001 - Shifting limitations
Drawing shapes thinking and vice versa, but you can't study what's unseen. I made a step forward today. I am professionalising. 🤗
There are different ways to study gestures and figures: asking friends to freeze for hours, participating in professional live sessions or getting yourself some online source. You could also sit down in public, get some plant-based tastyccino and try to catch moments of motions in seconds.
Recently, I noticed an issue with references I had access to so far: They were nice for the very beginning, getting a grasp of proportions and big shapes across the body like lightning across the leg, breasts or upper torso on a really rough level. This is, for instance, also handy for gestural studies and thinking about dynamics in pose.
However, they were very limited and as soon as I wanted to zoom in, I ended up in pixel land very quickly. These limitations were inherited by my progress: With these sources, I could not study muscles, finer details and shapes in a refined way. Look at the beautiful model below. Instead of just seeing an upper torso as a chunk and guessing about the paths of muscles, sites of tension and softness, or just characteristic marks like the position of the rib cage and pelvis, you can see a plethora of details. You see that the upper torso is a volume with a surface sculptured by muscles and organs finding their ways along the body and underlying skeletal structure. Take your time and look at the shadows on the torso of the enlarged pose in the centre.
source: cover image of public gumroad website of package
Today, I overcame these limitations and bought my first reference pack of high-quality photographies of a beautiful female model in different poses. It cost me only about 17 EUR for more than one thousand images. Pricing depends on what you want to use the references for. This and other packages are provided and can be purchased on grafitschool's gumroad.
I spent my day skipping through the package and I am simply stunned by the quality and level of details depicted in the imagery. The limitations are no longer the resolution and missing variety of references used. The limitations switched sides: From the screen to my hands, pencils and paper.
Now, I am the limitation.