggle with getting this angle right was sizing the back of the head and placing the ear. I do feel better about it, but I think that returning to this practice and continuing to try to capture likeness will go a long way toward my character design process (as well as general skill).

Leave a comment