Introduction

For this week I wanted to finally try to get human anatomy down as that has been a main factor for my art being limited, so in lessons we learned the details of the human body, such as how many heads tall people should be, or how wide shoulders should be compared to said heads.

Base Practice

To try and get an understanding I used a base my teacher gave me and tried to copy it from just my eyes, not pasting and tracing like I normally do to see if I can actually get it down without tracing. The base I used was this:

To try pace myself I made sure to do a layer by layer, so starting from the left and working my way to the right, which left me with this:

I think given I didn’t trace I did pretty well, however the right arm now looking at it is definitely too big, not sure how I left that and thought it was fine, other than that I think it went well. You can see half way through I followed the rotation as well, which probably resulted in that arm being messed up, but other than that I am surprised I was actually able to do that.

My process to get this was do the first layer, copy it and put it under the next, then make the next from that, copy those two put under the next and repeat, meaning I could work off what I had to make sure it stayed the same, making sure they don’t change shape like most sketches do without reference checks.

Using The Base

Then as a challenge I tried to use this to make two characters from it, one being, I’m not actually sure, then the second being my first character, which by the time I did that I had fixed the arm thankfully.

First Character

Okay so I found this thing online about trumpet bosses, basically on youtube there are tons of songs with images of people wearing parts of brass instruments, the comments then all collectively pretending it is a game. So this attracted me to try to make that a reality, and for that you need a player which is actually mostly left blank except for the constant mention of them being called a Maestro. So I looked that up and did my best

Line Art

Okay so I took the last base and used purple over it to grab what I wanted, using what I learned of Maestros to give them an outfit like that, I also ended up giving them a mask and the stick they always like to use. However I then realized I still am horrible at hair, so after a good hour of attempts I ended up just leaving it. And even now I still don’t get how to do hair honestly, so I will have to learn how to do it in the future.

Color

I added yellow behind them so they didn’t blend into the white background with the white background and as you can see, I didn’t do shading for them as I realized if I wasn’t going to do hair then they should just stay a concept instead, meaning shading would just be a waste of time. This is probably one of the pieces I have made for this blog I hate, I liked the concept but not the execution, I liked trying to learn with it but as of now I still wanted to trace due to how badly this turned out.

Character 2

Okay so my first character if you don’t know was a female oni samurai, you can see them on week one of this blog, or by looking at this image if you just want the image and not the process:

I actually got challenged to do this so that added to me wanting to redeem myself, so like last time I started with line art from my base

Line Art

As you can see here I used my image as a reference, I just removed the gray background for obvious reasons. This one definitely went better, I fixed the arm from the base, got the clothes right I feel for the angle and even gave them hair, although again that part was where I fell off again, I left it and thought it would look better after I added color, which I then did

Color

As you can see, yeah the hair stands out way too much which I didn’t not like, the rest looked fine, nothing some shading couldn’t fix, however I ended up leaving it here as I wanted to leave it as a concept again. This was due to me getting more interested in pixel art, leading to detailed art like this to be put on the back burner, leaving this in this state sadly. I definitely liked this attempt more but I doubt I will be using this method again, tracing just gives better results and I have changed line art from bases before to get what I wanted. Leading me to question if it really is worth the effort.

Conclusion

This was a nice lesson but I ended up feeling like I had just come full circle, I feel I understand the human body more but I still want to stay with bases and edit them where needed. It was a nice idea but ultimately I feel like it was sadly a wasted week, mostly just leaving me with the reminder of how much easier tracing is, I know other artists are the opposite but I don’t think I will be following them soon