[Dr-Mad]

Hi,

I need help badly, I can only draw the head perfect the body O.K. and the arms and legs are like rectanglar figures. Plus I can't draw someone from like a side view doing a punch because I don't know the animations of the human body or whatever. I need help really badly. I really really appreciate it if you could improve my drawings from a 8 yr. old to a 18 yr old.

Thanks for your time

Dr-Mad

[Asurfael]

Here are a few links that should help:
http://www.yoyodyne.net/Projects/loomis/index.html (covers figuredrawing and perspective)
http://www.polykarbon.com/ (some basic tutorials about fighting positions)
http://www.howtodrawmanga.com/tutorial/fbodymain.html (female figure drawing, including arms and legs)

These should help you getting started and improve yourself. Hope you find them as useful as I have.

[Dr-Mad]

Well i know about how to draw manga and polykarbon, and thanx for the other one but polykarbon doesn't really explain much about action poses and howtodrawmanga.com doesn't show much on how to draw male figures and musles. I'll scan some pictures tomorrow if i have time to see how bad my drawings are.

Thanks

[Asurfael]

well then read the loomis project book You don't get better by just reading tutorials, you know. You've gotta practice as well. Some learn easy, some take a longer time to learn. But if you know the basics from tutorials, I doubt that many tutorials would do you so much good. Try to get a book with combat pose photos, or some advanced figure drawing book that's concentrating on combat poses, muscles and joints.

[Dr-Mad]

Thanks so far this has really helped me out well.

[Vhy]

Poses are easier than you think, I mean you can probably act out alot of the poses you want to draw - but that's not enough reference unless you can draw the figure from arbitrary camera angles.

The first thing to master is simple forms: sphere, cylinder, wedge. You can construct anything out of the basic shapes, and that's a way to apply perspective and lighting to complex things.

The reason you need anatomy is because people & animals constantly change. If the subject is not there in front of you for reference then you need to know the underlying structure, the most important part of which is bones.

In order to get good at figure drawing you have to be willing to go though steps that don't give immmediate results, I think that's what discourages alot of people.

There is somewhat of a trick to learning to draw something without reference... it's not very effective to simply go from drawing what you see to drawing from imagination. Instead you could start the transition by drawing with reference, but using an imaginary camera angle. Suppose you are learning the skull...study a skull, then put it away and draw what you think it looks like, then get the real thing and take note of what you did wrong, then draw a better version, and repeat until you are getting it right and you're there.

There are some things to know about poses in general. For example the head tends to oppose the body to help with balance - for that reason it's a good idea to draw the head last. Read "dynamic figure drawing" by Burne Hogarth if you can.