Artistic anatomy

The order of work is the same everywhere. First the skeleton as the load-bearing structure: in the lesson on the skeleton from the back you can see where the shoulder blades actually sit and what happens to them when the arm moves. Then the muscles go onto that structure, and for an artist it is not the names that matter but the attachments: where a muscle starts, where it ends and what it does to the silhouette once the figure turns. The anatomy of the head is worked out on a plaster cast and on Gattamelata in three-quarter view, where there is no skin tone and no incidental hairstyle, so a miss in proportion or in the transition of form shows up at once.

A drawing usually breaks down where anatomy was learned from pictures instead of from attachments. Somebody remembers what the deltoid looks like head-on and sticks it onto the shoulder at any angle: the shoulder swells and the arm falls away from the body. The second sore spot is the junction of the pelvis and the rib cage. They get built as two independent volumes, and the figure stops standing, because the large movement is set precisely by the way the two turn against each other. In these lessons those volumes are placed in relation to one another first, the landmarks in the pelvis, rib cage, knee and shoulder are found, and only then does the muscular relief and the light-and-shade modeling go on top.

If this is your first time here, start with “Drawing the skeleton from the back”: ninety-three minutes, after which everything else reads noticeably easier. Take “How to draw the male torso and legs” or “Construction drawing of the female figure” second, depending on whose build you need more right now. Both go from the large movement to the details, both are long, and they are worth watching with a pencil in hand, stopping the recording after each stage.

What is not here: this is not a muscle atlas with Latin names and not a retelling of Bammes layer by layer. Nobody will hand you an “origin, insertion, function” table for every muscle, and there is no breakdown of hands and feet either, they have a section of their own. Thirteen lessons cover the skeleton, the body, the whole figure and the head; the rest you will have to pick up from neighboring sections of the catalog.