Trying to Learn Anatomy? (Here's My Simple Advice as a Professional)
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To draw from imagination you need to build a set of references in your mind... a visual library of how the figure works.
Learning anatomy is one of the biggest challenges that an artist faces. Especially if you want to draw a lot of people and figures! It's often the thing which people get judged on in the beginning...
However I feel that this idea of 'leaning your anatomy' can become a stumbling block if you focus on it too much...
At the Drawing Codex the goal is to learn to draw from imagination as much as possible. So most of my advice is aimed at helping you do that... (there is nothing wrong with developing techniques and process which rely on a lot of reference building and planning, a lot of my favourite artists use reference extensively... that's just not what I do here)
My Simple Advice is to understand that learning your anatomy is a lifelong process... you will always be improving and getting better as long as you keep drawing and keep trying.
To aid this process what we need are techniques for fitting the learning into our everyday drawing. Instead of trying to learn all anatomy in the beginning - realise that it will take time... a lot of time.
And that we need to both practice drawing from our imagination as a goal... while also building our visual library.
We still use reference to help us build a deeper understanding of the figure in our mind. Just not as a starting point.
Instead we use it to help us answer questions that arise as we try to draw our stuff all day every day. In the process we slowly need to ask less and less questions.
The 3 types of reference to focus on are as follows:
1 - Systems books (Like the Loomis Method etc)
2 - Medical grade anatomy reference.
3 - Photo Reference.
Depending on what your goals are you will need to check these references and focus on them to different degrees!
That's why I feel it's important to focus more on the task at hand and building your knowledge to support it... vs trying to learn all anatomy in one go before some arbitrary point in time.
The more you want to stylise your art the more you will probably need systems books which focus on primary forms and big shapes and how to pose the figure...
The more realistic you need your art to be the more you need to focus on the medical grade reference.
The one caveat that I will add is that I think photo reference is extremely helpful.... but I don't recommend spending a lot of time gathering it. Just find some basic reference that is easy to access and that's it.
The key here is to practice using this reference. And to streamline it and make it as small as possible so you know where to go to answer different questions!
We don't need a lot of reference... and we need to spend the least amount of time possible finding it. That way we can focus instead on the task at hand... drawing cool stuff!
Happy Drawing!
Tim Mcburnie
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