Nudity warning. It IS an article about anatomy.

Honestly, I don’t really “study” anatomy. Not in the sense that I sit down, read a lot, practice the same thing over and over, watch lessons, etc. In reality, what I call “study” is mostly a facade for self indulgence .

I think about this tweet by Farfin a lot.

_{(I’d rather not give the website formerly known as Twitter any traffic, so here’s a screenshot. Check out Farfin’s bsky account by clicking their name above.)}

A little background.

I talked about it a bit in my Art Journey post, but I basically did exactly that.

… I decided on just opening a new account and using it for strictly my NSFW stuff. But it wasn’t exactly “ooga booga horny brain, gotta draw boobies” (ok just a little), it was more about taking nude references, drawing them, and dressing them up with some flair/creativity/character.

I decided I needed a mascot. So I invented April.

I sorta became obsessed with drawing the nudes because it almost felt like I leveled up after each one of them.

I’d think, “Yo, it’d be really cool to draw her upside down.” And then I’d try that. And it’d be really fucking hard. I’d look for upside down references. None would be exactly what I was looking for but it’d help. I’d look for close poses. I’d look for videos and get freeze frames. “Oh, I didn’t think about gravity affecting a belly that way.” “Oh shit, THAT’S how an arm connects to the shoulder?”

I didn’t look up “how arms work” or “art tutorial shoulder joint latissimus dorsi”. I just had a thing I was motivated to draw and couldn’t do it, so I had to learn. This “method” got me from this:

Less than a month. But again, obsession (perhaps ADHD + the power of horny or something) is what really helped me. I’m not saying you can’t do the same thing otherwise, just that it helped me a lot. On top of that, I was drawing on an account that had no following, no obligation, no thoughts of trying to impress anyone. I put all my shittiest drawings on there and didn’t worry about it. It was all black/white poopy sketchy unfinished stuff for soooo long.

Ok, ok, the actual process.

_{(a.k.a. why you’re here)}

I make heavy, heavy, use of references. I can’t stress this enough. You. can. not. draw. what. you. don’t. know. You know that common thing that artists say? That every artist’s worst nightmare are hands, bikes, and horses? Well, that’s cuz they;re weird. You don’t know them. You can’t just try to understand them. You need to WANT to understand them.

Bikes might be the easiest of these three examples, but the point is: unless you’ve spent time looking at bikes, you won’t be able to accurately represent them.

The other thing to keep in mind is that it’s important to understand, not recreate.

Anyone. Literally ANYONE, can draw anything. It’s not hard to do photorealism, it’s tedious. You can take a photo of anything, zoom in, and copy every single pixel into MS Paint and eventually you will have a photorealistic “drawing.” But that’s not why you’re here.

You want to be able to draw a hand in any position. You want to be able to draw your OC stretching.

Welp, draw them stretching. What are they stretching? Why? What’s important in your picture? Was it hard to draw? Did you get frustrated retrying that line over and over? Doesn’t look right? Wish it looked better? Good. That means you know what you gotta do, and why you’re doing it. You’re not going to study, you’re going to realize your vision. Let’s do one together!

I have no idea what I’m doing.

So, spoiler alert: I’m terrible at drawing calves. I cheat. I have a shorthand that I use for every single position and I practically do not deviate.

Let’s fix that just a little bit. These “studies” aren’t meant to make me perfect. They’re just to challenge a weakness I have and give me slightly more knowledge than I had yesterday.

Here’s my first attempt. Completely from my head, no looking anything up. Just muscle memory and LOTS of scratching, erasing, sculpting. I draw over and erase sections until I get a shape that looks convincing to my own eyes. Which can’t always be trusted.

Time to look things up! I’m very lucky I found this exact pose. I swear searches used to be better. Anyway:

So, Immediately you’ll notice that the pose isn’t actually exact. The knee is more towards the camera. But that’s fine! You have a human brain that understands patterns, 3D space, and relational information! You should not be tracing this (will get to usefulness of tracing later). You should be actively using your hands, eyes, and brain in tandem to create the representation you want. This is hard, but you’re obsessed, remember? You NEED to show this off.

With this image, I would go back to the section I’m not very happy about and try to fix it up. Attempt 2:

So, with just a little bit of effort, I was able to make the calf and the knee a little bit better! At least, I think so.

Now, just changing your drawing a little bit and forgetting about it isn’t really study. You’re not going to remember remember what you did if you just tried to copy the reference. You need to mentally (or physically even!) take note of what changes you made and why.

• I moved angled the bottom of the thigh up a bit to better show a connection to the knee.
• I added a dip under the kneecap on the shin side. Turns out, knees change the shape of that area significantly! There’s a huge difference between a relaxed and an engaged knee. Duh moments like this feel like “wow, I already knew this but I never thought to use it. Going forward, it’ll be easy!”
• The top of the S that I default to drawing actually should turn inwards in this situation. Interesting.
• I flattened the curve of the calf muscle and exaggerated the inward curve toward the ankle. Turns out the S shape shorthand has flaws! Gasp! Who knew!
• I kept the shin pretty flat still, because I wanted to show that direction of the leg is more away from the camera. I still altered the line a little bit, though.

This is a LOT of information that I got from a drawing that took me maybe 30 seconds to do. All the other work came from looking for a reference and staring at it. I don’t know what the muscles are called. I don’t know what the bones look like. I don’t know the difference between a relaxed and an egaged calf muscle. But I know how to draw a leg in this position a little bit better now?

If I keep doing this for all the calf positions I want to draw, eventually my brain will just have a repertoire of angles and forms that make a calf what it is. And I’ll have an easier time drawing them going forward.

However, my S shorthand method didn’t look too bad, right?

Honestly, the difference is super slight (to me). But subtleties matter and add up. Using the small amount of knowledge I gained, I can update my shorthand into something that works a bit better. Cuz, realistically, when I just wanna do a quick doodle, I’m absolutely not going to look up references.

If I never did this, though, I’d never have improved at this by even 1 xp.

The more hardcore type of study.

Aight now for deliberate study section.

Deliberate, focused practice is the best way to get better at anything. They say “practice makes perfect,” but if you practice incorrectly, you’re only getting better at doing that thing incorrectly.

I have no idea how to study anatomy correctly though, lmao. So what I end up doing when I really wanna learn how to do something for the sake of learning it is

🦐 🎉 SHRIMPING 🎉 🦐

Shrimping is most useful thing you can possibly do when learning to draw something you’ve never drawn (or suck at). Honestly, I could have just linked that at the beginning and saved myself the trouble of writing all of this. Seriously, click the link and go give that a read. It applies to literally everything you wanna draw ever.

Past that, I do have some methods of my own. For example, I wanted to get better at drawing backs. So I found some references and got to work.

I just took some time looking at the different forms. The different shapes. This is where you put a layer over the drawing and start tracing. Feel the lines. Follow the curves. Trace over shadows. Draw complete, closed shapes.

I didn’t do that yet, but I’ll get to it. I started by just trying to copy what I saw.

This doesn’t have to be perfect. Making a good drawing isn’t the point. I’m not showing this to anyone as if it’s completed art work. This is for me. After that, I spent time adding in some color.

This taught me that a lot of what you perceive in a shape is from color. Look at how deep the spine sits in the center, and how far the shoulder blade protrude. You couldn’t tell that from the lines on the left. But you don’t want to do this much work for all drawings you do, so you’ll start to naturally take in what was important to give the illusion of depth. “Maybe if I darken X line, it’ll look deeper! If I lighten this one, etc.”

Next, I tried to do the same thing but only using black and white.

This was to force me to think in values, only capture what’s important, and not try to copy exactly. This was really hard, honestly. But it was worth it!

For the next exercise, I did a sort of combination of both + marking up the reference. It started by getting the basic form down and adding in a neutral color. It’s not skin, its more like a level/height/depth indicator.

I marked up the reference with various colors, indicating light and shadow. Height/depth. Whatever you wanna call it.

The color map over the reference then became my guide to finishing the drawing. This felt really weird, cuz im drawing a bunch of weird unrelated shapes onto what looks like a person. But remove the “person” from your mindset. It’s just shapes and colors. Taking a step back like this can help give you a new perspective.

After that, I simply took my result and prayed that smudging it all together would look good. I was very light with my blending, but I did change the opacity to 50% so that it looked more “natural.”

Not bad?? I think?? But regardless, I learned something. And that’s better than where I was before. That’s all that matters.

I’m no expert. I don’t know anything about the human body. It’s one of the most complicated things you’ll ever study. Trying to understand skeletons, muscles, blood, skin, hair, everything at once, is way too much. Start small, pick something you really want to know and use that passion to make what’s normally difficult into something fun.