Slow Progress Is Okay

This week was particularly difficult as it felt I was making no improvement despite practicing. The progress that I felt I had been making suddenly took a massive halt and left me confused and wondering what I was doing wrong. After struggling for a few days I decided to switch tracks and pivot away from practicing drawing the head and begane making sketches of things I saw around me. This mundane practice was very nice as I found a lot of satisfaction in seeing what I was looking at be placed (somewhat decently) onto the page in front of me. My favorite sketch from these days was this sketch of my cat who was sleeping on my lap at the time. While I feel I made the limbs too short I like it and it feels leagues better than what I could draw at the start of this art journey. This helped my mentality as I realized while I may not be seeing progress right now, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t any progress being made,

Mindset refreshed and only one day left to the week I decided to turn my attention towards learning anatomy. The goal of this was to get a shallow understanding, while prepairing a more structured practice routine for next week. I started with two videos by e u r g o j o s h, the first being “The EASIEST way to start Learning to Draw Anatomy!” which encouraged tracing simple anatomy shapes over other artists works while questioning why it was done that way, how did they simplify anatomy, etc. This was where I spent most of my practice this week as I didn’t want to go too far down the daunting task of anatomy as a whole. The second video I watched from e u r g o j o s h was “Learning Anatomy for Art? Study this FIRST.” I wish I saw this one first as it greatly simplified anatomy be segmenting the body into the top and bottom sections, then separating those sections into the chest, arms, legs, and pelvis, then further separating it one last time into all the separate sections. The step by step process the video undertook made anatomy suddenly seem a lot less daunting and a lot more simple and obvious. The video also described the important joint connections and what to keep an eye out for before discussing some sample images and what they did well/what they could do better.

Below is one of the sheets I ended up with after trying to mimic poses I found using image references using what I vaguely learned from these two videos.

Going into more depth into what I noticed while doing this exercise, below I have posted the two images that gave me the most to think about. I found that the squatting position is very hard to get a grasp on and confuses me. I don’t know how the legs fold/bend to both look properly proportioned while they are hidden under clothing. The second image was a standing/leaning pose where I noticed with one that the angle the hips were placed (the slight slant) matched the angle the knees ended up at (with one higher than the other). The reference for the images below came from Studio Ghibli (as did most of my other reference images did).

For further exploring and practicing anatomy, I probably will follow “I wanna learn anatomy in 7 DAYS… so I got help” by tppo which introduced me to Coloso, an online class website and provided a nice compressed seven day experience that he did. While I won’t use Coloso (it costs quite a bit of money) I may follow some of the steps he performed myself this coming week. A second video “How I study Anatomy” by Josh Art also introduced me to JUSTSKETCHME, an online model tool that one can use to adjust the poses of a variety of mannequins in order to get a proper angle and perspective. This website in particular will be very useful as I continue to practice bare-bone sketches to practice anatomy.