Ink Figures

Lately, I've been enjoying using the combo of fountain pen and brush pen when I go to life drawing sessions.

    

It's been a long time

Yes it has. I guess I've left the blog rotting because I tend to just put stuff up on my site without writing much about it, or post stuff elsewhere on the interwebs. But here's a recent painting. Actually several weeks old now, as you can tell from the weather...



Otherwise, most of my new work has been practice stuff, which you can find in the sketchbooks section of my site. Mostly I've been focusing on sketching scenes from around town in pen and ink, as well as getting back into life drawing whenever I can make time.

Anatomy Resources

Here are some additional anatomy web resources that I've found recently:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_anatomy
http://education.yahoo.com/reference/gray/
http://www.reybustos.com/03ra/ra.html

Anatomy Phase I: Complete!

So I've gone through the first 74 videos in The Structure of Man. And I can now do the following from memory:



Well, about 90% anyway. There are some details on the hands and the radius & ulna that I'm still a bit hazy about. Before I move on to the muscles, I'll try to do a few exercises putting the skeleton in 3D and in a variety of poses.

Bones

So rather than just talking about it, I've started going through the anatomy lessons I posted about previously.

    

Along the way, I'm gradually building my own anatomy reference book. I'm not quite at the point where I feel I can leverage this skeletal knowledge much in my figure drawing; it's a lot of work and the muscles are going to be even more work. And after that it's going to be even more work to get comfortable drawing this stuff from my head and putting it in perspective. But it is something I feel I should've put the time into learning many years ago. Better late than never I suppose.

And I was just thinking

about how I needed to learn more about human anatomy, and how to apply it to figure drawing.

This drawing gave me all sorts of trouble, trying to figure out how the obscured hips and right leg would look, and how the legs would attach.



Lucky for me then that I should stumble upon Riven Phoenix's The Structure of Man - 170 sequential videos freely viewable on YouTube, teaching you classical techniques on how to draw the figure from your mind. A fantastic project! I have a feeling this will become a staple of modern, internet-enabled art instruction. Thank you Riven Phoenix for creating such a valuable resource.

More Poses

    

Tricky exercises in extreme perspective/foreshortening and motion. Reference courtesy of DeviantArt stock artists.