Transcripts
1. About This Class: Hi, I'm Steve Worthington. I'm a storyboard artist,
illustrator and sculptor. And I've had to draw
millions of figures over the years in all kinds of poses. And they have to look
natural and kinda lively. When you combine
anatomical knowledge with comfortable natural poses, you end up with
well drawn figures. In this class, you
will learn how to draw figures posed in
all kinds of ways, doing all kinds of things that feel comfortable
and look natural. We will break the
figure down into very simple but
practically useful forms. We'll use those simple blocks
to create a very easy to manipulate in our mind
and on paper, mannequin. And we'll see how that
relates using reference to actual people will have some fun exploring lots
of gesture drawings. And we're also invent
some entirely of our own. We'll take a look at proportions
and also analyze lots of movements and activities
in fairly great detail, but still just using this
very simple mannequin. But also take a look
at the strengths and weaknesses of using round oval type shapes versus more rectangular
block shapes. We will see how you
can use them in combination for
the best results. We'll see how you can start with this very simple shape
and then build out. We will look at a few more
other shapes as well. For the class project, we'll start by
drawing a mannequin of someone doing something
that is interesting to us. And then we will take
that mannequin and draw it from
different viewpoints. The end goal is to
fill a page with lively natural poses
and then work over those to create a bunch of either a little
cartoony characters or more realistic looking
people, whichever you prefer. If all that sounds like
something you're interested in, I'll see you in class.
2. Materials: So what do we draw with? Well, anything you
are comfortable with. I mean, it could be a
pencil, Apple pencil. Anything that you're comfortable
drawing with is fine. When it comes to
what do we draw on? Well, paper's always
a good start. Tracing paper is
also perfectly fine. The point is if you are
comfortable making marks with it, then that's what you should use. Actually, if you are going completely traditional
tracing paper is a definite useful thing
for kind of working out your shapes over the
tops of other things. So get yourself
some tracing paper if you don't already have any. And it gets scribbling.
3. Manikins or Mannequins: So if we're going to
be wanting to draw people performing
various actions, a couple of things
we need to know. One is what the actions, how they function,
what they look like. And the other is we need a tool that we can use to very
quickly sketch that out. What I'm doing here is using a very simple
mannequin that will enable me to sketch
out my, my action. And then if there's
something about it I don't like it's pretty quick
and easy to change. In this case, we've got
somewhere in the bat to kick a football or soccer
ball if you prefer. You can go simpler than that. You can just reduce this
box here to a single line. You have to be very careful
if you're doing that though, because you've got to know
exactly which way is up. And if you don't draw
in the whole books, knowing which way is up becomes a little
bit more difficult. Actually quite a
bit more difficult. So I would advise using the box. That way. You'll know which way is up. We're gonna draw our
entire box in there. Got someone that
hit a golf ball. There are some very
key things within even this very simple
structure that you really need to bear in mind. One of them is essentially
the relationship of these two points
of the hip joints, especially in relationship
to this box and each other. And another one is a center line runs up the front or the back of the hip box and the same
thing with the chest area. Now this one is pretty
much dead site onto us, so we don't see the center line, but here we can do the
center line up this box, down this box here. Very important to have a good ground plane feeling of late where the
feet are planted. If they're planted,
in this case, one of the feet up in the air and the other one is just barely planted with
his heel on the ground. That's the sole of the shoe. And the head relative to the chest box and the chest
box relative to the rib box. These are very crucial
also where the hands are, because that's how
we figured out where we're going
to put the arms. Sometimes prefer to, rather than working from the
shoulder out to the hand, figure out what the hands
are doing because that decides how the rest
of the arm is moving. Hands. Then of course, the head. We need to know where the
middle of the head is. If we see the front side of it and put a little center line down there to say we know
which way it's facing.
4. Blocks, Landmarks, Limits: Here are a couple of
blocks of wood that I have fashioned on
a spring to give you an idea of the
limitations of the various movements and also which parts we're
looking for when we start looking
on an actual body. This is the chest facing this way in a normal
standing pose, the pelvis is tilted slightly forwards and the ribcage
is tilted slightly back, shaved off a chunk here, rather than keep it like
perfectly block shaped, just so that I could demonstrate
some forward bending. And I took these corners off because the shoulders
make up these corners. So anyway, what are these little red dots and
things all over the place? This is the center of the chest, center of the rib-cage. This, you can see represents
this opening here. And down the bottom here,
these are key areas. So I've just marked them
with little red dots. When we're looking
at it from the side. You can see that it's
slightly tilted forward. And these points here
are very important. And I've marked them on here
with a couple of red dots. This bony part here is
also super important. So I've marked with a red dot. You can see that this block is a conceptual thing to
help you identify. Because this is a very
complicated shape. It just makes it
easier to identify certain points so
that you can orient your body and heavier
various body parts facing in the right directions
and not go too far. On the backside. Done a
dotted line for the spine. Got a dot here. Lh would represent the
seventh cervical vertebrae, which is a point
that sticks out. You can feel it on the
back of your neck. Just marks the very top of the ribcage where
the neck starts. This V-shape here is very
noticeable landmark. If you've looked at any nudes, these two red dots down here, these to call them
your sit bones. So if you're sort of sitting
down on a hard chair, you feel those bones, they're kind of they might get a little bit
sore after a while if you've been sitting on very hard chair for
a very long time. So there we have
it from the back. We have it from the side. What is very important is to be comfortable drawing
these shapes, kind of tilted and twisted and bent around from each other. Now there's some important
points to remember in terms of just how far
you can move these. You can bend forwards if you're really flexible
an awful long way. But you can't bend
backwards that far. I mean, that's a really, really, really flexible person
bending backwards. That's a very flexible
person bending forward. And twisting goes. You can't twist as
far as you think you might be able to like that. That's a pretty far twist. Like halfway to 90 degrees
is you'd have to fix your pelvis and really be like pulling on something
to twist that far. You might feel like if your feet are planted
on the ground, I can twist my body all
the way around to there. Well, that's because
most of the action has taken place in
the hip joints. And sunny, a small
amount of twist that rotates the top block
against the bottom block. So be aware that it's the it's the hip joints where most
of the twisting occurs when your feet are planted on the ground and
you're just sort of reaching around your hip joints connect your legs to your torso. Side bending wise. That's a pretty good side bend. So don't be thinking
you can go like that because that's just
not realistic. So that's pretty far bend
sideways and say you can also get combinations of little
bit of backward bending, a little bit of side bending, little bit of twisting
with a little bit of folding and bending. And these are the things
you're looking out for anyway. So the next thing
we're gonna do is identify these key points. The enabled us to establish
our blocks on a human body. And then we can start
noticing these blocks. The concept of these blocks, when we start looking at
pictures of people in action.
5. Boxes Embedded in Skeleton and Anatomy Figure: So these are the bony
landmarks on the scalar. And I've put the outer part
of the hip joints in green. Here we have our block
superimposed over the top minus the skeleton, but we're still with
the indications of the bony landmarks. Now we have the muscles added
for anatomical reference. And then we got
rid of the boxes. So you can just see the anatomy. The boxes of returned, but, uh, now transparent
just in case they were getting a little
bit in your way. The body become transparency. You can get a clear
look at everything. And I've just gone into
some more unusual angles here so you can see overlapping
and foreshortening. It's just kind of a reference. Just get used to
looking at things this way and noticing how things overlap and how
they shorten when you're looking at them
more from an end. The green part of the
hip joint that is visible is called the
great trochanter. Obviously the blocks
don't line up perfectly with the
actual body parts. For instance, the
base of the neck. You'll notice that
that's quite a way off. That's because the back
edge of the top of the ribcage is higher
up than the front edge. Here we have our blocks and
I've colored them Front, back inside so you can
see the sharp divisions. So as the shapes
become more organic, the transitions between
the front sides and back become much vaguer. Where everything
kind of blends and smooths of superimposed
the blocks here against you get
to see them both.
6. Drawing Over Reference 1: We can see from the the bra and the waist band that the top and bottom
portions of the body, not bending sideways,
but they are tilting forwards in terms
of the pelvis and tilting backwards a little
in terms of the ribcage, we're seeing a little bit
onto the back side of them. We can tell that they're
facing slightly away from us. So we can draw our blocks in. Like so. Just adjust that line a little bit where we could put
our center line. Then those landmarks
that we have. This next one we can
see that this time we are seeing the front side
and a three-quarter view. We can see that it's pretty
straight up and down. This, none of this tilting, it was going on in
the previous one. We can draw our boxes in. This is the front part of the ribcage sternum. We can put our center lane. The ribcage actually
is higher at the back than it
is at the front. So we could lift the back of that box up a
little bit here. And also the shoulders. They vary in their
position there. This is way more important to locate the box of
the ribcage than it is the direction of
the shoulders to try and give you the
direction of the rib-cage. Because one shoulder could be sort of lift it
up like this one. The other shoulder could be
lower down like this one. And the shoulders can you can
get them all the way back. You can shrug your shoulders
all the way up to here. You can move your
shoulder forward. They connect to the front of the ribcage via
the clavicle bone. And that is the one actual
fixed point, if you like, of the arm to the
to the rib cage. As this thing lifts
up and moves around, the shoulders would be different relative to each
other and certainly not symmetrically placed
on the rib-cage when the arms are being
used in any way? Unless you're using them
very symmetrically. Yeah. Don't don't rely on locating
shoulders to get a sense of where the rib cages at least in his facing, which direction? This one we can see. The thrust of this box here is leaning slightly
forwards like that. The ribcage is leaning
slightly back. So we can draw our box. This would be the notch at
the top of the sternum there. We can put a hair center line. As we put more of our anatomical
knowledge which we may have now or we
may gain later. Refine our shapes
that we're using. There'll become more
organic looking. But the important
thing to consider using these boxes
is that you get a definite sense of the center and which
direction they're facing, and at what angle
they're tilted. So that is important not
to get too super literal when you're looking
at the corners of these boxes because all the
corners get shaved off. You're just looking
for those landmarks that appear within the box. We can see through here to
align sort of like a bra. That gives us a sense of
the direction of our box. For the chest, we can see that our pelvis
would be tilted ever so slightly in
this direction and the ribcage is
tilted slightly in the other direction and
leaning forward a little bit. The knees give us a
little clue to that because this knee is further
forward than this one. Center line. For the top
box of the rib, rib-cage. Then we're not seeing the
centerline of this one because we're looking at it pretty
much from the side and down. Well, I guess if
we were going to twist this pelvis ever so slightly more in this direction just so that we can see just
a hair of the front of it. Since this knee is sticking out a little further
than that one. We can just erase those bits. Just do that bit
again right there. And another important thing to always bear in mind is overlaps. So when you've got one box, you don't always
see all of both of the boxes depending on
what your angle is. The bottom box could be
completely obscured or partially, depending on how you're
looking at that. How leaning towards you. It is fairly
straightforward. Poses. Just put in. The rest of their foot would be back down here. Surfer.
7. Drawing Over Reference 2 (front/back bend): Now the clothes on this one, I really helpful for helping us establish direction
of our blocks. So we have this one tilted forwards up a little
bit on the other side, and this one tilted backwards. We've got a little
bit of backward bending going on there. We can draw pelvis, ribcage box. This is the notch
at the top of this. We can draw a box up here. Good to draw through
where you have overlapping forms and
then you can erase. Later. We can put our
center line down there. Again here we see that the shoulders wouldn't be a good guide because one shoulder is down on the other shoulder
is all the way up here. We can put a box him
for the head as well. My cat box a little bit. Just chop a corner off there. We can see, we are seeing
that slightly towards the back side of the
box on this instance, we can go ahead and draw a box where we see just a
little bit of the back of it. The Clothes help us here with figuring out where
our pelvic box goes. We can see that we're seeing a little bit of
the back side of it here. We would draw pelvic box like that. Put us into lines in. This is pretty much
just from the side. So we can see that the ribcage
is bent way forwards and the pelvis is folded
up. Pretty far. We can draw pelvic box like we can put the neck. The little point
that I pointed out, those seventh cervical vertebrae that sort of sticks
out at the base of your neck indicating the top
most extent of the ribcage? We can put that
there. So there's our site books upside
angle of our box, that's the ribcage
and the pelvis. And the shoulders abroad fairly far away from
the ribcage here. Which is why he shouldn't
use shoulders to figure out where the ribcage box is. We can put the thigh bones in
there and the tibia there. We can put the head
would be about there. There's some boxes that are
folding, folding forwards. And if you're not comfortable
drawing box shapes, simple geometric shapes, twisted and bent and leaning
relative to each other. I've got a class
on drawing boxes, which would be a great place
to start because you're going to really
struggle with this if that's a problem for you. Here we have a forward
leaning pelvis is sitting up like this. The ribcage is leaning
way forwards like so. And again, the
shoulders are sort of elevated away
from the ribcage. So we don't use the shoulders to figure out where
the ribcage is. If anything, we use the neck where the base of the neck would be probably
be about there. So ribcage box would be their pelvis box would be here. We can put a boxing
for the head. Everything nice and side view. Shoulders elevated
all the way up to here from the ribcage. Find some pictures
online and just practice drawing these boxes
and locating them, finding out which direction they're facing and
just draw over them. You can just draw over
magazines, junk myo. Anytime you see
pictures of people, start figuring out
where those boxes are in drawing over them.
8. Drawing Over Reference 3 (twist): So we can see that our hip box pretty much
just sitting there. The rib-cage because we
know this notch here is top of the
central front part. And so this is kind
of the center line. We can draw ourselves. Ribcage box going like this. What cues do we have here? We've got the back
of the underpants. Let me go to the two
pockets on the sides here to just confirm
that this is the the way that they have
is facing this hips box. Then back of the neck. That'll be the top
of the ribcage. And it's twisted a bit that way. Because it's twisted
a bit that way. It doesn't seem to be
bending either side. Just make sure this line is a little bit more in that
direction than this line. Putting their center line. Now this one is great. We can see very clearly
hips would be in a direction by looking at these points where
they connect with the lovely atop thing. Then the ribcage
is more like this. And we can see the actual
spine kind of moving up there. Say that definitely helps. We can draw we can draw
a box in for the head as well. Top of the head. If there was no hair there, you might see a little
bit of the forehead. Here we have a good bit
of rotation going on. We can put the hips in. And then there's our ribcage. He's swinging his arms
around this way to create some rotation so you
can bring his board around. This way. We can do
a box for the head. Ever so slightly on
the top side there. Erase these. We can put the feet in this row. Wine. There'd be a heap on
the other side here, down to the knee and
then the other foot. Shoulders forward a bit. We can't get a good
sense of the pose with just three simple boxes and some just wireframe,
arms and legs.
9. Drawing Over Reference 4 (side bend): So something I've noticed when side bending is that
the the rib box, you can push it a
little farther that way so that this point becomes more above
this one and this one goes further out to the side. Just something I've noticed. From the clothing here we can figure that the pivot
box goes there. And the rib box side bent a little turned
away from us as well. This is the line of
the sternum here. We can draw a box. The back edge of the
ribcage is a little higher than the front
on the top side. I don't know if you want to
put that in like that or not, but it's just a
useful thing to know. We can put center lines up here. Now of course, we
don't want to be too literal with these boxes, as I've mentioned before and
will continue to mention. They are a guide. We will get more organic with a mannequin forms
further down the line. And as you learn
more about anatomy, you'll get less boxy. But the boxes are there
again to indicate, make it clear which
direction these forms are facing because they will have fronts and they all have sides. They just don't have
fronts and the sides that are clearly defined like this. In fact, if anything,
you can think of. Okay, So this is a box. This is say, an egg. If you shaved off with sanding, if you've got like a sander
and just took down surface of this so that it has a
front that matches this. Then you send it off to the side so that it would
do that this way. Have a side that matched that. Again, you can do the top. This is kind of getting
closer to what we're talking about in terms of the organic shapes that
we're dealing with. But what we are
getting a hold of is that we have a center line, we have a front side, we have side and this backside, That's where these boxes
are coming in useful. We can do another
one for the head. We can see that. We can see a little
bit on the front side, nothing around the back. So we can just draw
a box like this. We can see ribcage clearly
leaning over to the side. We can draw it quite
confidently like that. And the base of the neck
would be about here. So the top of the rib
cage would be there. For the pelvic area. I did a sort of brightened
up version so I could sort of see what's going on down there because
it's kind of dark. I can see the middle here so we can kind of split the difference between
the underpants line in the short line. Put ourselves a box. Erase that. For the head. For the head, we can
draw another box here. I'm drawing these boxes
where the corners extend beyond the volumes
that they includes. The head, the
shoulder on this on this side is down and
this one is way up. So you can see why you
wouldn't want to use the shoulders to
try and figure out the angle of the box that
represents the rib-cage. We can do ourselves
a center line there.
10. Drawing Over Reference 5 (combinations): This hip is higher
than this one. We'll draw our block tilting
down a bit on that side. Then the rib cage is tilting up in the
opposite direction, say. And we can draw a center line. The shoulders are up here. Draw a block for the head. There's a bit of a side bend
and also a bit of folding, like bending
backwards, I suppose. Soviet of backbone then
a bit of side bend in combination there. This one. Even though it's
covered in a shirt, we can get a pretty
good sense that the ribcage is pretty
much facing us. This muscle here ends up a notch at the top
of the ribcage. So we can draw ourselves
a block there. I can't really see into
this darkness here, so I'm going to just do
it brightened up version. What I can see from that is that the pelvic area would seem to be like this. Not facing us. Like this is facing us. And it's tilted up. On one side. We could put our legs and feet in there. Drawer box for this knee would probably come
out a little further. Push that knee a
little bit further. There we go. We can position the hips
on the sides of that box. Put our center line in here. And keeping this sort of
simple three-dimensional form means that you've
got somewhere to place these hip joints. So here's the top of
the ribcage where the seventh cervical vertebrae makes a little lump on the backup the base
of the neck there. We can see that the ribcage
is pretty much facing us, just a hair hair turned away
from us and the pelvis here. We've got these handy cues of the pants to kind of give us a pretty good idea of
how we're drawing those. We can just see
the bottom there. Then we can put in the legs, the feet. The other hip would
be about here. Going up to the meal there. The shoulders again, I kind of one's more forward
and one's more back. Can't see too much
of the head there. Those hip bones. We can see that one is there
and the other ones here. So we can draw our box. We can see that the ribcage
is rotated and bent back. So if I grab my
little thing here, it's a little bit like that. Put a center line in there. Put our hip joints in their
hip joint would be over here. We can draw the head as a block. We can use the belt loops, the pants to help
us figure out where the hips box would go. The ribcage would be rotated, bend back a little bit to a side bend and M and a
rotation going on there. There's a box, hip joints. There's a lot of
swivel in these hips. This whole torso moves
around by virtue of these hip joints because they're ball-and-socket
joints, very flexible. Box in here for his head. Get rid of these bits. This one, there's
a lot of overlap. This is the side. Then the ribcage as a
little bit of a rotation. So we would rotate that. Also. We're looking down on it. Because we're
looking down on it. It's overlapping this
pelvis quite considerably. Then the is help us with
the browser as well, figured out that the
block for the head would be facing in
this direction. We're pretty much looking down, right down on the top of it. The shoulders. Once for the forward and the
others further back. The other hip joint
would be over here. Going out to the we can see we're looking at we're not dead onto the
back of the pelvis. Read a little bit
three-quarters. So we're going to see
some of the side. Then that ribcage is rotated
a little further around. So this would be the
base of the neck. A little bit more of the side of the pelvis should probably make a little adjustment there. We have the center line control block for the head, the hip joints, the knee, and the hip joint. The b here would be that
this is very foreshortened. So massive overlap here. Overlaps are always good things
to be on the lookout for. We've got some very
definite side bend and rotation going on here. So we can put the rib-cage. Then C into this dark area where I've brightened
up the photograph so I can see what's going
on a little better. We're seeing sort of
bottom of the box here. Sit bones would be
kind of air in there. This would be a little
triangle shape. Hip hip joints. They're down into the knee. Of the hip joint there, down into the knee. These are going away from us. This is where drawing more volumetric leg
would be helpful. Then we can see clearly
that this part of the leg coming towards
us further down it goes by how we draw the socks are a great
way to indicate that. Here I've done pretty
much the same thing with some Michelangelo paintings
from the last judgment. That's how you can use them to figure out if your
pose is looking right. You didn't have to
put much time in. You can just use a
minimum amount of lines. You get a really
good idea of if, if, if it's working
or if it isn't. There's no point going any
further with a drawing. If not, if it's
clearly not working, you can just try
something different, move things around very quickly. That's where this
is really helpful.
11. Round or Square Or Both?: So here's a question. Round or square when it comes
to putting these mannequins together and working at her
gestures, which is better. With round shapes. We get something a
little bit like this. Square shapes, we get
something a little bit more like this. While they both look fine, there are definite dangers
that you can encounter when you just go the round route and also certain advantages. Likewise with the square root, There's good things
about that and there's one or two things
to watch out for as well. With the square approach
is really clear where the center lines would go
down your main blocks. You have a very good
sense of what's facing in what direction and why
that's important is that, you know, how far various parts of the body can move relative
to the other parts. So you won't put, say, the front of this box
over here by mistake. Once you start working
into your drawing, you're very clear on where the front sides and
where the sides are. Whereas when you
start working on your rounded drawing, I mean, you might quite easily move your center line way too far in one direction
relative to the other. Once you get further
along with your drawing, you're going to have all
kinds of problems making your anatomy work because you don't have any fixed points. Everything's kind of fluid. One thing when you're
doing things using a square approach, your, you need to be really clear
in your mind of where your boxes are oriented
and how they're facing. You can't just kind of muddle your way into it quite so well, because you're being
kind of exact with your points and your planes. Like here's the hip joint. There's the knee,
the foot's up here. The other hip joints over here. So that's the other knee. This is someone
throwing something. Your center lines
again are very, very clear where they are. But unless you have
a very clear idea in your head of what
it is you're drawing. Drawing it with the squares first is a little bit trickier to figure out with the circles. You can work your way
in a little bit more. You're not sure
where the center is. You can try a hip joint
here or a hip joint here. You can just kind of get
a good sense of volume using this method and then
just kind of find your way in. But you have to, I would say, decide on at a certain point that the hips are
facing this way and the torso is
facing this way. And there's a certain
amount of overlap here. Just means that you can kind of work your way in
a little better. When you're drawing
things with these ovals. You can get this feeling
over a bending form like this could be. What we're going to end up with, which is a block for the chest area and a
block for the pelvis. Maybe hips are here. Then we've got some fee. Would work. It's way too there. We could have a head game
facing in this direction. We can start with kind of
a more circular approach. We can put our
shoulder out here. There are other
shoulder back this way, but when we're
starting with these, I mean, these could be facing any direction.
They could be. What you have in mind when
you draw them to start with, might change as you're
working into your drawing and you forget which way
this was facing. And until you fix those points. This circular approach
can lead you astray. As soon as you can. Once you've figured
out some things. Then with your circles, you can. Give it a little bit more
dimension and direction. And after that, you've
got your center line here and you know that
the center line has gone kind of tucked under. Maybe you could even see it
on the front side where, for instance, if
you have a shape, bends all the way
under like this, you'd see the center
line on the back side, say, and also on the front side. This would be if
someone is let's say someone is flying
through the air. If we look at say, someone hitting a golf ball, we've got a circle here in
a circle here for the hips and the ribcage and
other one for the head. But until we figure out which one is facing
in which direction, we really don't have that much other than a sense of volume. Sense of volume
is really useful, especially if you're drawing the same thing from
a different angle. Like let's say we're going to be much higher
up, looking down. Then you've got your volume for the for the ribcage and you've got the other volume for
the rib for the hips, then we need to start figuring out well, okay, where are we? Where do we put in the hip? Where are we deciding
is the center line? Then you can sort of start squaring things off
a little bit more. Just kind of once you
start squaring things. So if you are making
decisions and those decisions relate to
where your center lines go. Bring this down a
little further. That hip there. If we're
looking more down on it, where we know the hips are
facing in this direction. We know that the center
line is about here and the rib cage area and there's
some overlap going on. Then if you're just dealing with circles where you put your hips gets a little
nebulous as well. But once you've kind
of solidified it, given it some dimension, we're not dimension
but direction. Made those decisions on what's
the back, What's the side? Whereas the center line, then you can position
your other hips. And then you can you can put that other leg
and foot down in there. And then this arm goes
all the way around here. Squares. Your ultimate goal for position
and direction of things. Circles are kind of how
you might get there. Once you've got this feeling
of overlapping volumes, you then need to start deciding on where you're gonna put the center lines in
the direction of things. We can sort of think circular, moving in the
direction of square. Good way to start rolling. Good way to feel grounded. That you can then
further advance your anatomical knowledge
into your, into your drawing. You want something more sort
of definite with squares. One thing that it's important to point out is that because we're starting with boxes and sort of fairly
straight lines, sort of armature, if you like, doesn't mean that
our final drawing is going to be stiff and rigid. It's just that it has a solid foundation that
we can then work on. I'll show you what I mean. We have pretty much
nothing but straight lines here to indicate various parts, locations of various
points and give us a sense of the direction that
things are facing. So when we actually
draw over that, if we know a little bit about where the parts of the body sort of start from and where they go. We can be very loose and flowy
in a continuation of this. There's nothing stiff about, about this drawing here. Very loose and flowy, but it begins and is grounded by these straight lines and sense of where things are
and where they're facing. This is because we have
a sense of the front. We've got our center lines, which we got from
the initial blocks, where the positions
of the hips are, where the positions of
the shoulder joints are. From putting in the
hands and the feet. We can work out the direction that the volumes of
the legs and arms go. If we understand where
these points are and we've learned a little
anatomy along the way, then we can start
driving muscles to certain points
because we know where those points are relative to the sort of armature that
we've already drawn. An arbitrary might have
straight lines doesn't mean your drawing is
going to look stiff. So we've learned that while
you can get a good sense of overlapping volumes and
flow with some round shapes. Pretty soon you want to move
those forwards to having decided directions
and dimensions and positions of things. And then over the top of that, you can then get really flowy and lively with
your final lines. But it will then be placed over the top of something
more grounded.
12. The Bendy Box: Besides thinking in
terms of two blocks, There's always the twisty box
way you can look at things. The bottom of our box and the top part of
our box will be stiff. But this whole middle section
will be very squishy. You can sort of
move your box like, let's say we're starting
it in the same position. We want to twist it this way. We can end up with
this piece here, would be connected
to this piece here. So actually, we want to
keep that top part stiff. And then we just, then this would go up
to here and this would come back to a
point through there. We can bend up box
forwards like this. You can even give it
some twist as well. So we could add a
little twist in there, but I going just drawing
this rectangle here, but like up a little
bit like this. Center line wise. You've got the center
line of sight, the backside, and
then the center line of the front side because
it's folding over. You get to see it on both sides. We could draw pelvic
portion of our twisty box. Then it will be kind
of squash and stretch. Very squashed up
here and it will be stretched out
on the other side. We could figure out
where the hips go. Draw those legs. Put the feet in there. You could draw the other leg. Put the other foot in there, and put a boxing for the head, shoulders, the hands. We could do another twisty
box doing a back bend so we could start with
the chest area. Then it would go over
to the pelvic area. Shoulders would be extended away from the ribcage
a little bit. We could put a
heading down here. There's another box. Hips here. Make a put our legs in. They wouldn't be F508. The other hip would
be over here. The other foot
would be battling. Make that feel a
little bit bigger. The arms with the hands behind the feet there. Again, we can put it
in our center lane. Maybe you'll see a
little bit of it there. We can use this as the basis for drawing the entire figure. Because we know
where on this box, which is basically the bottom
part of our long bendy box, the bottom pi stiffen, the top part is fairly stiff. So we can, assuming, assuming you've learned
a little bit of anatomy, you can figure out where all the body parts
fit into this. Let me go to the forearm and
hand getting in the way. If this part here. We can indicate the volumes of the forms and the direction by putting some bits
of clothing on here, put some socks on there. I guess I'd have
to erase the toes. Then for the headgear
and the other way. For some parts of this, worth flipping it over
because you're more used to seeing a body
the right side up. If we want to draw
a vertical line, center line covering parts of the body here. We can do that. I almost put the
waist band on here. So you can do a pretty
loose, lively drawing, even if you start out with these kind of more
square-shaped things. Let's just emphasize this squash and stretch thing that
I mentioned earlier. If this is our sort of bendy box and the top and the bottom section of it
are fairly rigid and stiff. This middle section here
is kind of flexible. If our box is leaning one direction on the bottom area and then back again
in the top direction. What's going to happen
to our squishy area? This is going to get
much longer and stretch here and it's gonna get much
shorter and bulge here. So the way we draw that
would be like this. We could draw this
side of it darker. Put a little shading on
this side of this box. But to emphasize the point of the flexibility
of the hip joints. We've got the feet
facing this way. We've got the hip joints facing this way and the rest of
the rest of the torso, the rest of the way
around like that. The body is facing
off to the side and the feet are facing
off in this direction. You've got nearly 90 degrees between this angle
and this angle. But most of that is occurring
here in the hip joints. So the whole thing moves around. Surface facing the
direction of the feet. The whole torso can move around just by the
hip joints moving. Then the rest of it moves by the top of the torso
moving relative to the hips. But, but that, that amount of
twist is not that massive. Again, we can emphasize
squash and stretch there. Well that's more of a twist. This is the squishy
middle section. Probably the arms
would let me be back where major flexibility
in these joints here. If seen in the flexibility
of the hip joints, the flexibility in the
middle of the torso, but it's not as flexible
as you may think. Okay, let's take another look
at some squash and stretch. We'll start with ribcage box. Will put put our
pelvis underneath, but at a much more. Angled position. We can put our hip
joints in here. With Jordan will be down
there. Put the head. Shoulders. Have the shoulders
kind of raised or from the side of the ribcage. We can see we've got some very squashed and stretched here. We could draw will just reverse the
squashing and stretching. So we'll draw our
ribcage books again. This time we will
have the pelvis block angled up on the near side, down on the foss side. Put the hip joints in here. Other one would be through here. We'll put the head, shoulders
up off of the ribcage. We have a stretch happening on this side and squash
happening on this side. It's not forget center line. We can see we've
got some sort of side bend going on there. So if we're going to take a
mannequin a step further, you can bring out the rib-cage, will bring further to
accommodation breasts as well. The center line will be using cylinders
for the arms. And since we know that the back of the back of the rib cage
is higher than the front. And we can put in a nick ahead. Then we can put in shape to
indicate the abdomen area. And with this one with the
hip coming up this way, you can put it in
cylinders for the legs. Hip area here. Again, we'll accommodate
the breasts there. By bringing that forward. We'll take it back side edge
of the ribcage up there. Then there'd be sort of like a compression of body tissues like muscle and fat
and were heavy. Can put bottom of this shape here and add little
compressible shape for the abdomen area. The arms. Just use simple
cylinders for the arms. Likewise for the neck. And then we can put
the head on top there. If you want to get more
details on drawing heads, class on drawing heads. So that will help you
out a bunch there. Once you've got these
mannequins worked out. Adding the muscles. Beyond that point. Once you've established some
shapes that have passed that relate to key parts of the body. Landmarks, particularly
bony parts, then it's much easier to draw
the muscles in after that. So for example, you can put in the
pectoralis and deltoids here and the lattice
seamless and other muscles. Likewise over here we'll put the pectoralis and
deltoids in as well. To make up the shoulder area. Disappears into
the armpit there. Around the back side
we've got the muscles that belong with
the shoulder blade. Won't worry too much about that. Since we are around
the front side. We can bring the
abdominal muscles into the front area here
where the pubic bone is. Got some good dynamics going on. And it all begins with
these very simple shapes. And then you just build on those by learning your way
around the human form. But you've got all the, all the angles kind of contrasting
against each other. And you're drawing things in a solid three-dimensional form. So that it's more convincing
the further you go. We've looked at the long bendy box with the squishy bit in the middle being the basis
for a more organic approach. Beyond that point, you can fix your positions of various
anatomical body parts. We looked at some twisting
of our long bendy box. We looked at bending and
twisting of our long bendy box.
13. Skateboard Gesture Drawings: I have a couple of
different kinds of gesture drawings here. The first kind, which is
what you're looking at now, is me freezing some
action on the TV and just taking a few
seconds to make a quick drawing and then unfreezing it and then
pausing it again, making another little drawing. And I'm using a sort of slightly abbreviated
version of the mannequins. In a sense that we've
got the we've got the line between the hip
joints always present. And I'm simplifying the torso
quite often just down to a flat rectangular shape so that you can
twist it and stuff. That's just an economy born of necessity from trying to just do these drawings
very quickly. And here we have
some other ones. You can see we have that separation of
the two hip joints. And if I was going to elaborate
a little further on that, then I can just build out my three-dimensional
structure a little more. But there's enough
information here to go on. This 11 leg there with the knee up
and there's another link there with the knee down. And this line between the two hip joints is almost identical to the
line of the thigh there. So you almost don't notice it, but we've got a bunch of
skateboarders, various poses. You can see. As far
as balanced goes, balance and speed are
two things that sort of, if someone is definitely
way out of balance, like there's no way this
guy could hold that pose. He's obviously going
fast or he's just gone up something and he's
about to come back down again. This guy just slid along here. I think he just kind of either comes to rest up here or he
just goes back down again. I don't recall. But the point here is that
I've had the video paused. So I'm not even sure I would technically call them
gesture drawings. I mean, they're quick drawings. What I have here by
way of contrast, I just had the TV playing. I didn't pause it. I just looked and
then I kind of took a snapshot with my mind and then just drew it
and just ignore the TV. And then I went back to
the TV again with my, with my fresh focused eyes and waited for another pose
that I particularly liked. And then I drew that. There was no pausing of
the TV involved here. What these are, are
very quick gestures, but they are born of my
minimized mannequin approach. I'm always bearing in mind the distance between the
hip joints particularly, and they sort of simplified
shape of the torso. What you're really
dealing with is, is a short-term
memory drawing you're noticing maybe as opposed
kind of comes into being. And it's like maybe
in the instance of the skateboarders,
they're scaling along. You're noticing and being aware which way their
body is facing. And then they do a thing, and then there's a
shape that you like. You just kinda quickly memorize
the shape and then you draw what you knew and what
you saw and you combine them. That's what I've
done a number of times here very quickly. After you've got a page full of these very
loose sketches, you can combine the
short-term memory drawings that I would call true gesture drawings
because there's no sort of paused action that you're being able to kind of
refresh your mind with, with what you just
actually know. So you can then just
build over the top of these very loose gestural
sketches and just add more. The adding more isn't
necessarily what you're remembering from what you saw because you didn't see it for
long enough to remember it. It's a combination
of what you already know and what you saw. That's what I think of as gesture drawing is like a
combination of what you know, applied over what
you quickly saw and snapshotted and memorized for a shorter period of time as it takes to throw down a few lines. And then you just move
on to the next one. But the point is simplifying
with figure into these minimalist mannequins
is a great way to just get your mind into the habit
of seeing the essentials of an action and
emotion and oppose. We've seen how the
simplified mannequin can inform your gesture drawing. So I would suggest running some video or YouTube things of montages of some
actions that you're interested in drawing and
just have a go at it. I mean, sort of pause them
for awhile first and just get into the habit of keeping
it as simple as you can. And then just see how you
do when you don't pause it. The great thing about
YouTube, for example, is you can set the playback
speed to something slower than like
fully natural speed. That's one way you can kind of gradually transition
between pausing things and then drawing things at just life
natural speed. Depending on the action
that you're drawing. Some things that
he's way too fast, you'll have to slow them down just to see what they look like. But it's kind of fun. And it certainly is good
practice for if you're wanting to be able to draw things from your
imagination quickly. Which is one thing that I've
had to do most of the time. Well-being and
storyboard artist. If you're in the
animation field, I'm sure that would be
hyper useful as well.
14. Doodle a Page of Figures: Here's a page full of
figures. I do too. I didn't use any reference. I was just making it
all up as I went along. It didn't really know where
I was going with any of it. So I just started. My point here is, I guess
is that you can see how when you're using these sort of simple
block mannequins, you can mess around with
proportions, like with this guy. If he doesn't like
what you drew, you just try it again. I mean, you haven't invested a massive amount
of time into that. So I just redraw things. If I was doing this for like
a storyboard or something, I wouldn't bother erasing any of the lines that were wrong. I would just use a light
colored pencil and just draw over everything until eventually you get the
lines that you'd like. And then you can if
you want doc and over those will just
put another piece of tracing paper over top or a new layer and
just draw it again. So you can see like
with that foot there, I'm sort of trying
a few things out and not liking it
and trying again. Likewise with this guys, didn't like the too much. So I just kind of
made it a more of a sort of forced
perspective type of thing. Um, and then I just
turned the lines black and cleaned
it up a little bit. Just have some fun
constructing figures, even if you don't have
the faintest clue what you're drawing. If you just start with
a box and then say for the ribcage and then add
another box for the pelvis. And just try different angles. They will suggest
poses that you can sketch in some legs and arms and just see where it takes you. It's kind of fun doing that. Feel free to post your
drawings on the project page. Always fun to see what everyone else is
getting up to you.
15. Things I've Noticed: So it's important to be
aware of the weight of the body and even the
different body parts and what they're doing, where they're moving from. And too often during the
course of an action, you're completely out of balance until you basically
done and come to rest. If you're throwing a
javelin, for instance, you go right over your leading foot because you're just putting
all your effort into throwing the javelin. You're completely
out of balance. You can afford over flat
on your face unless you bring your other foot out in front of you and stop yourself. After all the act of walking is just throwing
yourself out of balance so that you're
going to fall over and then catching yourself and
then repeating the process. Noticed that with
a lot of actions, but you're hitting
something with a bat, the shoulder towards the target, which would be the ball
or wherever you're gonna hit is lower and the
other shoulder is higher. So for instance, the shoulder this further
away from the ball as high, but then as you swing
your body around, that shoulder ends up lower. These things I've noticed
aren't hard and fast rules. They're just things
I've noticed. And if I notice the
opposite happening in a certain other
activity, then great. I mean, I just bear that in
mind when I'm drawing it. For example, in table tennis, if you're hitting a
topspin forehand, the opposite is true. So the shoulder
closer to the target, which would be the
incoming ping-pong ball, instead of being lower,
is actually high. And then the shoulder that's got the paddling, it is lower. And then at the end of the move, then the opposite is true. And when you're
throwing a javelin, the opposite is true. So the shoulder
towards the direction where you're gonna be throwing
the javelin is higher. Then when you throw the javelin, then your body swings around and the throwing
arm is the one closer. And then that one is higher. When a pitcher is
throwing a baseball, their shoulders remained fairly level
throughout the throat. There's a lot of
rotation in the body. Another thing I've noticed
is that in throwing and swinging a bat and
that kind of stuff, the hips lead the rotation. The hips rotate first and they generate some rotational
energy in the spine. And then that spins the
top part of the torso around and then the arm just carries through in a sort
of whip-like fashion. The opposite of that happens when you're looking
at skateboarding, snowboarding, or surf boarding. Because the feet of the things that are affecting
change in the board. And so you have to
do the opposite. You swing your arms and
your top part of your body. First and then the
hips catch up after, and then the feet kind of whip
around and move the board. In that case, the shoulders
lead the rotation. Another thing I've noticed
is that when throwing, the back is often arched
so the body can be considered folded in a direction that's away from the target, like the direction of where
you're throwing a thing. And then usually at
the end of the moves, the body folds forwards. There's a whip-like
motion in the body there. I've noticed if you're kicking or hitting something with a bat, the body is usually
folded towards the ball or the target
object, whatever it may be. But overall, to draw an
action convincingly, you need to be paying
careful attention to where the weight is,
where it's moving, and the state of balance, which may or may not be balanced at all depending on where
you are in the action.
16. Class Project: For our class project, it's time to put into
practice what we've learned. We will start by finding some reference images of
activities were interested in drawing and using
tracing paper or layer. If you're using digital, draw the boxes over the top of the figures
and be careful to look out for any overlapping and get the angles
relative to each other. How you see them
put in the feet. A ground plane. If the feet are on the ground or one of the
fetus on the ground, put the hands, the arms, and legs in there as well. And then look at what you've got without the reference
underneath. If you fancy a
challenge, by all means, take another layer or sheet
of tracing paper and then draw the figure over the top of the mannequin
that you've drawn. And then you can pull
your reference back out afterwards and see
how they compare. After we've drawn some
mannequins over some reference. Another thing to do is then draw the same figures performing
the same actions, but from a different viewpoint. This is where you're
gonna have to utilize that enclosing box. Very important
that you have that going in order to manage
this and the ground plane. If they're interacting with
the ground in any way, then work out from the
angles of the boxes. How you would draw your manikin from a
different viewpoint. So you could be looking
at it from high up to down or from ground-level
looking up a little bit. Or he might have originally
got it from the front. So now you're trying
it from rear, three-quarter or
something like that. Just challenge yourself. And it's a good way
to see how you're understanding the juxtaposition
of those key boxes. Then the last thing we can
do is just fill up a page with doodles of figures doing the kind of activities
you're interested in. Looking at reference tutorial, just making everything
up and not even knowing necessarily where
you're going when you start. Just have some fun. And once you've drawn
a little mannequins, feel free to put another
sheet or layer over the top and draw them as little cartoony characters are more realistic characters
if you prefer. And take a look at
what you've done. If it looks good then great, and if there are
parts of it that look a bit awkward or unnatural, then figure out why. And to do that, you
just have to go find some imagery or video of people doing the
things that you drew. And then analyze them by drawing those boxes over
them and putting in the legs and the
feet and the hands. And just see why
yours look awkward. Why the actual people don't buy simplifying everything down into the simple mannequin. It's easier to see in your
own drawings where you're going wrong in regards to poses, rather than getting
distracted by any anatomical details or clothing folds or
anything like that, do as much or as little of
that as you're comfortable. I mean, it might
take you a while to develop some skills
where you're comfortable trying to draw things
from different angles then what you have
reference for, for instance, in which case, don't worry about
doing that yet. It's good goal to aim for.
17. Thank You and Good Luck!: Well that's it. I think the
end of the class is here. And hopefully you've learned some useful new
approaches to get a little more
naturalism and life in your poses and post your
progress in the project section. And if you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the discussions and I'll keep an eye out and
get back to me. I'm around online on Instagram. I'm Steve Worthington, art. Thanks for taking my
class means a lot to me. So let's grab our
favorite drawing tools and keep on scribbling.
Steve Worthington, Storyboard artist/illustrator/sculptor
