ASE Panel- Anatomy Presentation

This post has most definitely been brought to you by Heidi Black's entry for the welovefine Marvel Villain t-shirt contest.  Please take a moment and hit 5 for both of her fabulous designs, starting here.

This presentation was created for a panel given at Anime South East by myself and Heidi Black.  It covers topics such as line of action, gesture, various styles of constructing a human figure, and takes a look at constructing the head, the hands, and the feet.  Throughout this presentation are several animated gifs intended to showcase techniques that may be helpful to those just beginning to learn anatomy. 

As an accompaniment, I highly recommend reading Walt Stanchfield's lectures in Drawn to Life volumes 1 and 2, Andrew Loomis's Figure Drawing for All It's Worth, Burne Hogarth's Dynamic Figure Drawing, and if you can find it, the FAC's pages on figure contruction.  There are a lot of approaches to constructing anatomy, and I do not claim that this one is the best, simply that it is effective for me.  If any of the topics covered in the presentation need clarification, please email me or comment below.





I don't talk about the nuts and bolts of running this blog too often, as I kinda think that detracts from the reader's experience and distracts from the actual purpose of having a blog about a particular subject, but I'm going to make an exception.  I am SO glad this is finished.  And by this, I mean this presentation on anatomy.

Although it was created for Anime South East, this presentation has been a long time coming.  I've approached the topic of constructive human anatomy several times on this blog, with varying levels of success.  This presentation was a culmination of those efforts, missing a key ingrediant I've yet to find a way to share with you guys- a real time figure drawing demo that allows for viewer interaction.  I realize that I could do this via Livestream, but it would be a one off thing (probably).  I don't think that I am the best at anatomy or at figure drawing, nor do I think my method is the best, but I do think it's a great method for breaking down the figure into easily digestable chunks, and it's simply my variation of Glen Vilppu's method with some Paul Hudson thrown in because he's a genius.

During the presentation, I had no real way of showing the audience how I broke down my figure work.  There was no whiteboard, and we'd forgotten to bring a large pad of newsprint paper.  Fortunately, I'd designed this presentation to accommodate for such circumstances, and there are several step by step animations demonstrating how I go about constructing various parts of the figure. 

For a presentation given in person, this Powerpoint was rather wordy, but I knew I'd be sharing it with you guys after, so I really went the extra mile in trying to make it comprehensive for a basic artist.  I feel like, combined with my past tutorials, it's covered all the basics of my day to day figure creation, and hopefully we can explore more advanced topics together.

This is the only presentation from Anime South East that does not have an accompanying video, and it was also the hardest to accomodate.  The large file size made it unweildy to transfer, the fact that I used Powerpoint to create it and Heidi used Open Office to edit caused a LOT of snafus, and the animations made this a difficult presentation to find hosting for.  I usually use Slide Share, but slide share has no options for animations, so I had to find a different host.  All of this was done on an aging Eee PC which has lag problems while trying to get two more inking assignments finished for Monday.  Thankfully, it's finished now, and I can relax a little bit.

If you haven't yet, I would really appreciate you taking the time to vote for Heidi's entries to the welovefine contest.  Heidi is a huge part of this blog, both in content (I bounce a lot of ideas off her, she writes a lot of guest posts) and in behind the scenes convention attending drudgery.  You do have to register to vote, but considering how much Heidi helps make sure the content of this blog is high quality stuff, I think it's a small price to pay.  It would be even more appreciated if you took a moment to share her entries- either through your social networking channels or with your real life friends.

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