Anatomy of a Character
To start off the anatomy project, I wanted to focus on how the body parts connect, how they should be shaped and how long they should be in comparison to other parts of the body. I Referenced the character Kazuma Kiryu.
I made the two sketches on the right first to try and get a grasp on posing and gesture but went back to make the one on the left. I referenced the image sown and sketched over it to figure out the shapes of the arms, and the connections within them along with the shape of the chest area and pelvic area. This also helped me get a better grasp on the neck area, and you can see a clear difference between the sketch on the left and the ones on the right. When I had a grasp of the pose and proportions of the character, I made the opacity of the sketch less, so I could draw my character design over it in that pose.
I think the final character looks good, and it helped me get a better understanding of how to build a pose using basic shapes to create a sort of doll from which you can base a character design from. I think experimenting with different poses, in the same way, will be useful, to help with character design. I want to start to challenge myself with harder poses and understand how they are formed.
Overall I think this exercise has been very useful to help me understand and get used to the body, how it should be posed, and especially how to form the arms of a character, with thicker meatier parts of the arms tapering into a wrist for example. I think I could improve upon this even more by carrying out muscle studies and getting used to how each muscle in the body is formed and practising drawing them to make the characters look even more realistic.
