Male Arms

Been looking at anatomy so I can break down the structure to better inform my thumbnails when preparing to animate.

Today I have been looking at male arms a little closer. Firstly I looked at the muscle structure a little closer, broke it down into the different parts then simplified the structures further in order to give a clearer idea of the shapes involved.

I then applied the basic structure to photos of people in various positions and as you can see in the bottom left of the image below started to apply these shapes to cartoon images with unrealistic proportions. 

Finally I then tried to apply the shapes to different builds and in poses not from reference

12-02-14 Quick Poses

I've been finding the poses on pose maniacs to be pretty stiff so I went in search of somewhere else that generate poses to draw. I came across quickposes.com which I'm glad I found because it's been set up by the guy who produced one of my favourite animations:

This is awe inspiring work and never fails to impress me. the poses that are brought up are all photographs of real dancers and as might be obvious are often in the middle of a movement. amazingly fun to draw and I reckon a good place to get to grips with gesture a little better.

Weakest: 11, I dont think this portrays the motion properly
Srongest: 2, I feel the line of action works well here.

Also moved onto the rest of the skeleton later on in the day. I'm starting to understand the structure as a whole before i go into gender differences, it's rough but I think i'm getting somewhere with it. Here are a couple of bits from my notes but it isn't exactly show worthy especially as spellings are an issue.

06-02-14 - Facial expression

A lot of personality can be displayed in the subtle change sin facial expression, If i want to mimic them properly a firm grasp of what it takes to display an emotion properly is probably advised. I started my session (which turned out to be much longer today than previous sessions) with trying to copy pictures of people and then assess what it was that made them display the emotion they had.

These were the first two I produced but I was disatisfied that I wasn't capturing the subtlety of the expressions and felt this was probably down to a lack of proper anatomy and understanding of the structure of the face. So I started to look at muscle structures, again copying images but after asking for feedback from one of my coursemates it became clear that the bone structure was my real downfall. From then on I've been watching video lectures on the bone structure of the skull in pretty intense detail and while i probably won't remember the exact names of each of the sections described I'm much more likely to remember their structure after being made more aware of them.