[MC1986]

Hey everyone, I wonder if any of you could shed some light on something that's been on my mind lately. For anyone attempting to learn anatomy, is it better to study the entire skeleton before moving onto the muscles, or should they simultaneously learn the bone structure, muscles, volumes, etc of each section of the body separately?

The reason I ask is that I've taken anatomy courses at two different schools, and was less than impressed with the way the material was handled. We basically spent an entire semester drawing the skeleton, and then spent the second semester learning musculature.

On the other hand, I've also taken a five day workshop under a different instructor that covered everything at once in a practical, simplified way, and I have to say, I definitely feel like I learned more in that one week than I did in an entire year with the other instructors, mainly because their method of teaching was pretty much textbook-grade. Rather than teach us to apply the information to the practice of figure drawing, they simply provided the name, function, etc. of all the bones and muscles, and pretty much left us to our own resources to figure out how to apply it.

I certainly think it's important to study the skeleton for a thorough understanding of the body's structure, movement, solid forms and volumes, and landmarks that affect surface form. However, spending an entire semester on it seems a bit excessive, in my opinion. Anatomy is really something that should be studied for the purpose improving one's figure drawing skills. Unfortunately, most instructors basically have the student memorize all the bones and muscles and stop there. Personally, I think it's better to simplify everything as much possible, and study the major anatomical forms and landmarks in a structural, intuitive way that can easily be applied to freehand construction of the figure.

What do you guys think?

[AWSullivan]

I'm certainly no expert but I'll offer my thoughts.

I've found that understanding musculature has been far more beneficial to my figure drawing than skeletal knowledge. This could be because I have a cursory understanding of the human skeleton or something else. I'm not sure.

One thing for certain is that the study of anatomy is a lifelong endeavor and no amount of time studying the human body is wasted effort. You will benefit from every moment you spend drawing, observing and understanding anatomy inside and out.

I hope someone here can offer you a more scholarly answer but that is my self taught and extremely amateur understanding.

Good luck!

~Anthony

[MC1986]

Thanks! I guess what I'm really trying to ask is:

If you were to design a one-year anatomy curriculum, would you introduce musculature in the first semester, or hold off on it until the students had mastered the skeleton? Personally, I think it's important to spend as much time as possible learning skeletal construction (at the very least to know where the muscles attach), but the sooner one can incorporate all the elements of the figure together, the better.

Ideally, I think the first semester of a one-year course should cover both the bones and muscles, section by section, while the second semester should include features, surface landmarks, simplified anatomical volumes, and movement. The problem is, one semester may not be enough time to learn the nuts and bolts of the figure before moving onto more advanced material.

[AIMonkey]

I think the skeleton has importance for proportions, while muscles are important for the eventual lines/curves

Just my take on it, I'm not an expert on this, still learning and have my problems with this subject myself

Sorry for the long read, became 3-4 times as long as I expected
Also sorry if it's written kind of awkward. I tend to get lost in typing what's in my thoughts. (You might just need to put your own thoughts on some thing to get it)
Was a quick type, Tried dividing it into subtitles for better read

--- My school experience with anatomy for Skull
Here one semester takes about 7 weeks on my school (? US to Dutch education translation can be confusing)
We had one semester with Anatomy, though just the skull. Eventually we just didn't have enough time for the skull, let alone the entire skeleton And muscles

But the big focus and purpose of the lessons were the proportions of the skull, after that we applied the muscles with transparent paper
This to get an understanding how the muscles cover the bone and tell us how the face becomes what we see for real with skin and all, because that is Very different from the skull

Because of the skin we can have a hard time at guessing the proportions of the face because it's not something we "look" at

But in every face, that skull is indeed there. And it's important

--- My take on purpose of Skeleton and Muscles
Now while we haven't done a complete skeleton, I think the same applies to that, but with added aspects like motion

The "stick" figures some people use to set up a pose usually seem to represent the skeleton.
Because the skeleton is that what has the joints and all. Those pivot points are very useful to get the muscles right and of course the proportions

But when it comes to muscles, those make up allot of the final shapes and curves that are seen by us.
I find it important to have them applied at roughly the right location on your "skeleton".
You will need to know where what muscle is, comes from and goes to, how it changes shapes with different gestures.
With the help of the proportions in your skeleton, the appliance of muscles should go fine and look correct

My conclusion to this would be that the Skeleton is very important to get every proportion correct and very important as a guideline for the muscles and everything else.
Bones don't change shapes, Muscles do, so it's much easier to "calculate" with bones

--- Some further afterthought ...rant? Some about my take on teaching it
Not saying that a skeleton is a must, but it can be helpful
And it doesn't hurt to just skip the skeleton and go straight to muscles. Seen enough people from all camps making different approaches.
Also seen people who do seem to have that skeleton in the back of their head, but don't have to put it on paper or anything

When something is wrong in proportions one can fall back to the skeleton for help, if the curves of the body are wrong muscle wise, one can fall back to muscles, etc.
But both are part of the body

As always, it's easy to say that us humans are different in so many ways, it's hard to design lessons that fit everyone.
Better yet, I would say it's impossible to give everyone the same attention/feedback/help. But I can understand it's very hard to tutor every student separate

It's best to look at each class and see what the most common "mistakes" are and focus on that when teaching. And on the Skeleton <> Muscle topic, I think it's useful to know where they shine the most,
and if possible have a muscle first approach for those who can use it and same for skeleton
But I'm not expert on teaching either, so can't really go into that

[tmth]

I'd say go for simultaneous learnin'. Sometimes you can wrap your head around a particular bone structure problem through some little observation you make with muscles, and vice versa.
Like it was said: I would concentrate on bones' proportions and muscles' masses and volumes. You'll draw a foreshortened bicep way more often than a foreshortened humerus, no?

[Millah]

Bones for proportions, muscles for mass, keep on going and you'll kick some ass.

[tully]

I would fully recommend the way I learned anatomy. I had a class for one semester -- I already had a pretty decent idea of the major forms of muscles and how the skeleton looked, but this class completely solidified it in my head.

My instructor was a forensic artist with quite a few years of experience. She gave us reams and reams of diagrams -- one for each muscle in the body, that showed individual muscles and outlined where they attached/inserted. For the first half of each class, we worked on understanding a particular muscle group, looking at photos of dissections as well as bones and good drawn diagrams, and the second half we had a life-drawing model (who was specifically selected to be a lean, muscular type) from whom we drew that particular area -- they'd be encouraged to do poses that gave variety in the area we were working on that day. In between classes, we had weekly assignments, to draw the basic skeletal form of that area of the body, and use tracing paper to layer up each muscle, which was drawn individually.

At the end of the class, we also had two days of drawing cadavers at the nearby medical school. I would recommend it to anybody, but it's obviously not the type of thing one gets the chance to do often.

I think it was particularly beneficial for me at the time because I had enough background knowledge to make it especially useful and really understand what the instructor was getting at. I suspect most of the people here would have that as well.

Though obviously it's great to have the benefit of a very experienced artist teaching you (and it's not something everybody gets), I'd tend to recommend the assignments we did with the layering. Do really good renderings of the bones, and layer muscles on top (photoshop is even good for this, but I found paper/pencil helped me remember better). Do research, find out all the muscle names and google them and see different representations of them. Then draw them to make them really stick in your head.

[Dreadd]

In my humble opinion, I think it depends more on the student than the particulars of the instruction. This is due to the fact that the shapes and forms generated in the skeletal structure are not always evident after having musculature layered on top of it. I can see how some individuals would benefit more from a class which deals with surface anatomy at first, then delves into why these things look the way they do, while others would benefit more from understanding the core of the human form first.

For me personally, I have taken several life drawing classes, and they have all been different. Some, you start with hard core anatomy lessons (bones first, then muscles, then surface details), while other classes simply throw a model in front of a bunch of artists and say "There he/she is, now draw!" For me, the second method was just as instructive as the first, but I could see how difficult it could potentially be for a person unfamiliar with drawing the human form.

-Dreadd