What is Reddit's opinion of Morpho: Simplified Forms: Anatomy for Artists (Morpho: Anatomy for Artists)?

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I have various folders on hard drives and if I need them on the go I will upload them to someplace like imgur. I will reference physical books as well but it is not something I always bring with me. It is why I like the little Morpho pocket books.

I do find constantly looking at a computer for my reference to be distracting due to how easy it is to click and look at something else. It is why some people recommend not having your work computer be connected to the internet.

There are a lot of good ones out there!

For beginners, I feel it's important to learn how to break down complicated shapes into easier shapes. A great book for that is: Morpho Anatomy for Artists it breaks things down geometrically.

When I teach anatomy, I have my students try gestural studies. These are super fast, barely there drawings that last for 20 seconds. You can do them while watching TV, or sitting at the coffee shop etc. The goal is not to create a complete or realistic drawing, far from it, the goal is to quickly identify the tough shapes and forms. A head is a circle, the torso is a quick S shaped curve to represent the spine, a horizontal line to express the tops of the shoulders, and an oval for ribs. It's basically like a glorified stick figure. But doing this will train your brain to recognize how the body moves how weight is balanced and how long the limbs are compared to the rest of the body. You can make a game of it, like how far can you get into the gesture drawing before the person moves out the TV scene changes?

Here's an excellent video on gestural drawings: (not my video) https://youtu.be/KVXOIBRdzPw

If there is one book I would recommend that teaches you all the basics of anatomy simply and easily: Morpho: Simplified Forms by Michel Lauricella

In youtube video; Marco Bucci makes quick and understandable videos, he teaches all the basics and more in terms of composition, color, strokes etc.

You should study your anatomy front, side, and back. Get used to drawing character turns from the same model, like these, and it will become much easier to understand any human figure in any character turn.

As you draw and try to build up the forms of a character in a turn take note of any particular body part that's causing you trouble. Focus on drawing that body part in isolation and in different angles of rotation until you build up an understanding for how the forms work.

I like this book and this book for practicing my understanding of specific body parts. If you're used to copying a finished work and you can't think of how to build comparable works of your own from the ground up, then you're lacking in your understanding of form construction.

Learn your proportions first and then if you're still struggling to construct from anatomical models you should spend time building line confidence and your understanding of three dimensional form in a two dimensional space.

Once you've gotten your line confidence down such that you can put the pencil / pen where you want it to go on your page and you've gotten a handle on construction, then you want to apply that construction to learning anatomical models. Anatomical models need to go somewhere though, so I find the absolute best place to start learning your figure drawing is to memorize the Loomis 8 head model. That second link I gave you gives a more robust and honest treatment about how far you can use the 8 head model, but it's so simple to learn and so easily modified for whatever you want to draw that I'd highly recommend it.

Memorize your proportions and anatomical markers then you can zero in on learning the specific body parts from different models. I personally like to use the Morpho series but it took me different stages in my art journey before I could use them properly. Before my construction was where I wanted it to be I struggled so hard just getting my lines where they were supposed to be that I wasn't learning anatomy, I was just struggling to copy. Before I knew my proportions I couldn't see where things needed to go and why. After my eye was trained to see proper anatomy proportions / markers and my ability to construct confidently in perspective then I really made gains with those Morpho books. Things that used to take me 30-60 minutes and I'd be frustrated with became my 5-10 minute sketches that were extremely close to the Morpho anatomy models I used as reference.

You're probably a way better artist than you realize. I think a lot of this frustration is common because you're guessing too much where to put body parts and how to build those body parts from a construction perspective. Figure out your construction, learn your anatomy proportions / markers, and then apply that to learning the figure one part at a time from models. Trying to do all of that at once is going to be hard, so why not make it easy and tackle one problem at a time?

Hello!

Here’s an old Reddit post that has a great selection of links to help you learn this process!

Some things to consider before drawing details:

• get the gesture down first; armatures are a perfect start because it teaches you how to spot points of rotation, like the hips, and the general curve of the body.

• do away with rigid rules, such as “the body should be seven head heights tall”; draw what you see since bodies are so different

• figure drawing is to emphasize a figure: draw areas where the spine would curve, or emphasize lines that are closer to the viewer (in side poses), and areas where the body “bulges” (hips on a sitting person for example). The emphasis on these areas helps you study and capture those visual focal points in a drawing

• construct your drawing using shapes, such as ovals and tubes and identify the foundational shapes of the muscles that lie underneath the skin and the bones underneath the muscle. This architecture is the basis for the figure’s movement.

• I suggest reading the Morpho series of books, found here on Amazon (but order through your local bookstore if you can). They are fantastic for figure drawing resource material.

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For your drawing posted:

You are very courageous for posting your stuff for feedback! :)

• I’d love to see a facial map of her face: where her eyes are and where they are looking, the nose, mouth, and maybe even draw the ears to help reference the facial expression. Simple lines will do or you can block in features.

• if this is drawn from a reference: go back and study the image and how her arm is formed. You’ll notice that the arm can be divided into four sections, not including the hand, by looking at the muscles and where they start and end. Feel your own arm and you can get a better idea of this, too.

There’s the shoulder muscle, which connects to the upper arm (made up of two separate muscles in the front and back), extending down to the elbow which you can draw as a circle or line, and then the forearm that begins wide at the elbow and tapers down to a point at the wrist. The forearm also has two bands of muscles that you may indicate with simple lines.

• Have you drawn a nude figure before? Look up stock images of nudes and try them out because it helps show you the whole muscle groupings to make it easier to draw.

• Figure out clothes and shading later :)

• Good start on finding the centre in a slightly angled pose! I can definitely imagine a spine!

I found this book to be very practical for anatomy:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1681984482/ref=ppx\_yo\_dt\_b\_asin\_title\_o00\_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Timewise I set aside about an hour to 90 minutes but I probably only really get a solid hour in that slot.

For the exercises it just currently recreating/redrawing stuff from either one of the Morpho pocket books which I like because they are small and portable and lay open flat for ease of study. Or a comic. Currently Jack Kirby's Mister Miracle.

It is not a super structured approach. I kinda want to go through my copy of Dynamic Life Drawing in a more structured way...

The rest of my drawing time is spent doing the fun stuff I actually want to do. It all feeds in to one another.

The brush itself most likely uses the Flat Brush at various sizes and opacities, depending on the section. Watch this video for a good summary on when to use thicker or thinner lines.

For painting colors, look up the Grisaille Method as it is used by modern anime artists: you can find quite a few YouTube tutorials on this. It involves rendering all the shading on a monochrome layer and all the flat colors on another, then using Multiply layers to superimpose the color onto the monochrome.

I don’t use Clip Studio Paint (I draw recreationally on a 2017 iPad Pro with Procreate), but for effective painting try and research if your app has a Alpha Lock function. By Alpha Locking a layer with a painted object, any additional painting you do on that layer can only affect the previously painted areas. This is very useful when adding the shading in the monochrome layer, so you can just carefully paint a midtone grey that matches the character’s silhouette at first, and then easily add the shadows afterwards without risk of making a mess.

If you’re unfamiliar with human anatomy, go to The Internet Archive and download a free, public domain pdf of George Bridgman’s book(s), my personal choices being either Constructive Anatomy or Complete Guide to Drawing From Life.

If you’re willing to spend some money and have Amazon service in your country that doesn’t cost too much in shipping fees, I’d also recommend Michel Lauricella’s Morpho: Simplified Forms, especially for beginners. The more complete version of the book is technically more popular among artists, but I think you need to be an intermediate artist with a solid foundation before you can make use of that in-depth anatomical information. The Simplified Forms is enough to get you making figures, and anatomically correct enough to give you a strong head-start. Be careful of overestimating your progress while learning from this book, though: every anatomical illustration is deceptively simple, and you need to really think about how the shapes comprise a three dimensional volume if you want to make the most out of it. It’s relatively cheap and packed with information, but you need some initiative to really take advantage of what it’s offering.