Unit one: Skeletons continued

No gestures this time. Don't worry, there will be more. There'll have to be. Sigh. Anyway continuing the skeletal studies has been most enjoyable. Getting a better idea ow what the internal workings of the body are like has been very, very helpful. All images in this post are scanned directly from my sketchbook and were done on the 3rd and 4th.  

Perhaps a bit too helpful. I'm starting to notice a kind of funny side effect. I'm starting to be able to see how the skeleton is positioned when I look at someone standing. It's only brief flashes in my mind, but it behaves like a really weak and unreliable form of X-ray vision right now. Like, for the briefest moment I'll look at how someone is standing and then all of a sudden I won't be seeing them but their skeleton. Something similar happened during my first painting class when I couldn't help but look at something and see how it would be taken from a drawing to a finished painting. 

Anyway, moving away from my unreliable but developing superpowers the above studies are from one of my books. Specifically The Human Figure  by Vanderpoel. My notation for those unable to read my chicken scratch:

"A part of a person's size and dimension is obviously determined by the shoulders and ribs (implying the skeleton as a whole). Varying these must produce varying body types."

Obvious notation is obvious yes but it is a note that I need to make sure I study many physical types. I like fantasy art but it has a habit of being rather homogenous with its body types. Especially where women are concerned. 

More stuff from the gesture drawing tool in the image right above this one. Now remember when I said no gestures this post? Well I kind of lied. Forgot that these started with me trying the new gesture drawing technique I picked up in Anthony Ryder's book and THEN doing the skeleton on top of it. I tried to keep things loose here. Multiple colored pencils helped me to care less about perfection and more about the character of the pose. 

Again, stuff from the gesture drawing tool. The skeletal stuff is sort of finished as its own unit. You'll see elements of it in all the drawings of course but it's time to move on to the trunk. For the purposes of practice I'm defining the 'trunk of the body' as the neck to the upper thigh. A part of this is so that there will be overlap when I move to the arms and legs and it'll be easier to mentally put a whole figure together in the end (I hope. I'm partially making this up as I go admittedly). 

This was mostly me trying out a couple of tricks I remembered from my figure drawing class in college and a couple of new things I picked up out of Ryder's book again. He's got a technique called using an envelope that I'll outline in a later post and I'll use it to develop a figure from reference and imagination for anyone interested. Every time I do a session there is always a dud drawing. A runt of the litter as it were and the female planar study is that this time. I think the twist threw me. I was also starting to fatigue. Hitting that one dud drawing is usually the indicator it's time to take a break.