Fake It Til you Make It

Just to tack onto my last post

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qinni:

i just wanna ask: do any of you guys actually use posemaniacs?

because I find that most of the poses on that site look extremely stiff and sometimes unnatural looking. And yet I see so many people online using it as anatomy studies, and I have yet to see one negative remark about it. Well, here’s mine:

I think it’s okay if you understand anatomy and have done a lot of life-drawings and treat is as a basic reference point for quick gesture drawings, but essentially understanding anatomy anyways and understanding where everything should go. however, most people i see using it simply outright copy the poses without understanding how anatomy really works, so their copies end up just as stiff and unnatural as the 3d model. There’s also the problem that some of the poses are off-balance and the center-line is completely off, etc. 

This also doesn’t even include the fact that often when doing poses that has a lot of perspective involved, you have to exaggerate certain parts of the perspective a lot more in a drawing for it to look natural, and so simply copying the pose will guarantee that it looks a little wonky perspective-wise…and a a lot of people simply just copy, not understanding where to exaggerate. 

I guess it’s just frustrating to see beginner artists using it as as a crutch instead of actually studying anatomy and going to life-drawings/drawing from life, and I don’t usually like to say stuff like “you shouldn’t do this” to their face but it’s just…i dunno. I think you need to understand how to use photo/3d-model references and it’s definitely not outright copying them. I just saw someone comment on a forum that it’s good to use posemaniacs instead of going to life-drawing, which I completely disagree with (i guess that’s why i’m talking about it here, because so many people were agreeing with them….). 

I guess the bottom line is, I’m not saying that it’s completely bad to use them, but that an artist really has to think about how they are using it. I personally haven’t seen any work I like that uses posemaniacs’ poses well, because I find all of them way too stiff and there’s an air of unnaturalness about the poses, but I’m pretty strict when it comes to art so i dunno, maybe it’s just me. 

these are just my opinions though; there’s no one absolute way of doing things, but these are my reasons for cringing a little whenever I see posemaniacs brought up for studying purposes. 

I think you are absolutely correct… the 3d rendering will never fully compare to a live model of any body type because despite what it might be posed as, it’s still just a doll. The muscles wouldn’t relax naturally as they would when a real person sits down… no matter how many pose nuances you have the doll mimic. I think a lot of the stiffness also has to do with the lack of gravity in other ways as well — the female models, for instance, have breasts, but they always maintain the same position even though real breasts have tissue as well as fat and swing/pull depending on if they’re supported or not and which way the person is turned, etc. Referencing from stiff bowls attached to a 3d model will never give someone an understanding of how they actually work. Same goes for other body parts, and you unfortunately miss out on good stuff like skin flaps and chunky body parts also influenced by gravity, and how a figure balances or rests on their legs or lying down can really bring life to the drawing (a model posed conveniently with their arms thrown up and two feet planted wherever won’t mimic this properly in most cases, obviously).

However! I think posemaniacs does have benefits, especially for beginners, if they acknowledge all that! From what I can tell, it’s a good way to get down really basic muscle structure, if you really have no clue how some muscles lay under the skin and haven’t referenced it before, drawing poses with skin may have you leaving important bumps and tense muscle things out, and posemaniacs (while they should still research how muscles actually push and pull together because it’s amazing) will help beginners learn to pay attention to that sort of thing (as in life drawing you should try and visualize skeletal structure even if you can’t see it, which might be a challenge if you’ve never even taken a look at the skeletal structure). The other thing I personally used to use it for starting out and still think has merit, is the actual act of getting into gesture drawing — yes life drawing will never be topped for practicing this, but the experience of having the poses force-switched every 30 seconds in various contortions and managing to get down the figure is a skill you have to work on, and most kids have a lot of trouble with (they want to toil on it and draw unnecessary information). Life modelling sessions do this almost always as warmup anyway and it’s a fantastic resource, but there’s no harm in someone just getting into gesture drawing and drawing naked human form to use posemaniacs to sort of get used to these types of things, or practice in the middle of the night before they run out and sign up for a life model class they’d likely have to pay for. :D

Sorry for wordiness, I just like these discussions >w<

yesthatdana:

brorails:

brorails:

SAI

PHOTOSHOP

i’ll tag it in my art tag so that you guys can find it easily too!!

i’m going to be reblogging this for the next few days to make sure that everybody who wants these programs can get them because i know they can be damn hard to find, so here you go guys!! ♥

omg sai with transparency. its a flipping MIRACLE

Oh goodness me, did I just accidentally reblog this for people who really need it?

(Source: dersea)

Notice at the very end of the extension it says “.exe.z…” presumably hiding “.exe.zip” which would confuse the file types and cause an error!

You fix it by going into tools->View (tab)-> uncheck “hide extensions for known file types”. This will reveal the .exe.zip, and if you erase .zip off the end it will just rewrite itself back into a proper .exe file and open properly!

Thanks Blue-Ten for helpin’ me out… xD

blue-ten:

This. Seriously, just try this.

I watched their video on this program and I’m like, “ok… not sure how that would work, but it’s got a free trial so whatever.”

I start drawing with it and it’s super smooth - I’m pleasantly surprised. Then I use the zoom tool and…

Is it vector? Is it raster? I don’t know, but I love it.

Zoom up on something you’ve drawn with one of the soft-edged brushes. It’s freaky XD.

I feel like I’m definitely gonna buy this (it’s $129 so I’ll have to wait on that XD) and I might do a more in-depth review when I recover from having my mind thoroughly detonated.

Tried to download the trial for Windows several times, but no matter what I do, the folder only extracts a couple of text/word documents (and trying to directly open the zip folder gives an error, something about it being invalid). :( I’m really sad, I wanted to try this! Does anyone know what’s going on?