Self-Taught Artist Term 3 Round Up
Let’s get into Term 3 of the Radio Runner Curriculum for the self taught artist. This term has the following unites: Anatomy of the skeleton, Head Anatomy 3, Perspective 4, Figure Drawing 3, and Animal drawing.
Anatomy I: Skeleton
Pretty simple course, just following along with Proko’s videos and doing the assignments. Lots of drawings of simplified bones. These videos are easy enough to follow along then doing the assignment. I believe the photos are still free, but once you understand what he is talking about you can use your own references too. I think it’s really important to understand the size relationship between the body’s three major forms; the head, the rib cage, and the pelvis. Also understanding the shoulder construction and how the whole shoulder girdle works is important. I’m going over some stuff with Tom Fox’s anatomy book now and it goes into much more detail.
Head Anatomy III: Riley Rhythms
I am looking back at stuff I did for this course and it looks like I did go over the coursework for it, watching videos on youtube, but I also focused on drawing heads and then drawing the planes on my drawings.
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I know I went over the rhythms and practiced them a bunch, but have lost them in my sea of sketchbooks or mislabeled the file somehow.
Then it looks like I drew some using rhythms and added plans and then shaded them (digitally of course). It’s hard to remember exactly what I did since I wasn’t really taking notes then, and my spreadsheet just says the name of the unit on it for that day. Note to self: take better notes for future me.
Lots of drawing and painting heads and faces. I liked this unit as I generally enjoy doing portraits.
Perspective IV
Involved learning to mirror shapes in perspective and rounding forms. I can’t seem to find any of my drawings from this but it was nothing exciting. This was kind of a review of DAB stuff here, so nothing too important to see. It was nice to review though.
Figure Drawing III: Drapery
Here’s my assignment for this unit, drawing mannequins and then drawing the clothing over them. This reminds me of the Tom Fox course I did, and was fun to do.
I also did some of the Mikey Mega tutorials on clothing, then did some drawings from reference. Looking back I feel like these drawings are awful and I know I’ve improved at drawing figures and clothing since then.
Animal Drawing
Animals really baffled me and still trip me up sometime. I’m not a huge fan of Aaron Blaise’s videos, don’t get me wrong his art is awesome so I had a hard time watching his videos and I ended up turning to the Force Method. I dislike the method with figures, I feel like it’s just rebranding of gestures which I think despite what everyone says, are actually an advanced topic. I think that The force method for figures just complicates an already complicated subject. I much prefer starting with mannequins and using the Fresh Eyes method or the MDJ method from his becoming a Gi series.
Searching through my stacks of sketchbooks I think I did these after finishing the force book. I love drawing animals, they are a lot of fun.
While you can use gestures, and you can use mannequins for animals, I feel like each has it’s downsides. Gestures work if you understand how animal anatomy works, if not gestures might have you producing strange shapes. If you understand the underlying anatomy, especially how the shoulders and hips work, or how the necks work on birds, then mannequins for construction of animals is a good way to start out. Using the force method with that was what I tried to do. I think the key thing to get is exaggerating and pushing poses, and I think that’s what the force method does a lot. Otherwise you could end up with really stiff looking figures/animals.
Final thoughts on Term 3
I finished term 3 of the RRCurriculum around the end of November 2022. Overall I improved figures and animals a lot as well as got a lot of head drawing in. I feel like the more I learn with drawing portraits the harder it becomes. There’s so much structure to learn, and when I see someone who is much much better than me, it always makes me want to delve deeper into it and study planes and anatomy more so I can bring it out in my art. Although, right now I’ve been doing a lot of simplification when drawing faces which is a whole other topic.
After this I did some extra curricular courses that I’ll talk about next time.
