2D Toolkit - Anatomy Wireframe

 

2D Toolkit - Anatomy Wireframe

In this session, we looked at how anatomy works within a posed wireframe. For this, we started by drawing the basic wireframe shapes of a posed character. I drew the front and back here, and to make it more accurate I drew lines across so it matched up. I also had to remember there was one foot forward, and focused on that for the backside to make it more accurate.

After this, I switched to a different colour pen and tried to draw the muscles over the wireframe. Some of these were mostly accurate, but some were too far apart or not accurate enough to where they actually should be.

One area I mostly struggle with is the legs, since I find it hard to place the knee and how all the muscles work around the thigh area. This is easily visible below by removing the wireframe.

I drew a loose diagram of the basic muscle anatomy of the torso and thigh to look at how the muscles properly connect from the front. I am going to be drawing poses from the front and side today, so I wasn't planning to draw poses from the back just yet.

For the first one, trying to draw a basic wireframe and get down the vital information of the pose helped me with understanding how to do wireframes quickly. I used arcs to symbolise the curves of the arms and legs and show which direction they were going, and thought of the torso as more of a 3D shape.

now drawing the muscle anatomy, I focused on making my lines much more sure and steady to avoid chicken scratching. When drawing poses, it is vital to get as much information down as possible so it is easier to draw a character within that pose. I think with this pose I did a good job of placing the legs and arms, but I need to look more at shoulders and how they work when the arms are extended.

For the next pose, I wanted to try something more complex. Looking back on this one, its very easy to see I went back to chicken scratching as a sign of being less sure about where to place my lines.

It is even easier to see here how less sure I was with my lines. Not only that, I posed the leg completely wrong when going over the wireframe. Looking at how I did it, I think it's because how I drew the leg as a curve at the knee rather than actually drawing it as if it was bent like in the picture.

Below are some quicker tests where I set myself a time limit to how long I could spend drawing the wireframe and anatomy. For both of these it was 5 minutes.

For this first one, I think I did a good job with drawing the wireframe quickly and I tried to minimise my chicken scratching as much as possible. I still did it without thinking around the torso area, and that was due to trying to accurately capture the 3D aspect of the pose.

Due to running low on time, it's very easy to see that I began to quickly go over my wireframe to get the muscles down with chicken scratches as I wasn't making a conscious effort to avoid doing it.  Despite that, I think I did a good job within the time limit I set for myself of capturing the general shape.

For the next one, I really focused on avoiding chicken scratching whatsoever, and just purely focusing on the shapes. I was able to do this pretty quickly.

When I got onto the muscle part of the drawing with a small amount of time left, I only realised that I forgot to draw the 3D aspect of the torso. This heavily affected the abdominal and pectoralis muscles as seen on the right.

Overall, I think my understanding of anatomy has progressed, but I need to consistently practice as well as consistently implement all the things I have learnt to get better at it.