Learning to draw people

I have been doodling for some 27 years but up until yesterday I have never managed to draw anything that remotely resembled a human. They have just never interested me and every attempt had been a huge failure. Recently have been watching a lot of anime and have become very interested in drawing my own web cartoon. With my current drawing skills that really limits me to being able to only draw animals which is fine but you've got a lot more room for character development and story telling with humans and when you can actually draw beyond just the head of a character...

Yesterday however it all clicked and on my new Samsung tablet (with cartoons on in the background) I was suddenly able to draw human faces! Human faces but not the body. So how do you learn to draw humans when you really, really can't draw them?

Well... when I draw animals its from spending a lot of time working out what shapes fit and where to create an image for example a face might start out with a circle and so on... its the same with humans however at least for me that idea has been very hard to grasp. Until now...

Technology such as pen input into tablets and graphics tablets has made digital drawing much more accessible and with it comes loads of tools and apps that are either free or very cheap to use. This can really help to transform your drawing ability. I have started to use an App called magic poser. What magic poser allows you to do is to adjust and resize a 3D model to act as a subject for your creations. This allows you to either use them as a guide/ reference for the positioning of your characters limbs or to directly trace over the lines providing that the model is open source and used with permission of the artist for that purpose.

As I mentioned earlier I tend to draw using shapes and so I'm using these models to work out the shapes that exist in a human character in various positions so that I can eventually create my own style for a future web comic. There are advantages to having models to base your characters such as the ability to animate a scene quicker as you can keep set models with specific parameters (height, size, proportions) for each character so that your artwork can be consistent. I am a fan of learning and forming my own style through. If you do not have a tablet pc or graphics tablet then you could also create a scene using 3D models and print them out as a reference for your work. This is great because you can get these characters to make any pose and pose with multiple objects...

Here is the progress I've made so far...

I'm still learning to draw people (this is day two). Its always best practice not to draw over someone's art work unless you credit them and have permission for the use of their images (I used models by the magic poser app thats created to help creators with their drawings) but having the ability to work out human shapes from anything like photos, models... is going to help your understanding of human anatomy and having the models there to reference whist you draw free hand in your own style may well be useful in the future. It's always best to try and develop your own style, even if you use an image as guide lines you should learn to draw it differently in a way thats yours as it's good practice. In the future if you sell drawings you will need to use your own style and to be able to draw freehand.