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Playing guitar - anatomy

· 3 min read
Kylie
Kylie
Admin

We launched our studio website the other week and while I’m happy with it I do feel like it’s lacking in art. I’d love to do little cartoon versions of myself and my wife but cartoon versions of real people is something I’ve never been great at. This week's study of guitar playing poses is me starting the baseline work for that as I know I’m going to do a few attempts of my wife playing guitar.

Day 1 - Drawing from imagination​

While I at least understand how guitars are held and played, keeping a large object in proportion to a body is still difficult for me.

Day 2 - Figure sketching​

Found some decent references, I was worried they might all just be some guy sitting down, but Pinterest had some decent in motion poses going on.

Quick hand sketches using references

Day 3 - Reference studies​

I’m finding that I lose a lot of movement and energy in these more precise studies. They’re great for proportions but I feel like I use the arcs of action. Lots of the little arrows I draw around the final are places where I feel like the angle should be pushed.

Day 4 - Drawing from imagination​

Putting the practice into action.

Conclusion​

Another thing this week made me notice is that I’m starting to feel pretty confident about basic anatomy and poses. I would never expect to nail detailed, muscular anatomy but I feel like I’m at a level that’s good enough for the kind of character art I like to do now. What I feel less confident about is faces.

I spent some time focusing on mouths, eyes, and noses for our first video game in January. And I’m still pretty happy with how those faces turned out, but I still panic and need to do 10 passes when I draw a new character. So I might change up my anatomy weeks with some face studies. Then maybe I’ll stop drawing all these faceless bodies during my anatomy weeks.

Next week is supposed to be a new style study but I didn’t do the usual research in preparation for which style I want to do with D; I have some Pokemon art I want to work on so I might do that instead. Maybe do some practice capsule art for preparing to put games on steam. Basically all to say I don’t know what I’ll be working on next but I’ve got some projects in mind.

Pinterest board of guitar poses.