Hey Everyone, this is ergo, Josh, and today we're going to see
if we can learn anatomy with like zero effort in just one day.
Basically, everybody says practice makes perfect,
but it's also said that perfect practice makes perfect.
But how do you do perfect practice?
Because anatomy is really, really complex,
especially if you're just getting into it.
Trust me, it was for me when I'm in the beginning of learning something.
one thing I always loved to do was just to trace and copy things a lot.
So much, in fact, that I can draw the things as you're used to seeing me
draw today from never drawing a figure before 2017.
Ever. Like I never did.
So in order to show you guys
that this actually works out to be a little bit creative.
The first thing I needed was to give you some sort of control of what
it's like to practice anatomy without tracing or studying at all.
So in order to do that, let's go back in time and show you what I did last night.
So last night, I decided I
would just come up with something to draw from imagination.
I didn't really have an idea
going into it, but I was just like, Let's just start drawing something
and start from the head.
Now, I say imagination, but really the correct term is invention.
It's not really something that has never existed before.
These are things I've seen before, things we've all seen before,
but I'm trying to invent something and create
a different arrangement of things, a different character
that I haven't seen before doing this exact same thing.
So I'm kind of inventing my own character.
The reason I chose
to do something from imagination or invention for this experiment
is because it's really the best way to tell if you've learned something.
If you can remember it in any shape or form without having
an actual reference, then that's how you know for sure that you learned it.
And so this is how I'm going to compare for the next drawing as well.
I'm not going to use a photo reference at all, but
I will be just drawing from invention in order to see what I've learned.
This is also a pretty decent way to test,
because even though I have been drawing a lot for the past four years,
I haven't really drawn consistently for the past month.
Really, I'm actually pretty rusty and I'm actually surprised how this turned out.
I'm actually pretty happy with this drawing.
Since I haven't been drawing very consistently, like it's
honestly been like three times within the last month.
This is a great example to see if just studying for one hour
by just tracing and copying actually does help me
with my anatomy.
So once I finish this up, we're going to come back
and jump into the present and analyze this and see what
I came up with.
So this is what we have right here.
The final drawing, and if you looked at the time lapse
while I was talking to you guys about the process,
there was a lot of guesswork in the beginning, to be honest.
A lot of areas are ambiguous, such as the upper arm areas where both of the arms
and the fingers, especially around her hip area, to her upper thighs.
Still a little bit awkward.
Not too sure what's going on.
What actually ended up doing was
I tend to do this thing where I think in different areas around
the joints did make up for anatomy that I don't really know too well.
I do, however, really enjoy how this drawing came out.
The expression, the pose, all the details
I was able to get in the face, the perspective, the angle that it's in.
I really do enjoy it.
But again, there's just not enough clear decisions being made,
and I can't really feel like this would be a good drawing to show
that I actually do understand anatomy, maybe form and perspective, but anatomy,
not so much.
So what you're
seeing me doing right here is I'm just going through and I selected
a lot of different artwork to use to trace to help study some anatomy.
The reason I'm actually using artists instead of like photo references
is because in order to draw from imagination or invent something,
you have to know it really, really well.
And anatomy is just really complex.
It's just too complex.
There's so much to understand.
So the easiest way to learn from tracing and copying
is to look at how other artists have simplified, specific anatomical components
to be able to learn those different things and use that in your own drawing.
That way, you can draw from imagination as well.
I selected some artists here that I thought are excellent
at simplifying their work into bite sized bits of information for different joints
and features that are very clear and help you understand what the figure is doing.
I did a
combination of copying and tracing here, you see me switching to tracing
at the second half of this procedure a little bit here or switching to copying.
And I believe that you should really bounce back and forth between both
because copying can be a great way to test and tracing can be great for specific
things that you might want to look out like form versus
a little simple ways to display features in the anatomy,
specifically that I like to do with copying.
I also ended up here
just using copying as a way to reinforce what I have done
and studied with the tracing, so that can also be helpful as well.
I'm not focusing too hard on what's going on, I'm really just looking for the fun
curves and shapes that I see in the artworks here and trying to look at
when the artists use them and try to remember for when I want
to use them for myself.
Now we're getting into my second attempt here,
and this is when I immediately after the study process, I wanted to see,
can I draw something for myself that's better than what I did before
and to be honest with how things start out here.
I had to had some time at the end to make this a little bit better
because this was kind of a little bit of a bad drawing day for me.
It wasn't that bad.
It was just rough in the beginning and end up trying out a lot of different ideas.
The first thumbnail sketch you saw me do in the beginning ended up being something
very, very stylized, and that was not what I was going for.
So I had to tweak a lot of things.
At a certain point, though, I started to have a lot more freedom
to look and pay attention to other things other than the anatomy,
so I started thinking about Horizon zero Dawn Forbidden West,
which is a new game that came out that I'm playing right now. I love it.
I highly recommend you. Check it out.
Is beautiful, looks amazing in the character.
Designs are fantastic.
Now again, just to remind you, I'm not looking at any reference here.
What I'm adding here is just for my imagination again.
But it's really cool that
because I felt a little bit more confident with the anatomy after doing
my previous study,
I had time to think about these things, like the emotion, the expression
, what's going on, the clothing in particular that I think
makes this drawing a little bit more interesting than the previous one.
Overall, it's honestly not that big of a difference,
especially if you compare the time it took at the exact point with my last drawing.
one thing you will notice here is that the lines are much thicker and bolder,
which gives this feeling that I'm a lot more confident, which is a
very important thing with your art and how it's perceived in general.
But there are some things I'm going to go over
and you'll notice that there is quite some cool improvements here
that I wouldn't have been able to do if I didn't study the artist beforehand.
You might already notice them now.
Now we have the final result here.
And let me give you guys a little bit of a disclaimer first.
I couldn't really be 100% mindless when I was copying or tracing,
and I really don't suggest that because that's how you actually get better
when you do it.
But I really couldn't be because I picked the artists that I enjoyed.
I picked artists that actually tried to show off their anatomy in their work,
and that all helps with the tracing and copying process.
Another thing to keep in mind is that this isn't going to last a very long time.
The improvement you've made.
You've got to be pretty consistent with your studies
to see more significant improvement and have that improvement actually stick.
And I was only able to study, you know, what was it like, ten poses or seven?
Yes, I've seen different artists in about an hour.
That's only so many different poses.
So how long would it take for you to study to be able to get a good grip of
a lot of different poses?
Overall, if we look at both of them, it's
actually not that easy to tell if I've actually improved with anything .
This one, I did spend a little bit more time
to polish with since I had a little bit of a rough time getting into it.
But the one quick and easy way to see that I actually did make
quite a bit of improvement just from this one hour of study
is if you look at the feet and the legs, these look like like Dora's like,
I don't know, like some little kids
feet and shoes, I had no clue what I was really going for here.
But if you look here, I really went in
and added a lot of details for the ankles and the heel and the toes.
And if you remember in the studies, I was actually playing
quite a bit of focus to that,
and I started to think about how she could have these sandals
and how the sandals wrap around her feet and how that actually would look in the
perspective that we're looking at her front.
And if you look at the legs here, you can see I'm
adding some lines there for the division, for the tibia there.
And you can see here where there's some more division for the tenseness as
some of the skin is being pulled around the bone in the lower leg.
And here you don't really see much of that at all.
It doesn't feel very sure or confident.
You see a little bit of a curve here
for the gastro nimbus or the calf muscles, but really not much.
Another thing to notice
is that there's quite a bit of attention to the complexity of the pose.
It's quite a it's a lot harder of a posed, to be honest.
She's bent down, she's bent over.
She's coming towards you in the page and her arm is moving back.
This her right arm.
This arm is coming towards us.
There's a lot more foreshortening in the leg here, and I
have to think about, OK, how do legs
get to the same place on the ground when they're bent in different ways?
It's a lot more challenging and tricky, and I have to really play around with
reducing all the structures into tubes and think about
how the different shapes of the arm and the different muscle groups of the arm
all throughout the arm would look at different
angles and perspectives, whereas here it's pretty consistent.
And even though there is a lot of
opportunity to show that, it's just very ambiguous, it's very consistent
throughout this entire shape here, not too many clear decisions being made.
And to contrast here, you can see I'm clearly thinking about the bicep, how
this area here is tightened as she's extending her arm.
That space in the middle of your arm right here, where there's a little bit
of a dimple here, right where the muscles are kind of wrapping around
and having this gap right here, I kind of show that here and here.
So you can see I'm
thinking about a lot more things because I took the time to study that
from the different artists.
So I hope you all enjoy this video and it was very helpful and educational to you.
If you want to see the full three hours of this content and the middle section
where I actually talked during the entire hour
about what I was doing support me unpatriotic.
I'll have all that content available by the end of the month.
And if you don't want to go over to patron.
Stay tuned because I will be intent releasing
channel memberships here on this channel and there's going to be a few extra
perks here as well that will be later on in the future.
But yeah, you will be able to have access to all of the different videos I make
and a lot of stuff that's just extended versions of what I make for YouTube
that will be really helpful to you if you're really serious about learning
and getting better with your anatomy, as well as different topics like lighting
and faces and expressions and things like that.
And if you're interested in brushes I used, you can find my brushes on Gum Road.
I have a procreate brush set for multiple different sets and just a big set.
But the brushes that I use the most were the sharp detail, flat brush here,
the sharp detail brush and as well as the teeny tiny brush here.
So that will be it for me today.
Thank you all so much for watching and I will see you in the next one.
Take care.
Stay safe and stay positive. Peace.