This is a copied and pasted reply to someone I replied to yesterday wanting to learn anatomy, hopefully it'll point you in the right direction.

If you're gonna invest in any really helpful art books I'd suggest starting with something like Anatomy for the Artist by Sarah Simblet (I know that's the UK link but it gives you a preview that the US Amazon site doesn't). It covers all aspects of both male and female anatomy and it's really high quality, it even gives you transparent overlay pages over photos that show you how muscles lie under the skin. It looks like this but with a sheer sheet between the photo of the limb and its muscles, so you can flip between the two. It also gives you examples of famous artworks in contrast to a photo of a real person in that pose, to show you how anatomy can be distorted/transformed in art without it looking 'bad'. Anything like that will give you a brilliant understanding of how the human body is formed and it honestly will reflect in your artwork. As other people have said, life drawing sessions or even drawing the people you're surrounded with is an essential way to learn natural poses and lessen the 'stiffness' drawing can sometimes convey.

Look at other people's work as much as you can and also try to critique it in your head! What perspective are they using? Where's their lighting coming from? Does said lighting affect their colour palette? Are their proportions right? All of this will become automatic if you do it enough and it's a great way to learn techniques you might not have noticed before, that you can later apply to your own artwork. It's a cliche but the more you look at other people's work/draw the better you'll get :)

Sorry this is super long, I hope it helps. I'm in no way a professional artist but I started drawing with a tablet when I was 12 (I'm now 23) and all I can say is the more you do it the better you'll become. Draw whenever you can using whatever you find, all practise will help whether it's on the tablet or not.

u/BakedlCookie · 1 point r/3Dmodeling

Thank you for your words of encouragement, I'm guessing studying anatomy and doing many sculpts to burn the knowledge and strokes into my memory is key to success. Zacks anatomy is really great, I love the sleek muscle build he's got going. I guess as a beginner I tend to exaggerate the muscles to give them more form, like this (this I made in an hour):

http://i.imgur.com/GnZHBd3.png

I guess subtlety comes with practice. I actually got a book on human anatomy, this one. I'm cross referencing it with other sources because honestly no single source can be comprehensive enough.

When it comes to topology I've got a fairly good idea of what's needed- nice loops around the eyes, enough segments for the brow area, thunder cloud studio gave me a nice breakdown of the basics:

http://www.thundercloud-studio.com/index.php?page=content/tutorial/ModelingTutorial/headModeling

But first things first- good characters with pleasant features. But the one thing I'm unable to get is this- the low subdivision levels. I'm talking... less than 50k for a good base mesh, because that's seems to be low enough at polycount. I simply cannot do anything with that, I find my preferred range to be around 200k (active points, in zbrush) like that torso and head I linked above. For me its plasticity is enough to mold like real clay, but not enough to go all out with detail work. And it helps me gauge the form way better too. I'm all for heeding advice from people who know better than me, but that one bit of advice seems to nuke all of my sculpting progress (I end up getting frustrated with the base mesh and rushing way too early into detailed work).

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