100 Days of Drawing (week 11)

The Human Body as a Means of Expression

Let's face it, our bodies are fascinating! And well they should be since we spend all of our life in our body!

And how do we express ourselves? We use our bodies to show others how we feel!

Some of us are better at expressing ourselves with our bodies than others. Dancers, mimes, actors, comedians, and clowns are the people that come to mind.

As an artist, I would like to be able to draw people expressing themselves. So I look for photos of dancers, mimes, actors, comedians, and clowns expressing themselves to learn from by using them as models for a drawing. And this will help me develop my skills up to a point; I'll be limited to the poses I can find photos for.

If I want to be skillful enough to draw people expressing themselves from my imagination, I'll need to know how their bodies work. Specifically I'll need to know the fundamental structure - the skeleton. I'll need to know what moves that structure - the muscles. Finally I'll need to know how movements flow - muscular coordination - that is, which muscles relax when other muscles contract. In short, I'll need to know human anatomy.

So far, I've introduced the following human anatomy in our drawings:

• Day 26: body
• Day 30: the head
• Day 46: the face
• Day 48: the eye
• Day 49: the hands
• Day 54: the human nose
• Day 56: the foot
• Day 62: the mouth
• Day 63: the arm
• Day 69: the ear
• Day 70: the leg

The focus of these drawings has been on surface anatomy. Some of the associated videos have introduced deeper anatomy, for example, in Day 62: the mouth, I provide a link to Proko’s How to Draw Lips - Anatomy and Structure.  

Beginning this week, starting with our drawing of the shoulders, we'll be doing more in depth studies.

I encourage you to learn at whatever level you feel comfortable with, but if you are considering portraiture or manga for your artistic avocation, plan to revisit human anatomy periodically in your pursuit.

This week

• Day 73: shonen magna
• Day 74: a city in 3-point perspective
• Day 75: cross contour drawing
• Day 76: the neck
• Day 77: the shoulders
• Day 78: color harmony: split complementary
• Day 79: texture: using charcoal

Materials:

• for Day 79:
• charcoal (recommended: General Charcoal HB, 2B, 6B and White 558 pencils)
• blending stump (make your own) or old used toothbrush (I cut half the handle off of mine)
• eraser
• paper (printer paper, notebook, etc)
• colors (colored pencils, crayons, watercolor, etc)
• alternatives to the above: smart phone or tablet drawing app

Day 73: shonen manga

I saw this book, Manga Art for Everyone by Danica Davidson and Rena Saiya, at the library and though it would be a good jumping off point for a drawing.  I choose the four characters in the book that appealed to me:

• shojo manga (shojo girl in Japanese; manga targeting teenage girls)
• shonen manga (boys’ comics; manga targeting adolescent boys)
• nekojin (cat person)
• yokai (beings from old Japanese folklore)

I then looked for youtube demonstrations of these four.

This is our second manga of the series: shonen hero!

Draw a shonen hero (sketch) by Sikana (5 minutes, 1.5K views)

Draw a shonen hero (ink) by Sikana (5 minutes, 344 views)

Draw a shonen hero (shading and filling) by Sikana (5 minutes, 171 views)

And from My Hero Academia: Drawing Deku. My Hero Academia is a creation of Kōhei Horikoshi. Deku is the nickname for My Hero Academia's main protagonist: Izuku Midoriya.

Day 74: a city in 3-point perspective

How to Draw a City in Three-Point Perspective by Circle Line Art School (10 minutes, 244K views

Day 75: cross contour drawing

The virtual instructor in Cross Contour Lines - Improve your drawing and painting (5 minutes, 114K views) briefly reviews the contour line than jumps into cross contour lines that he draws over an apple to illustrate the apple’s form. He then compares using cross hatching to using cross contour lines to draw the form of a cylinder. Finally, he shows how cross contour lines can be incorporated into applying your media: charcoal, painting.

Draw Awesome takes a different approach to teaching us How to Draw With Contours (10 minutes, 139 K views). He draws the contour lines on an apple and a banana and encourages us to do the same. He then uses the apple with the contour lines on it as the object of our drawing and proceeds to demonstrate drawing contour lines on paper.

Day 76: the neck

Proko, in Learn how to draw the neck - Forms you should know (note: the last minute is advertisement. 5.5 minutes, 223K views), starts with modeling theneck as a cylinder.

David Finch in Anatomy study: Necks (17 minutes, 3K views), draws using various anatomy models he has found on the web.

Day 77: the shoulders

Shoulders are incredible.

They allow us to freely move our arms. 

My study shows the muscles from the back and front (posterior and anterior).

Stan Prokopenko first introduces us to the bones in the shoulder in Anatomy of the shoulder bones. We learn about:

• the clavicle
• the scapula
• the acromion process

In another video, he shows us How to draw the shoulder bones. If you get nothing else from this video, you'll start to appreciate how marvelously complex the human body is.

You may be asking, "Where's the meat?" Well, in How to draw shoulder muscles, you get your answer.

Day 78: color harmony: split complementary

Kickreate quickly explains how to identify the three colors that form a Split Complementary color harmony:

• choose your dominant color
• identify its complement
• select the immediate neighbors 

I used procreate to play with various split complementary trios, and then I played around with tints of split complementary trios.

To help yourself learn, choose your favorite color and identify the two colors that it can play with in a split complementary color harmony. Draw something and use these three colors (and their tints and shades).

Day 79: texture: using charcoal

Charcoal is a wonderful material to use for the following reasons:

• it can give the full range of values from white through black
• it's rough, natural qualities can free your expressiveness
• it encourages you to work in larger formats therefore bringing more of your body movements, and consequently your self, into your drawings
• you can use your bare fingers and hands to 'move' the charcoal around

For a complete introduction to charcoal drawings, I suggest that you watch the following 3 videos:

• Jordan Swain Visual Art provides a good introduction  to using charcoal in Charcoal 101 (7 minutes, 291K views) and 
• she follows it up with a demonstration on creating value scales in charcoal (2 minutes).
• Tom Quigley shows us 5 techniques for using charcoal ( a 10 minute video that I suggest starting at 2:45)

I've also included Carley Renée's Meditative Drawing Process (11 minutes) to illustrate using charcoal in a large format (larger than 8.5 X 11 inches) work of art.

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