# Why Artists Study Anatomy

I’ve been interested in drawing ever since I was a little kid. I like drawing people. I practiced a lot by looking at a cool picture of a character I like, and copying it as closely as I can.

The better I got at copying, the better my work became. I got some great results this way. I even advanced to the level where I could take photos of real-life people, then painstakingly copying it to produce a portrait. I was pleased by and proud of many of my works. Many agreed that I was “such a good artist, wow!”

![](https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/9bjgxV08qoF8s6kEhClEbt9bb9Bv2fw-WpAUV5YXbzf8iVPsnTH7SgmxGAsvqkHhdV-1wlYWSiORItT13Xn3LNTtLiYLLzfmDJT_ijsJ6gsb12AAOafscGOoawWOWob6EGKIiQHL)

*Here’s one piece I was particularly proud of; my sketch on the left, the reference on the right.*

In middle school, I took on a new challenge: **I wanted to draw commissions**. People would give me a character design, sometimes with a few reference images, and I would draw their characters. This was really hard for some reason…

I had no images to copy directly from. My results were inconsistent. I spend a lot of my time tweaking things like moving around the eyes, redrawing the nose, etc. After a bunch of commissions, I got reasonably decent at drawing a character at the ¾ angle, the most common one for portraiture. I did hundreds of commissions, almost all of them at that angle. Soon, I felt uncomfortable drawing faces at any other angle.

![](https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/6lJhIi5KZPa1gaIfSrUzEjJjOvLJD7MAzDC78hvuivZeN1OuTNMhaEJpvrEGdqkjcn7qFVt4LflqvJvpiyFsJvzJL2VQPmj9r3FImZWHiu6aBFXKsF5q-wuDnh8ckAYwtyAVWQDF)

*Some examples of the stuff I drew. Some of them look kinda strangely similar, hmm...*

I stopped doing art for a while because college was busy. When I started again, I took [an anatomy class](https://www.proko.com/human-anatomy-for-artists/#.XsHOTmhKihM). I learned a lot of great things. But the biggest lesson I learned was that I’ve been approaching drawing all wrong. The biggest thing I had missed was that **I had to understand the process that generates the image.**

The art an artist draws is a projection of the 3D object onto a 2D surface. By practicing by only copying from 2D images without studying the 3D structures that generated them, **I treated my reference images as being generated by some black box, and ignored the underlying gears and structures.**

For example, the shape of an eye is determined by the 3D structures of the eyeball projected into 2D. I never learned what an eye looks like in 3D, so I didn’t know how to draw it from an angle different from the 2D references I’ve seen. It turns out, the eye isn’t a flat almond-shape like it seems in a picture. It’s a sphere inset into the skull, wrapped from the top and bottom by flaps of skin. No wonder I hit a wall when I tried to draw an eye from the side. I had never seen the sphere or practiced drawing it as a sphere. I probably tried to draw it as a slightly squished almond, then wondered why it looked wrong.

![](https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/0gSNDOZH8rU-xnNm8Vorip_xppwy4H3dr_uQJHQWcwK0m5r6qwTV46EX8R5Bs2HX9kgf11OX0f3eIiCFTUEDEPpqk9tsRL___OV1Tu92n56560gGoCnAX0tY5uyBa_k2waTYePu_)

Another example: the lines describing a body in a drawing are dictated by the underlying bone and muscle structures. I had never studied these before. In the anatomy class, we looked at body parts in 3D. We reduced complex shapes (like a human torso) into simpler geometric shapes (boxes and spheres) which are easier to mentally rotate in space. Then we constructed lines of the torso using these basic shapes.

![](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pmzdiSpn0yy4NM2rSGUHCW4tjuPUf1TliyJi9Qtd4_wa7Amix66i1r00s8maPKQolx7HR-3g8duMfUSRutGQ_ZxoZgjSVh4UlE34rb2eV_TzquL9NZTchH_T0r-vTh5dez1qtpgM)

*Some of my sketches of the torso.*

Similarly, I learned to draw a head by starting with a sphere and a box. I then used these shapes to produce guiding lines, which then dictated where the surface features (eyes, nose, mouth) had to be located. If I wanted to draw the head from a different angle, I started with a sphere and box angled differently, which then produced different guiding lines. There was no more “guessing” where the eyes should go.

![](https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/f-Y32p0j7RdIuTXLWfT0wsvewtX_k6mUsg2ILeFEqI9WLEFwRkGDvTG28dWQ754_o8hhiCDMpn1Y8U-mzxTE4SYFv_xLVBWuGFVE1LAewetVrcbufDEhDh_Cxxd6PHFpfeb8C0sF)

[*From this post*](http://www.stanprokopenko.com/blog/2009/05/draw-head-any-angle/)

This is the reason artists draw from live models and study anatomy. The 3D shapes of the underlying structures generate the simple-seeming lines on a drawing. Drawing well requires opening the blackbox and looking at the internal gears of human anatomy.