I have been putting my articulated skeleton through some rigorous testing lately to see how useful it can be for practicing anatomy studies. I haven’t been very satisfied with it in the past because all my drawings seemed to come out looking weird.
And then I realized it probably had something to do with how I was taking the photos.
If the camera is too close to a small model at chest level, the head will appear above as if we’re looking up at it, and the feet will appear below as if we’re looking down on them. It will look distorted.
So instead of using my phone to take photos of the skeleton, I used my DSLR camera with a 200mm lens. This allowed me to get very far away from the model, and the resulting photos looked much more proportional.
Then I began trying to draw muscles over the skeleton photos from memory. I would check my work with an anatomy app to see if I was drawing the muscles in the right places and with the right shapes.
After a few days I noticed my drawings were getting much better and I was needing the anatomy app less and less. I feel like this art mannequin can be extremely beneficial to artists wanting to master proportions and anatomy.
Now if I can just figure out a method to produce it at a reasonable cost. Currently, this female art mannequin costs about $700-$800 to create.
