Are You Stuck On Horses? What Other Blogs Don't Tell You About How Anatomy Effects Art

Well, are you?

I am. Stuck on horses that is. It feels like the last million blogs have all featured horses. In reality it only been three or four. Most of them aren't even on this website. But there is a valid reason for that.

The reason does have something to do with me learning to draw via horses. And I guess that could make me bias. However I feel strongly that they help, so I'm going to give you them.

When I learn't, and hopefully when you learn from me, we use the circle method. Oh no! Not more circles. I know, I know, I have gone a bit over the top with the bloody circles, but just bare with me.

You see, as I have said, (a lot)the circles are there to represent something. In my last blog that was a part of the horse, like a shoulder, or a knee. But recently I was giving a impromptu art lesson to a 11 year old, when they taught me a very important thing.

It wasn't a skill, so much as how to see a lack of one. Let me explain my self.

This girl had just drawn a very interesting mermaid (and no, it wasn't a mermaid-horse). I took one look at this mermaid and thought, she has done it wrong.

I noticed first up that she obviously knew what a waist was, as the creature had one. However it looked as though she didn't know why it was there.

I drew a picture of some bones, and showed her why the waist dipped in at the middle. Of course, she already knew this and I had just wasted several precious minutes of her attention span.

So the next problem I attempted to fix was the lack of definition in the arms of the underwater deity.

And it was at this point that I finally figured out what the problem was. Because she said, after I drew her a skinny arm with shape, "I prefer girls without muscles."

Then I lost her attention and she left.

Girls have muscles. They do. Otherwise we would be incapable of moving. We also have bones, and fat. And when you draw something, be it a mermaid, horse or dog, you have to take into account the effect these under skin structures.

That is one of the reasons that in step by step drawings the shapes are present. They are a simplified way of showing the budding artist the effect of the main structures of bone or muscle in the creature we are drawing.

You can't just draw what you think the outline would look like with out taking everything else into account, because it will never work.