For a recent local exhibition ran by A Canny Collective, which I was a guest artist for, with the theme of love, I decided to focus on self-love in the form of body positivity, so in my pieces, I wanted to illustrate multiple bodies of different shapes and sizes. I am confident with the message behind these pieces as everyone should learn to love and appreciate their own body shapes and sizes, buuuut there was also another reason why I had wanted to draw bodies for this mini project, as I wanted to use it in order to get better at drawing anatomy. Luckily for me, an artist named Chelsea Gracei had posted a video on youtube discussing and showing how she specifically draws anatomy and poses.
Chelsea Gracei is an illustrator who I have followed on social media for a while now. This was the artist who I had taken inspiration from in the #DrawThisInYourStyle challenge on Instagram a month ago when I had redrawn one of her characters. Her style is more cartoony so her figures are not exactly anatomically correct, but she does have enough knowledge on anatomy that she knows how to manipulate it so that her characters are still pleasing to the eye.
In the video, she discusses how she uses oval shapes to form her characters, as it gives a more flowing sense, creating more movement within the character than using a more blocky shape would. Following the artists tutorial, as well as reference images so that I would have a better idea of anatomy, I had tried drawing the first of four figures. The reference image I had used was of my friend and was posted on her private Instagram in confidence, so it would be inappropriate to show that reference image within this post.
The figure I was drawing had bigger hips but a slim waist so I tried to convey this within the oval shapes I was using. The proportions did look a bit off, but I decided to just leave them until I cleaned up the sketch a bit. In the original reference image, both hands were positioned on the hips, but I eventually chose to move them both behind the figure as I wanted the woman’s curves to be the focal point of the piece. I did initially just have one hand on the hip, but I felt the proportions looked weird within the arm without any shading and I had not intended to add and shading as to keep my design minimal, so I ended up just positioning both arms behind the woman’s back.
Once I had an initial sketch down, I tried planning out the background elements, positioning a shape behind the specific character of which I felt would best complement their figures and positioning. I had ended up only creating four pieces as I was working with a short time frame, but in the future, I would like to draw even more body shapes and sizes of all different genders and ethnicities as I would like my work to be inclusive to all. I still had further refinements to make at this point shown in the images below, but I wanted to have minimal line work, so from the sketches, I had created a white silhouette, which had cut out the figure against its background shape, then I would later line the characters, quite boldly but only using the lines to help define the bodies. The linework would taper off and not exceed the specific shapes as I wanted to keep the characters quite clean and confined to their shapes.
I plan to carry on this explanation of my process within an upcoming post, but as well as discussing my own work, I will also be talking about the exhibition as a whole and my experiences with that.
Moving back to the topic of this post, anatomy and learning from a video by Chelsea Gracei, I do feel that I had learnt from her personal process, creating more organic and flowing body proportions and positions, but I do believe I will still need reference imagery if I am to create more figures in the future, as I feel without, my proportions would end up being very off. I do plan to work on my anatomy skills and knowledge more in the future, but I feel, for the time being, I can work well with Gracei’s process whilst using reference imagery. I do believe that in future projects I will refer back to this artists tips and techniques as I did find them useful whilst working on these figures.
Bibliography
Gracei, C. (2019). How to Draw Poses that Look Natural and Flowy. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alamCiqsIb8 [Accessed 25 Feb. 2019].
All other images within this post are my own unless stated otherwise.
Melon.R 