Weekly Art Practice - Week 13
This week was my first week at trying to do some focused anatomy and human poses. For references I went with figure skaters as they do some pretty weird stuff with their body that you don’t see people doing in other situations.
Which, surprise surprise, does make it more difficult.
Day 1 - Drawing from imagination
I enjoyed watching figure skating when I had cable. But not enough to go out of my way to watch it now. So my memories of the movements are a little rusty going into day 1.
Day 2 - Figure sketching
Competitive figure skating is highly photographed so there is an endless supply of reference photos for the sport. However as I started to gather references I did come to realise that Yuri on Ice has taken over a large part of figure skating fandom, especially the art side.
Day 3 - Reference studies
Since I’m more focused on the body and not so much the whole scene of figure skating I did only want to focus on the physical pose for my reference studies. So this meant no drawing fancy figure skating outfits or hair styles.
By this day I was thinking that I should pull up some lessons on different figure drawing approaches. Some people have some lovely styled ways of doing figure drawing while others have some extremely detailed shapes that they use to really analyse the pose. My own approach is a bit of a mishmash of the styles I learned last year which I don’t feel like is either super stylized or super accurate. So in my next anatomy focused week I think I want to find a more refined approach.
Day 4 - Style studies
Trying to find art of figure skaters is where the Yuri on Ice characters dominate. I didn’t want to pull directly from anime which led to having to restrict my choices a bit. I found someone else basically doing the thing I’m trying to do, figure skater pose sketches:
Reference: By WildSword on DeviantArt. At least so says the watermark.
Reference: Figure skater vector art.
After doing these few I kind of wish I had just used a bunch of Yuri on Ice references and decided to go for an anime style fully instead of just the one piece.
Day 5 - Drawing from imagination
Due to my procrastinating I did day 4 and day 5 on the same day. This maybe gives some advantage to day 5, even just on the level of being warmed up before starting.
Instead of doing multiple takes I decided to take the first pose that came to mind and went through a few fixing stages. Extend a few limbs, keep having to make the head bigger. Just fixes to try to get the anatomy closer and closer to correct.
Water colours
While I was procrastinating on doing my studies I did a watercolor practice instead. I save Youtube tutorials as they pop up if they look interesting and within my skill level so this is the one I followed this week.
This took about 30 minutes which made for a nice quick dip back into watercolours. I haven’t touched them much since last summer, it just doesn’t feel like a winter medium for art.
Conclusion
I kind of regret choosing figure skaters as my subject matter for my first anatomy week. They have so many weird poses and there is constant foreshortening or hidden parts of the body in the photos. My girlfriend says this makes for a good challenge but it definitely led to me dragging my feet on doing simple studies because of how messed up looking they were coming out.
But I do think it sets a good benchmark. If I was a master of anatomy I would be able to piece together what the body is doing in the areas I can’t see. I didn’t feel super confident in the guesses I made in these but it will be a good sign of improvement later on when I feel like I can make those conclusions.