I read Glenn Fabry’s book Muscles in Motion: Figure Drawing for the Comic Book Artist recently. The book is not really that great, but it introduces a fairly easy way of getting practice drawing subjects in poses that would normally be difficult to do from life. Fabry drew figures from videotapes (fitness tapes, bodybuilders…) to amass a vast personal library of poses and anatomy reference for his comic book work.
His basic methodology:
- Get a tape
- Stop at a suitable point (in exercise tapes this was virtually every exercise, really)
- Draw
- Forward a few frames
- Repeat steps 3-4 until the tape spoils, buy new tape, go back to step 1
I haven’t got any fitness tapes handy, but I did have a few episodes of Mythbusters on my recorder.
I tried this with a Peking opera that was showing as well.
Obviously this isn’t going to increase my people-drawing skills (not the faces, anyway…) but I like to think of it as quick training exercises. But there are also times when I’m watching something (like The Life of Mammals the other day) and I think to myself “damn, I gotta draw that!”. But my sketchbook is in my room, and I really just want to watch the monkey catching and eating the flamingo. To counter this I am planning to leave the sketchbook on my coffee table, together with a 3B pencil.
Why 3B? For me at least 3B provides that nice balance in between rich tones and fine control. Then again, with these drawings, I suppose it’s more about capturing the gesture than absolute control that matters.
