Another Use For Moving Holds…?

I had a bit of an epiphany today. I have been re-reading The Illusion of Life and in particular the description of moving holds therein. Now we all know that the purpose of a moving hold is to keep a character alive during a stationary moment, so nothing new there.

Now, in studying human anatomy lately I have been making use of a CG skeleton model that can be rotated to any position. This is great for getting an idea of how everything fits together given that a real dissected human isn’t readily available to me! I rotate the model around and study it from multiple angles, building a three-dimensional image of the thing in my head from which I can draw. I was doing this yesterday when my attention was momentarily caught by something on the TV. When I returned to looking at the model, I was suddenly extremely aware that I was looking at a flat 2D image, and I had trouble working out how things were directed towards and away from me. Rotating the model however, even by just a small amount, popped the three-dimensional image back into my head and I was able to proceed with my drawing studies.

So how does this fit in with moving holds? Well I wondered if perhaps moving holds have more advantages than keeping a character alive. Perhaps they are important for maintaining a solid three-dimensional idea of the character in the audience’s minds. Maybe in leaving a character still, the audience loses the dimensionality of the scene as everything flattens out, and believability is hampered.

Am I onto something here? Or am I talking rubbish? I’ve never heard mention of this before, so I’d be interested to hear any views on the subject!

Upper Arm Anatomy

Still plodding on with the anatomy studies. The upper arm has surprised me actually – I thought it looked quite complicated but it’s not too bad really. In most people you can’t see much in the way of muscles anyway, but even in people with well-defined muscles, things aren’t really that complicated.

Anatomy Cintiq Studies

While I’ve made a lot of progress in learning the muscles of the body, I have been struggling to identify them in a real flesh-covered person. So tonight I tried grabbing some photos from the internet and drawing over them in Photoshop on my Cintiq. I’m not sure how clear they are to anyone other than myself, but I think I learned quite a lot doing this. I’ve drawn bones in a cream colour and muscles in red. In the first example I’m not sure I have got the large Latissimus Dorsi muscles at the bottom correct as one side is quite a lot different from the other.

In the next example below I was really struggling to see the part of the Trapezius muscles in the centre of the back between the shoulder blades, so I have left that region undefined.

In the next example showing Rafael Nadal, the muscles were particularly pronounced and so mostly easy to locate.

And finally, this is the only front view I tried. The muscles at the front are a lot simpler than at the back.

Anatomy Continued

Pelvis Studies and A Couple of Sketches

I fell off the anatomy study wagon with the hectic schedule at work. Things are calming down a bit now though, so I’m trying to get back to it. The plan is to learn the anatomy of the human body before embarking on the animation for my Mime short. I’m not saying the mime character will have complex anatomy, but I find knowing more about the real thing allows better control of a cartoon character.

I’ve pretty much learned the head, shoulders, chest and back and am concentrating on the hips at the moment, which means starting with the pelvis. I used to think that the skull was the hardest set of fused bones to draw. I was wrong. I’m wrestling with finding a way to quickly and simply depict the pelvis. It’ll always be buried under flesh so I don’t need detail, I just need to be able to position and orient it.

And just for the hell of it, here are a couple of sketches. The woman on the right is the reason I’m posting these. I was trying to depict different materials with different pen and pencil strokes. First there’s her curly hair, then there’s her bobbly jumper under her coat, which you can see the top of, then there’s the fur around the hood of her coat, and finally there’s the main material of her coat, which was like suede if memory serves me correctly.