One of the courses I took this last fall was Anatomy for Artists, taught as a companion course to figure drawing. I’ve been dyeing to learn more about anatomy, I’ve got quite a few books, but in the past it always seemed like an insurmountable task. So many bones and muscles, so many crags and knots and little doodads, and all that Greek and Latin!

Well this is where great teachers come in.  The reason you take a class instead of learning something on your own is that (hopefully) the instructor’s experience tells him or her what’s important to learn and what’s pedantic detail.

We spent most of the class on the skeleton and the first thing we learned was SIMPLIFY. All those little boney protuberances and ossuary processes and subtle sloping curves of form basically disappear once you wrap everything in guts and skin and whatnot. Instead, visualize the bones as simple geometric shapes and focus on understanding their positions and relations in space (which is quite hard enough on it’s own, thank you).

I’m proud to say that we did study the medical names however, which is kind of fun.

Here is a set from early on in the semester to give you an idea of what I mean. At this point we’d covered the head, torso, and legs but not the arms. These are all drawn from reference photos (I left the clothed ones in, but I cropped out the nude ones, sorry ^_^).

So you can see how all that boney detail turns into boxy shapes, but the drawings still capture the figure pretty well. Even the complex joints can be turned into things like spools and cylinders. The joints on the knees are called condyles by the way, which is my new favorite anatomy word. Also, don’t look at that ankle just above, I put the spool in backwards and it’s wrong wrong wrong x_x.

Some things are easier to simplify than others. The pelvis for example is very complex in real life, but because it’s mostly buried in fleshy bits you really don’t need much more than a wedge shape to get the idea. Scapulae (that’s shoulder blades to you non-doctor types) on the other hand rest right under the skin of the back so they take a bit more work. Heres me trying to sort them out:

Going through the process I learned some things that surprised me. For example, did you know that the two bones in your forearm ( the ulna and the radius ) actually cross and uncross as you rotate your wrist! It kind of gives me the chills if I think about it too hard.

Near the end of the semester we just started talking about the muscles, but unfortunately we ran out of time to get very far with them. For the final project I did these two complete skeletons:

The fellow on the left is Fred Astaire, the one on the right was a female model. I drew her once before in one of the drawings above. Comparing the two you can see how much more fluid and weighty this one looks.

Some foot studies from life drawing class, mostly from photos. There’s a few Bridgeman’s in there if you look carefully.

Our first assignment in perspective class this year was 100 impeccable cubes, freehand. You don’t usually think of perspective class as a place for freehand drawing, but it really should be. Being able to work out a complex perspective problem with a ruler is important but let’s face it, most of the time drawing with a ruler is a drag. Rulers are a tool for finished drawings, not for sketching. But sketching is where all the design happens. I can only speak for myself, but I want to have the sort of draftsmanship skills that I can draw what I want to long before I have to get the ruler out.

As with any hand skills, the only way to build them is muscle memory inducing repetition. So I started drawing cubes. 100 isn’t that many, right?

The first hurdle to get over is to realize that what you think is a cube in your head isn’t. It took me about 45 cubes to realize this. When I started drawing my cubes I did them out of my imagination. They were awful. To help things along we were encourage to build a model to draw from. Here’s mine:

It’s made from foamcoar board, 4 inches on a side, with some geometric printouts pasted on each face. Drawing from the model was a big help. I even taped a knitting needle to the end of my pencil to use as a measuring guide while I worked. I did the next 90 or so cubes this way.

It get’s a little monotonous. Especially when you realize that there are really only 9 views of a cube (think about it). Everything else is just some slight variation of one of those nine.

One drawback to the cube model is that you’re always about the same distance away from it, so the amount of foreshortening and wideangleness is always the same. A good alternative I found was to draw up a cube in a 3D program on my computer and them move the camera around at different focal lengths for variety. This is also nice because you can set it to wireframe and see where the back faces are too. It’s super important to draw the cubes through to the back side to make sure you understand the structure.

By then end of the assignment I had drawn 227 cubes, but quite a few of them were less than impeccable. We were asked to submit 20 of our best. Here are mine (in no particular order):

You can see they’ve got a little of that hand drawn wobble to them, but that’s fine. It just gives them a little class. The point is that my hands have the experience of drawing 227 cubes (and about 20 good ones), and my eyes can recognize a good cube from a bad one.