Reply To: Polybook – Jake

[Jake Korosi]

@numbernine It remains to be seen whether I’m good enough to be giving anyone else advice; but I will let you and everyone else know about the anatomy resource I found and like most.

It’s a series of videos on a YouTube channel called Proko, which teach the forms of human skeletal and muscular anatomy for artists.  The channel is dedicated to charcoal drawing; HOWEVER it takes no imagination to realize the information is just as useful for sculptors – including the digital kind; anatomy is anatomy.  The lessons are also quite watchable too, with lots of humor that trends on the campy/dad-joke side.  Proko has a paid “premium” service, run from his website (he plugs it at the end of EVERY video)  which has some longer videos and goes over some extra information, for instance explaining some of the deeper and hidden body muscles, that aren’t covered in the YouTube playlist – but the YouTube channel DOES cover all of the muscles you can see on the surface of the body, do not worry.

The videos are each only a few minutes long and they start with some anatomical basics before getting into first the bones, going through each part of the body, and then shifting to muscles.  The series is still in-progress, but the only parts that have not been made yet as far as I can tell are the lower-leg muscles and the foot muscles.  

You can find the anatomy playlist here.  I really personally recommend taking the time and watching the whole playlist, including all the bones; but I suppose if you want to save time, you can watch just the bone episodes which cover the bony surface joints (elbows, knees, hands, feet), but make sure you watch all the muscle anatomy and form videos of course.  You can feel free to skip the assignment example and critique videos, since again those more specifically focus on drawing.

And for sculpting, even after watching the anatomy lessons, nothing beats a good reference.  In the course Kent recommends the website 3d.sk, and I’ve found nothing better for model photos.  The super high-res photos and sets cost money of course; but I’ve found that you can open and save the lower-res photos on the product pages  for free, and while they’re not huge by any means, they’re often decent enough for using as sculpting references.   As I’m becoming more serious about my art though, I think eventually I will fork over the money for a few high-res sets; those paid photos are large enough that you can see like fingerprint-level detail in them.