How to be a guy what can draw well.

Okay, I myself am now in a mood (Rinku knows why) so there will not be my usual paragraph of being silly, so buckle up we're charging right into it. It being how one goes about not sucking at art.

First off. Art school is not magical nexus of instant artistic knowledge, its a school. Grades, structure, study, tuition, school. Everyone who has declared that they can't be a serious artist because they don't have the time or money for art school, that they are just hobbyists, that they can't be serious unless they're professionals. I want you to shut up.

No, I am not some elitist art major, or a snobby veteran of countless art classes. No, I am a hobbyist who is dead serious about his hobby. And why shouldn't I be? I love drawing, and nothing pleases me more than to draw well, except perhaps to draw better than I ever have before. And I am for the most part self taught by trial and error and constantly bugging a guy who knows what he's talking about for critique of my work (Thank you Rinku!).

Which brings me to the point of this long rant. I want to share a small portion of my practice with you, our non-existent readers.

At the moment I am teaching myself how to do the human body properly, from the bones all the way to complex poses using a few books I picked up cheap at a used book store. Before this I briefly ate up a few pages of my sketch book just drawing basic shapes, Squares, circles and triangles, plus their corresponding three dimensional shapes (more on why later).

These are the books.

I'd prefer to say there's one end all book on the human figure, but there really isn't. Most art books have their strengths and weaknesses, and you'll do well to do research and buy a mix of books that will balance out each others weaknesses. As for me, this was the best I could get at a reasonable price. You will also be aided by a solid understanding of basic shapes as mentally breaking down the complexities of the human body into simple shapes will vastly improve your understanding of them and your ability to draw and remember them.
That said, let us examine my efforts so far.

1. 1st attempt. Focus: Shapes______________2. 2nd Attempt. Focus: Shapes of Skull

3. Detailed focus on skull, minimal use of reference for drawing on left.

(I apologise for the pixelation, just click on the image to zoom in, that'll fix it.)

This was mostly done with reference to Anatomy for artists. In the 1st and 2nd drawings you'll note how I laid out the basic shape of the skull as a set of squares. This was my own observation independent of the book, and the basis for my attempts in the third drawing. While this isn't a perfect shape, its a simple visual short hand for the actual thing and good for fleshing out the size and proportion before doing details. The grid was drawn in by me, though I wish I hadn't as it gets in the way of the shading.

While this isn't a bad start, the real trick will be when I can reliably and and (much more) accurately draw the bones of the skeleton without reference, after that will come learning musculature. And while it certainly is tempting to just skip to practising people practising the framework of the body gives you a good sense of what the human form can and cannot do. It's the basics, and it's surprisingly not that boring to practice them after all.