Anatomy and Gesture

I’ve spent too many days just doing the minimum amount of art so tonight it’s time to get back into the routine with some anatomy and gesture study. And I planned this well as tomorrow I have life drawing class with a live model and I need to get warmed up for it.

I had this great idea of doing some anatomy sketches starting with the bones on a page then drawing the muscles on tracing paper and layering them over the original bones drawing. I tried it today and it worked really well. I was even able to label each of the layers of tracing paper with the muscles.

The subject for tonights anatomy study is the whole arm, even the very difficult to remember forearm muscles. This is the first drawing of the bones in ink. It would be good to not here that I was looking at a new book that I picked up called “Anatomy, a complete guide for artists” by Joseph Sheppard.

Here is the first layer of tracing paper. You can’t tell in the photo but if you press the tracing paper down with your finger you can see the bones through the paper much better.

I used red ink for the muscles and it’s nice to see the underlying muscles as a faded version slightly obscured by the tracing paper, it lends focus to the muscles on the current layer.

After my study with anatomy I did some gesture study. This didn’t go so well as my gestures still need lots of work. I was working from a video on New Masters Academy where Steve Huston was teaching some really good techniques for drawing gestures.