As my vision heals and I am able to see fine lines on paper again, I have started drawing with Prismacolor pencils, a medium I love for sketching. My figure drawing skills are rusty, so I am practicing the figure manikin exercises from the Watts Atelier online program. In the online program, students draw using a number of manikins, but my favorite is the skeletal manikin. Jeff Watts did some wonderful demos featuring martial arts poses with this manikin, and I am taking my inspiration from there, although the skeletal manikin I am using here is more based on the one taught by Karl Gnass in his classes at the American Animation Institute many years ago. Perhaps I’ve modified it a bit to fit my own tastes, but I love using this manikin for action poses, especially martial arts. I used to practice martial arts many years ago, especially Tae Kwon Do, but my art career didn’t leave a lot of time for martial arts practice. Nevertheless, I like to pretend that I wield the pencil in the same spirit as the samurai wielding the sword, the mind totally focused at the point where the pencil touches the paper. For inspiration, I have dug up my old martial arts books from the 1980’s and used them as reference for these sketches. Great fun drawing on actual paper again!
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