Anatomy time this is the petor major s interior external oblique rectus abdominal stal mastoid trapezius wait stop oh my god there are so many muscles this is overwhelming are you really supposed to remember this uh kind of but wait you don't actually have to remember them all right now in fact depending on your art style or what you plan to do you might not even have to remember them at all but if you're determined to learn them I'm going to show you some steps you can take to make it easier I'm going to take you through four levels of anatomy to demonstrate how you can build up your knowledge gradually instead of having to memorize well all of this right away hopefully you'll be able to have fun along the way if you're just getting started trying to draw more anatomical figures Sometimes the best way to get started is to break down the human body into simpler shapes one thing to keep in mind is that the human body is very complicated and there are an infinite number of ways to simplify it use whatever method works for you I'll tell you how I like to do it but you might like to do it differently and that's fine draw the head as a cylinder the rib cage impel elas can be represented as rectangular prisms I like to use spheres to represent the various joints such as the shoulders elbows and knees the limbs themselves look like cylinders we could draw the feet as these little triangular blocks and the hands as I don't know blobs hands are hard okay we'll worry about them later but you can see how flexible the sort of very super simple mannequin is right I feel like I can achieve a lot just by drawing these boxes it's about the orientation of your blocks if you're make this one's a little stiffer because I make my blocks kind of stiff and a little bit parallel whereas these ones are more rotated and a little bit loose mhm anyway these are very simple shapes but put them all together and they give the impression of being a human body already you can actually go really far with something like this when you're trying to figure out a tricky pose or perspective this super simple mannequin is actually surprisingly effective once you get comfortable with the simple shapes we can start smoothing it out and making it look more like a human being in instead of drawing the head as a simple cylinder we can break it down a little further by adding an elongated sphere so it looks more like a skull you can also use a Lumis head if you're into that for those of you that aren't familiar with Lumis heads it's a popular way of simplifying the structure of the head I like to widen the Torso to also include the muscles of the back then I start drawing lines to connect up these individual boxes so it looks more like a human body as for the pelvis itself I personally like keeping it as a box because it lets me figure out the orientation more easily but I know a lot of people that like to draw the pelvis as a bucket it's up to you you can also start cutting out portions of your box or bucket to make attachment points for the legs it looks a little like a pair of underwear as for the limbs we can start adjusting the width of the cylinders to make it look more natural it makes sense to widen it where there's more muscle such as at the shoulder or near the elbow the joints themselves tend to have less surrounding fat and muscle so we can keep those a little thinner how many muscles can I name on this model there's I didn't draw any muscles in none okay it's time to learn the actual muscles here they are yeah at this point there's no real way around it anymore it's time to start memorizing okay so I'm not going to go over each individual bone and muscle here because I think there are resources that do a far better job than I can but I'm going to tell you which ones I used and the process I use to teach myself I started with this book figure drawing design and invention by Michael Hampton as a beginner I really liked how one it breaks down each muscle group into simple and understandable shapes and two it starts with important prerequisites such as form and gesture I think these are important to cover before starting to learn the actual Anatomy I confess I kind of ignored the head section in this book because I just wanted to draw anime faces so um yeah another great resource I really like is anatomy for sculptors it's a very visual Guide to the body with lots of diagrams and not too much text it's great if you're a visual learner I don't know about you guys but just looking at diagrams or watching YouTube videos including this one by the way it doesn't help me learn by actually copying out each diagram I am forcing myself to carefully observe and understand what I'm looking at I have links to these two books in the description so please go check them out and these are not the only good resources out there I'm sure there are many amazing artists who have made many amazing tutorials and books out there but these are just the one that personally worked for me if you know any particularly good ones please feel free to share in the comments I'm going to go find some reference I think there's a website called free photo muscle which is um one of my favorite places to find references because all right cooking class my CH typing at high speed you wonder why I like this website I I don't know why it's a mystery to me as well well Hey listen we're doing anatomy studies and if you want to learn to draw you need to draw from reference okay one more thing that you might be wondering is do you really have to memorize the names of each of these muscles I'd say not really personally knowing the name helps me remember the muscle and when I want to talk about Anatomy with my fellow nerd artists it's easier to say the actual name of the muscle instead of trying to vaguely describe it by saying something like that cool twisty muscle on the arm um actually that muscle is called the bra yellow radialis and it also happens to be my favorite muscle just look how cool it is okay so let's say you're done with all of that you've leared where all the muscles go is that it are you an anatomy Master now are you done nope in fact you're just getting started all right maybe you won't have this problem but I find that after a while I'll start to forget some of the stuff I've learned and I think that's normal I've had to go back and study the same bits of anatomy over and over again but each time I add to my understanding and I remember a little bit more here are some additional exercises that I found are pretty useful for hammering in the information of course you don't have to do all or even any of them but maybe you'll find them useful too so far we've been drawing an awful lot of skinless people with muscles uh the fancy art people call this an eor by the way which means skinned in French people obviously don't actually look like this because they have skin so looking at photos and tracing where those muscles are is a useful exercise to see how muscles actually look in reality you can also do this for a skeleton and of course drawing from reference all right Macho harvesting kiwi just Gathering references don't mind me no I promise you I love studying anatomy anatomy is like like my favorite thing to study dude what what why am I being doubted you guys know I take my studies super seriously right ah Anatomy but don't just copy blindly when you draw a curve for for instance try to figure out which muscle is actually causing that curve I also find it helpful to Simply put my favorite character's head on top of these studies here's my original character he's basically a bunny dude that doesn't wear a shirt so uh yeah I'm just going to draw his head on all of these bodies and that for some reason just makes me feel very motivated to do more Anatomy studies very mysterious I wonder why that works huh this next exercise is something I've recently started doing but if you want to be able to draw something from any angle first you got to know what it looks like from every angle for an extra hard mode version of this you can try drawing it from memory then checking a reference to see if you're right having a 3D model for this exercise is really helpful okay so what I'm about to tell you next is the most important step do not miss it you need to draw for fun yes really you have to take take all this information that you've learned about anatomy and learn to apply it in your actual work surely you don't want to be drawing skinless people forever right so how do you do that what you might need to do is slow down and stop autopilot if you've been drawing for a while there's probably a specific way you like to draw certain things like arms and torsos but now you've learned new information about these things so instead of drawing them as you always do try to include this new information in your drawing I find that when you're first starting out it's helpful to sketch in every single muscle to force yourself to think about them you can always omit these lines during the linear process or just erase them when you get more accustomed to it you'll be able to skip the step but it's really useful when you're first starting out what's also cool about drawing for fun is that it's a really good test to find out which parts you're struggling with the most and after you find out you have a good subject for your next study session no I need to learn how they move first before I can draw them appealingly cuz like I I don't know what I'm doing right now I find this Loop of study draw for fun and then study again really really effective you start by studying something and then testing Yourself by drawing from imagination you find out what your weaknesses are and then study again and this whole time you get to have fun by getting better and better at the things you love to draw okay so now let's say you've done every exercise lots of times and you've perfectly memorized the position and shape of every muscle now are you done now are you an anatomy Master ha you thought not even close see the funny thing about art is that you can always keep going deeper there is in fact no finish line and the more realistically you want to draw the more important it is for you to have even more in-depth knowledge here are some examples of stuff you can dive into the actual direction of the muscle viers learning the actual origin and insertion points of the the muscles this means you got to get really familiar with the shape of the bones get ready to get really comfy with the word epicondyles change shape when they move what each muscle is responsible for to be honest if you hit the gym with any regularity you probably know the stuff but if you're a Kush potato like me you're going to have to go and learn this and there's probably much more than this too it's not like the muscles on the surface are the only ones you can see there are also muscles below these muscles that also affect the shape of the body if you're interested in this kind of detail a really good resource to check out would be proo YouTube channel you probably already know about him but I'll leave a link in the description just in case so anyway if you thought there was a certain point where you could say you were finished learning Anatomy well there isn't the path to Mastery is in fact infinite and that's what makes it so fun so this video wasn't exactly an anatomy video I'm not really trying to teach anyone Anatomy but I'm trying to teach people to teach themselves Anatomy I hope it was helpful for you and let me know if there's anything else you'd like to see from me thanks for watching bye yeah okay I'm done get super