Legendary Disney animator, Milt Kahl, was quoted:

“The ability to draw and be able to turn things and the ability, the knowledge that enables you to caricature and exaggerate in the right direction and emphasise the difference between things is what you’re doing all the time. Any time you’re doing a strong drawing of anything well, your drawing is strong because you’re depicting why this is different from something else. You need that figure-drawing background in order to sharpen. Every animator should have this background and unfortunately, they don’t.”

That being said, one thing that I’m going to start doing is trying to do draftsmanship and drawing the human figure. Hopefully over time, doing this as a practice could help strengthen my artwork in the long run.

First off, the female form.

I have a book that I got a while back called Anatomy for Fantasy Artists. In it, it has some various poses of both a man and a woman posing, as well as showing how light falls across the human body in different angles. For now, I’ve chosen to quickly draw two female poses from the book:

A couple things I learned doing this are:

• The female body is very curvy in nature (if that wasn’t obvious already)
• I need to learn that the waist is much smaller than I think it is
• Drawing a curve through the center of the torso helps me in directioning the chest to the abdomen
• I need to pay more attention in curving out the chest or else the wider it becomes, the more “man-like” it becomes
• I need to practice drawing legs more, and I seem to have trouble with the calves.
• I have a habit of making every part of a female figure slim, and that I should not get caught in it or else it starts become more … alien-like
• “V”-ing out the hips seems to help more with transitioning to the thigh
• I need to remember that shoulders need to be parallel to the hip.