How did you get to study anatomy?

[Dorian_Grey]

Definitely invest on some anatomy book studies, and online tutorials and practice, practice, practice!

If you're not attending an art school (or maybe want extra practice) I actually use meetup.com
If you sign up with art you'll get notifications to find local free art classes and galleries and they help greatly!
I found some donation optional nude modeling drawing classes from there, as well as free watercolor classes. Plus you get to meet other artists and networking and making friends is a plus.

[AnnaLandin]

I've studied lifedrawing - though I would love to do it more regularly. Alas, I live out in the sticks, and it's tricky to find someone here willing to, uh, pose naked for money. XD

I mostly make do with reference-photos for the trickiest poses, use my own hands for the trickier hand-poses, and rely on my bank of knowledge for the rest - which isn't always optimal, but it's what I've got.

Like @keii4ii says, getting a basic knowledge of muscle groups and how they work is really, really good. Knowing how something looks from the inside will help you build up the shapes of your figures, and will make them look more realistic.

But yes. The greatest resource is a good life-drawing class. I've been to some that were more structured, with an actual teacher and assignments, and I've been to drop-in, pay-at-the-door type evening classes where all you get is the model and a place to sit - the rest is up to you. Both have been immensely useful.

[Waterdrain]

I took a figure drawing class about 2 years ago and it really helped me to understand how the body moved and work. Sometimes studying the different parts of the body can help you to understand which pieces should go and how much mass that they have. I also took an anatomy class in high school and we learned about bones and mussels and what kind of jobs that they did to keep us moving.
I know this might sound strange but, if you wanted too, you could look up videos on figure skating and pause them so that you could draw the pose that they are doing. Usually dancers and figure skaters have amazing bodies so they're really going to reference from. You could also try looking at Proko's videos, they're pretty fun to watch but for fair warning he does use nude references in his videos.
Hope this helps c:

[whydocowsfall]

Lots of people have mentioned this already, but life-drawing is very, very useful. Not only has it helped me improve my proportions and knowledge of anatomy, it's helped me improve my style and work faster - it's definitely the best thing I've found, and I'd like to do more because I know it can still help me to improve further! :DD

[DeadAccount]

Lifedrawing is also great because it helps you build your internal visual library : D so eventually the rhythm and proportions of poses should make it easier for you to draw from imagination, too. Alas, practicing muscles and bone structure can be tricky, as it depends on how much time you're allocated and your lifemodel's built, so books do come in handy here. Also one thing that helps me out at work (I do 3D) is this anatomy model we've got. This one is quite pricy, unfortunately, but you can find smaller and cheaper ones from 3D total, I think.

[toherrys]

While it's very good to study up on anatomy like bones and muscles, anatomy art books certainly never helped me. As with everything, the best teacher is practice : D

Life-drawing is pretty much the best you can do, as many have already said, but if you're like me and prefer to stay huddled up inside and online, photo refs are the next best thing. And really: practice. Make it a daily thing if need be. You learn a million new things every time.

Gesture drawing is another good practice method. It helps you get faster and learn the crucial points of anatomy. Choose ref images and set a time frame of 1min or something and try to get the pose drawn up as quickly and cost-efficiently as you can. This will be a pain at first : D But again, practice is key.

[UzukiCheverie]

I took life drawing classes in college and while I FUCKING HATED THEM UGH they definitely did help with my anatomy skills overall.

Remember - and this is a mistake I see a lot of starting artists make when they want to learn anatomy - drawing people isn't about getting the exact measurements of arms, legs, etc. and getting all the muscle detail in, etc. I see a lot of starting artists just doing front-poses off model sheets and such, but never anything else. Drawing people isn't just about structure, it's about movement.

When you draw people, you're still allowed to have your own style. You just need to learn how to apply what you've learned in say, life drawing classes, to your own work so that your characters follow movement rules and body proportions, but don't look rigid and stiff from trying to draw the anatomy on point.

I don't know if what I'm saying makes any sense :U

Remember, drawing anatomy =/= drawing people. Sounds weird, right? Rather, when you draw anatomy, you're learning where certain muscles are located, the distances between limbs and facial features, how the limbs work and all the directions they can go in, and the ones they can't, etc. When you draw people though, you're drawing emotions. You're drawing personality. Atittude. All those things that separate a human from just a body. Gesture drawing helps you learn how to capture emotion and movement and flow and all those things that capture more than just drawing a body on a model sheet.

Take life drawing classes, or go sit out in the park and draw the people walking by, or use photo references. Learn how to capture movement and personality. Combine the things you learn about anatomy with the things you learn about life. Like real, physical life in action, which we see every day and pay no attention to as we walk down the street.

And there you have it. Life drawing.

[Doubtcent]

What if you go to a morgue and draw the dead people they have laying about?
Is that still "still life" or would be called "still death"?
Plus they won't move.

[AnnaLandin]

What if you go to a morgue and draw the dead people they have laying about? Is that still "still life" or would be called "still death"?Plus they won't move.

I'm pretty sure that would be called "morbid" and "possibly illegal"! XD

Also, it doesn't produce the same results. A lot of early artists - of the Renaissance era, but others as well - are rumoured to have used dead bodies for reference for certain paintings and studies, and some of those paintings really look it. Dead muscles don't have the same tension as the muscles of a living person, then there's rigor mortis and general decomposition to deal with - so yeah. Unless those dead bodies are really fresh, they are NOT a good substitute.

[PotooGryphon]

I learned anatomy from life drawing classes in college and then using Pixel Lovely after college.

Also I recommend all of Andrew Loomis books. Here's a link to some PDFs of his books
http://www.alexhays.com/loomis/

[elixiadragmire]

I stared at Maura for 3 years.

I learned a lot, I also pose in the mirror or use posemaniacs.com

[Alli]

I learned a little bit of anatomy from an art class in middle school, but I learned a lot more from forensics class. We had to study the skeletal system and be able to estimate how tall a person was based on the length of his femur, etc. It also helps to just look in the mirror and give yourself reference points. For instance, your elbows will likely be where the smallest part of your waist is. The bottom of your nose might be in line with the bottom of your earlobe. Where, between your hip and knee, does your hand fall? You can also go on deviantart and search for reference poses for some practice.

Once you get anatomy figured out, the fun thing is that you don't necessarily have to follow it. Your style can be whatever you want, and as long as the parts appear to fit together in a way that makes sense, you can get away with less-than-accurate anatomy.

[winglesscomic]

I learned a lot from tracing!! Like A LOT!!!!!!!!

[Doubtcent]

Umm... I was just joking...

Plus I don't think it's illegal as long as you don't touch them or interfere with any investigations. Just studying them is okay as far as I've heard.

Maybe it'd be good to study if you were trying to draw dead people... I've been interested in doing a murder mystery sort of thing in the far future... for reference maybe.

But seriously, I was making fun of the term "still life". Is all.

Then again, I see your point.

Never mind.

The joke's over.

[Kayke]

I've had to take a lot of figure study classes over the years... but honestly I think the one that was most useful to me was this clothed figure drawing class I did in college.

Nude figure drawing can be good for learning how muscles work, but chances are most of the people you're drawing will have clothes on, so it's also good to know how fabric looks when people move differently.

My hint if you don't want to/can't take a figure drawing class is: watch movies and draw sketches! You can pause the movie to study a pose and sketch it out. That can really help you learn how the body moves and give you a wide range of poses and body types.

[LTyler]

Here's a really good tutorial series that helped me out quite a bit when I was younger: http://foervraengd.deviantart.com/art/MANGA-to-REALISTIC-PART-ONE-215317699

It's a 12-part tutorial series, plus additional tutorials. So I think it's definitely worth checking out ...
That being said, another great resource are medical anatomy text books. When you study and learn all the underlying muscles and structures of the body (not just the skin-level stuff), proportions are a lot easier to get down. (the whole '7-8 heads tall' thing just isn't really all that great...).
So yeah. Study, pretend your a med student. Copy the bones and muscle figures in said text books a few zillion times until you have all the structures down. Then start adding skin... hair... then clothes. Start drawing from life - hang out in cafes, parks, and stores and just draw people doing their everyday stuff.
It's important to learn realism. All great abstract artists are masters of realism first and foremost - comic book arts are abstractions of reality. Master reality & its rules, then, you can begin bending and breaking those rules in an intelligent and knowledgeable way, instead of simply copying other peoples abstractions and styles.

Best of luck to you and your studies!

[iddqd]

I don't know if the knowledge of anatomy is all that useful, actually. My first anatomy book was by Burne Hogarth, and I've learned all the surface muscles I could, and could draw them without looking them up. The problem was, it was an anatomy book, not a figure drawing book, so as a result all my figures tended to be very stiff, and all the women I drew looked like bodybuilder ladies on some major steroids. I still refer to it now, but mostly when trying to get a particular anatomy detail right.

Like people have said, life drawing is your number one option for learning anatomy (or more precise, figure drawing). When you don't have that, your second best option is the photos. What I would recommend is a good book on life drawing (yes, notice the irony here), which you can use as a companion to your studies from photos. I think hands down the most useful life drawing book for a comic artist is The Vilppu Drawing Manual by Glenn Vilppu.

I've never done life drawing and often find that when I try to draw from imagination the poses tend to be off here and there in subtle ways. Photo references and a vast knowledge of drawing from life can definitely help avoid that, but while the latter is not available to some of us, photo refs for tricky poses should be fairly easy to get with a friend and a photo camera.

[AnnaLandin]

@vincentprendick Oh, I know you were joking!

.... I now realise that my response to your joke is quite possibly very, very creepy. >.< I'm sorry! It's just my art-history nerdery getting away from me again; I had a teacher who liked to show us slides of Renaissance artwork and talk about artists illicitly studying corpses to learn anatomy - which at the time was grossly illegal.

[Menbung]

When I started to get "serious" about anatomy I used the Burne Hogarth's dynamic anatomy book, that helps ya with all the muscles, mucles names, and even some forshortening.

That would lead ya somewhere, but it's not nearly enough...

As peeps say, life drawing, that really helps you, you need to see how the body changes when it's in motion. When a person stands still in real life, they don't stay rigid like those anatomy/proportion drawings that you tend to see everywhere. Even when your figure it's standing still (sitting, crouching, etc) the viewer should see that the body is capable of motion. Is not a rigid plastic doll...

Life drawing helps you with that, so if you can't go out there (or u don't like to), there are pretty good sites with naked models doing pretty cool poses that convey motion (even if they are sitting).

Also anatomy and proportions are good things to study together, you can know how to draw a perfectly anatomically correct arm, but if you always draw it 2 times larger than what it should, it may look off with the rest of the body (unless that's what you're looking for), so is good to take that into consideration when practicing anatomy, to see how far arms extend, correlations between feet and forearms, hands and face, etc.

So, time to watch some naked peeps !!, "Menbung why the PC is filled with naked japanese women!!!", "T-they are for my a-anatomy practice routine!"

I'm sorry I tried to find that awesome page with model ref, but I don't know where I put the link D:

[zelkats]

Strange... Just a couple of days ago I was talking with a colleague about life sketches and learning anatomy. She studied at an art university and she took anatomy study as an elective course. For some reason, she was taken to a medical school to observe dead bodies (the one she saw was headless..) and the doctor-lecturer there was idly cutting it open and showing students the insides and stuff.

So yeah, apparently that's a thing at some places O_o