Also, you can’t use the drawings for finished paintings for copyright reasons, the way you could with the life nude book above. If you decide to try this, Fredericks is better than Victoria’s Secret.
#Human portraiture skin
The big problem with such catalogs, of course, is that the forms in question are extremely thin and exclusively female, but they’re still well worth studying if you want a crash course in how the contours of the skin work. The stockings (or garter belts or whatever) show the contour of the form. Why? Because in an undies catalog, you can use the lines of the sleezy stocking to see where the lines of the muscles and curves are. Particularly the sort where there’s a lot of cheesy striped stockings. Underwear catalogs are, I am embarrassed to admit, another excellent source of anatomy education. It’s just what it says on the box: well photographed nudes, taken in the round, with extra shots on the CD.
#Human portraiture series
It includes a good series of shots of an older man (always hard to find, ime). The Art Models: Life Nude series of books has a nice range of body types. The color of skin, the shape of the arms, the way the legs are longer or shorter. The goal of the book is for young women to know that their bodies are normal (I wish to hell I’d had that book as a young teen) but it also helps an artist to understand how many kinds of bodies there are and how they differ. It has lots of pictures comparing body types. The book has lots more interesting stuff, though. It was a huge and wonderful AH-HA moment for me as an artist, because yes of course I look at magazines and other visual depictions and one eventually gets the feeling that those bodies (since they’re photos) are “real”. Not the zip-removal, but the way that hips are sliced off and thighs slimmed, and curves shifted around. Then they show what she looks like after she’s been Photoshopped. There’s an incredibly cool spread where they take a young woman at a healthy weight in her undies and show her unretouched. It’s got lots of useful, straightforward health information on menstrual periods and that sort of thing, but it also covers the amazing differences in bodies and that’s what I want to talk about here. It’s a health book about the changes that occur in adolescence and young womanhood, and it focuses on the female body. This book is not designed for artists, it’s designed for young women and teen girls. I first ran across this book in a Borders in the YA section, where I skulking around looking for a copy of Twilight (yes, Noah, I blame you). These are what I have used, and embarrassingly at times, I’ll slap on up a bit of my own art as an example of where someone might want to go with this.įirst, I’m going to talk about an interesting book called Body Drama. They are not necessarily standard, although a few are. So this week, I wanted to explain some of my favorite resources. Then learn more about the tools and do it again. I’m sort of boring in my approach to craft: find a reference (good painting, ink drawing, photo, image) and draw it, draw it, draw it. Either the resources below depict various body types and ages, or they help me learn to craft the human form from one body type to another. So I’ve been gathering resources to help me craft art about the kinds of people I do know. The people I know just don’t look like that. How many people do I know with washboard abs? *looks around vaguely* None! Yes, there are times when one needs some kind baseline, but when it comes to art, let’s be honest. After a couple of hours with the Atlas of Foreshortening, I start to think that everybody has a shaved head and washboard abs.įor someone who actually thinks art should embrace the truth of the human figure in all its ages, shapes, sizes, body types, etc, this can get frustrating. One of my frustrations as a student of anatomy and human portraiture is that so many of the resources available have been single-dimensional in terms of beauty or form. This has been a life-long passion of mine. As y’all know by now, I love to draw the human figure.