About learning Anatomy

Anatomy studies: What I've learned about practicing anatomy

This is one of my early anatomy studies. I'm not sure if it's maybe even my first but it is the oldest I could find. For one of my first or even the first anatomy study I think it actually turned out pretty good. But I already sculpted really gross stuff before. That is why I started to really dive deep into anatomy references in the first place. And it took me quite a while to get to this point. I looked up references from all over the place. I started out with pinterest and google and then found out about Andrew Loomis and eventually anatomy for sculptors, which is by far the best reference book about human anatomy out there!

This is my second anatomy study and it's funny to see how I just got lost into all the écorché references I found. Who needs fat and skin after all? This might have taken me even longer than my first study, because I just couldn't help myself to keep refining and refining and really sink deep into sharp defined details. I'll tell you later down the road how I think about this today, because there is a point I want to make.

And here is my third anatomy study. To be honest, I really thought I'm getting better and better with this. And yes, It kind of is getting better in terms of gesture, the flow of the forms, brushstrokes and the gereral sculpting technique, but at the same time I also fell into a trap. And that is, that no living human being on this earth looks like this. It is a human without fat and without skin. I've spend many hours digging really deep into the references to try replicate what I see as exactly as I possibly could. I also just copied what I've seen like a copy machine without thinking about why the muscles look the way they look, or why they attach to this point on that bone here and that point there. I just copied écorché pictures as good as I could but I did not understand.

I realized that I should probably also sculpt women. For that reason I bought my first anatomy tutorial on flippednormals.com made by Nicolay Naydenov - female anatomy for artists.
I can't recommend that tutorial enough. Actually every Tutorial made by him. He also has a lot of free Tutorials and also live streams on his youtube channel "speedchar". And as the name implies, Nicolay is reeeeaally fast and probably the fastest sculptor I know. And this might intimitade many people but I have to admit, that fast approach really helped me to focus on the really importan things and to optimize for learning when I'm studying. I get lost in details easily which is not the best thing to do when the overall shape is not at the right spot yet. So it's better to first exercise fast and do many short anatomy studies than spending weeks on just one figure which doesn't even has skin.

So that's one of the most important lessons I learned from my first attempts on learning anatomy. Don't dive deep into all the fine details of écorché models like a copy machine and instead try to do many shorter studies and optimize for learning. Try to make a hundred heads. And then make two hundred. And Bodies, legs, arms and so on.

Check out the tutorials I screenshoted for you above:

- "Head Anatomy and Sculpting Exercises Tutorial" - by Nikolay Naydenov.
He is crazy fast, but that was actually really helpful for me. If you want to make better heads fast, get this. Or jump over to youtube and check out speedchar.

- "Female Anatomy For Artists" - by Nikolay Naydenov.
You will not only learn about female anatomy but also make a fun little exercise and turn the female body into a male one. If you want to make good looking bodies fast, check this out.

- "Anatomy for Sculptors" - by Christian Bull
This one is absolutely genius. You learn about the fundamentals of anatomy and how it actually works. I was surprised when I started the tutorial because I was expecting so see the ZBrush UI. Instead I saw the instructor with another almost naked dude explaining to me how the human body works. He jumps over to ZBrush later on though and shows how he sculpts and how he thinks while doing so. This will totally change your understanding of Anatomy and give you really nice insights on how to think while sculpting anatomy.

- "Introduction to Anatomy" - by Henning Sanden
This Tutorial is probably the gold standard of all Anatomy Tutorials. You will learn what you have to learn and you will understand what you have to understand.

For Reference also check out these sites:

I hope you found my little learning experience helpful and you could relate to it. Thanks for stopping by :)