I've learned the folly of new year's resolutions, but this one I'm serious about: 2009 will be The Year of Anatomy. This fellow to the left is going to be an integral part of that.
I took the artistic anatomy course in my MFA program at AAU, which was a perfectly fine introduction to the subject, but it was fairly superficial in many ways and I don't remember a whole lot of it. One of the things I lacked was a really good reference model that would help me relate the endless diagrams on the page to 3-dimensional space. This will nip that in the bud, but good.
I'm going to put myself through the course again, using its progression as a rough guide, but at a rate of one month per module instead of one week. By the end of the year, I will be able to draw this figure, well, from memory. Ideally, from any angle and in any position. I have half a dozen good anatomy reference books, and I will use all of them, plus master drawings, plus photographs of bodybuilders, working and learning each muscle group and area until I know it backwards and forwards.
Enough is enough. It's been five years since I took up the pencils again and I still can't draw a decent, realistic figure out of my head. 2009 will be the last of those years. By this time next year, that problem will be in the past - not that I can't spend the rest of my life continuing to improve it, but I want the mental handcuffs off, and all the gaps in my knowledge of human anatomy filled.
I will post a celebratory figure, drawn from imagination, on December 31, 2009. Put it in your calendar now.