Reddit mentions of Master Class in Figure Drawing

I second the other comment. All the guys that do amazing western style comics are masters of the figure and anatomy. They studied their craft, and drew their subjects as realistically as possible. They learned to understand how things are put together, or constructed.

A good start is to locate a figure drawing class you can attend. Alternatively, you can also go quite far by practicing using some of the excellent figure reference out there on the web. Just do a google-drain on it and get drawing. Suppliment your learning by studying human anatomy. I recommend the following books:

[Atlas of Human Anatomy for the Artist] (http://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Anatomy-Artist-Stephen-Rogers/dp/0195030958/)

[Master Class in Figure Drawing] (http://www.amazon.com/Master-Figure-Drawing-Robert-Beverly/dp/0823030148/)

Hi,

This is a good first effort!

Drawing the human body is tough. There are all kinds of shapes involved, they move around and change shape in crazy ways, and people are really finely attuned to the details so it's easy to make a noticeable mistake.

If you haven't already, I would first focus on drawing simpler things -- simple geometric objects like cubes and boxes, then a bit more complicated but still basically geometric shapes like buildings and chairs, then biological things that don't move much like plants, and so on. At the very least, it's important to be able to draw boxes in perspective pretty well. (I'm not sure if you can already do that or not -- just saying in general.)

If you want to just dive right into figure drawing, I would recommend picking up a book on artistic anatomy. There are a lot of good ones out there. One I can recommend (kind of intermediate level) is Master Class In Figure Drawing, by Robert Beverly Hale. He looks at drawings from the greats and breaks them down. It's not a complete reference, and there might be better books/online tutorials out there now, but it helps you think about drawing the human body in general.

More or less, his approach is to go from the largest masses of the body (the rib cage, the pelvis) to the smallest (the nose, fingers, etc.). He describes them in terms of simpler geometric shapes like boxes.

I find that more than half the battle is just drawing boxes for every body part in the right proportion and in the right place relative to each other.

Good luck! Keep it up.

See if you can check out this book from your universities library

http://www.amazon.com/Master-Figure-Drawing-Robert-Beverly/dp/0823030148/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1302539682&sr=1-1

It helped me a great deal to really understand how the great masters would do to draw the human form.

btw what university do you attend?

Check page 16 of "Master Class in Figure Drawing" Robert Beverly Hale