Reddit reviews Anatomy: A Complete Guide for Artists (Dover Anatomy for Artists)

Don't start drawing thinking you have to create something beautiful or highly refined. This will leave you always frustrated and feeling unaccomplished. Just allow yourself to freely draw, not concerned with the outcome. Learn to enjoy the action of drawing, and then after that, set goals for yourself.


Here are some easy tips/exercises you can do:

Find Draftsmen you like and emulate their works. The best way to increase the quality of your work is to look at high quality work and strive toward it.

Draw for twenty minutes a day. Anything. Trees, chairs, your cup of coffee, your desk, whatever.

allow drawing to be fun. My girlfriend and I play a game where the one person writes down a word (say "cat") and then the other person has to draw the word using the first letter (C).

If you want some books on drawing, I've found this book and this book helpful for reference with human anatomy.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Work on your anatomy, in 2d first. I highly recommend this book: http://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Complete-Guide-Artists-Dover/dp/0486272796

So one thing you can experiment is instead of giving yourself a lot of time to get the gesture just right, time yourself and ELECRTOFY your speed. It will basically put you into a panic and you will have to draw as fast as humanly possible. It's sort of stressful at first, but it gets across the speed of gesture drawing an translates it into flow.

Here are a few gestures I did some years ago with some students. The time was one minute. You can see that I'm not even putting down forms at that point, just action lines in some cases. That's how you need to see the figure in a gesture, a series of landmarks and suggestions.

Learn anatomy from books, there are several good ones. This one is my favorite. Copy the more critical drawings, do studies on the relation of parts, read all the information in the book.

Good luck! Keep it up.

The best thing you can do is get a few books/e-books or like Kissnellie suggests online guides.

I suggest Bridgman's Complete Guide to Drawing from Life , I also like Anatomy: A Complete Guide for Artists by Sheppard.

Basically just draw all of the images over and over again, they are like maps to the human body. Sure they won't be exact for every person - but getting an idea of how it looks will help you shape it better. Drawing figures (and anything) is about understanding it and yadda yadda.

Draw from life, gesture often from pixelovely, and Posemaniacs

If you practice for a while, you'll get a good understanding of the human figure pretty well :D

I might have some anatomy e-books if you're interested - drop me a message. I am currently taking a life drawing class, so it's all good fun if I can help others =3