One of my goals for this year was to improve my art. And there are multiple ways that I plan to do this. I’m trying to do more varied poses when I draw humanoid characters, rather than the standard front on view of someone standing with their arms by their sides. I’ve been doing it so far by copying pose reference images when I draw a character. But I figure (pun intended) that doing figure studies couldn’t hurt.
So I present Figure Fridays. I know myself better than to assume I’ll do it every Friday, or even that I’ll restrict it to Fridays. But it gives me a header for the page in my Notebook. I’m not going to do a blog post for each one either. I’ll group them, so there’s only blog post every so often.
I’m not sure if I’m doing figure studies right, but I sketched out some figures from pose references.
After that I decided to look into what a figure study actually was. When I googled “how to do figure studies” the first thing that popped up was my friend Sambeawesome’s tutorial video – I guess Google knows me well.
It’s a good video, full of excellent advice. As always. I’m not sure I care too much about accurate anatomy. I don’t draw realism things. It’s the “dynamic poses” she mentions that I’m interested in. And I won’t be doing 2 hour fully rendered studies. Just lots of sketches to get practice doing the strokes.
I will move on to actual human references at some point, maybe. Sam makes a valid point that no matter how accurate another artist’s work may look, it’s probably not. But, like I said, I’m not so bothered by accuracy.
Shout out for her brilliant little re-enactment scenes by the way.
The timing aspect might come into play later in the year. As I draw more and get used to it, and start adding more detail, I might start giving myself a time limit.
I LOVED the comment about the gesture line. That’s not something I’d considered before. (Sorry about your facial expression in the screenshot, Sam.)
Her advice is all very awesome, and I will definitely take it on board. I’m gonna continue just sketching from pose references for now. And as you can tell from my first attempt, I’ll be using references for chibi-style art too. Considering I’ve been leaning towards that style a lot recently, it seems like a sensible idea.
Here’s some more. Ignore the washi tape – I was just using up some scraps.
Crafted By Colette 
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