Drawabox and Anatomy?
4:53 PM, Friday June 10th 2022
Heyo I was wondering how would you apply the teachings of DrawABox to something like Anatomy? Like let's say someone wants to draw the human torso or head how would they approach it?
Heyo I was wondering how would you apply the teachings of DrawABox to something like Anatomy? Like let's say someone wants to draw the human torso or head how would they approach it?
A human body is a solid 3D object (complex, of course, but still a 3d object), like anything else in the real world. You just build the mass using the knowledge from Anatomy of dimensions and placement.
If you dont do that, the person you draw will be like a cardboard plan.
Many people watch a 5 minutes tutorial of how to draw a head on Youtube and thinks "yeah! i'm head-drawing master!" but they can't do a simple rotate with the neck without being helpless. That's where construction and perspective is needed (and construction and perspective is focus on drawabox).
Furthermore, people are animals and Lesson 5 is "applying construction to animals" so you can see by yourself how it can be done.
Remember: color, shadow, line, perspective, etc, can be studied apart but they only makes sense when you put all together.
Drawabox is designed to teach students about spatial reasoning. This is a fundamental skill that should be useful in drawing any subject, whether it's cars or people. When studying anatomy, the human body is often depicted using basic shapes: cylinders, boxes, etc. Drawabox teaches how to convey those shapes on a 2D surface. Also, when drawing more than one figure at a time, or doing forshortening, perspective comes into play. Having said that, I don't know that Drawabox is designed to help with a specific subject, especially one as complicated as anatomy.
You can simplify any solid thing into boxes, cones, cylinders, pyramids and spheres.
I think you'll be surprised to learn (as I was) that the teachings of drawabox inherently apply to something like anatomy.
For example, I just worked through Marco Bucci's "Understanding and Painting the Head" course (via Proko), and from beginning to (mostly) end it's all about being able to draw simple shapes (primarily boxes) in correct perspective. Form intersections, basically.
Same with the Proko figure courses, really. In fact, I started doing drawabox because I was doing the Proko figure fundamentals course, got to a certain point, and realized I really had trouble drawing boxes and cylinders in correct perspective. Drawabox has helped a ton with that, as you'd expect.
This recommendation is really just for those of you who've reached lesson 6 and onwards.
I haven't found the actual brand you buy to matter much, so you may want to shop around. This one is a "master" template, which will give you a broad range of ellipse degrees and sizes (this one ranges between 0.25 inches and 1.5 inches), and is a good place to start. You may end up finding that this range limits the kinds of ellipses you draw, forcing you to work within those bounds, but it may still be worth it as full sets of ellipse guides can run you quite a bit more, simply due to the sizes and degrees that need to be covered.
No matter which brand of ellipse guide you decide to pick up, make sure they have little markings for the minor axes.
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