During the second period of 2D art we handled the subject of human anatomy. For this, each class we followed tutorials created by one of the teachers. Every week we would go over a different part, such as the skeleton, muscles of the upper and lower body, shapes, the skull and facial muscles. 

During the first lesson of the period, we started with a quick excercise; we had to draw a human skeleton without any reference:

This was interesting to do because honestly I had never drawn the human skeleton in any way shape or form before (except for a skull), despite having drawn human characters so often. After this excercise we continued with drawing a human skeleton with the help of following the first tutorial:

This is the outcome of my skeleton drawing. The most fun part of it was to see it slowly come together as I progressed through the tutorial and everything would fall into place.

In the second lesson we continued with the muscles of the upper body:

Naturally, in the third lesson we would go on with the muscles of the lower body:

After these parts, we were also assigned to shade the body (basically add skin) to show the shapes and forms of the muscles:

Als laatste onderdeel gingen we het menselijk schedel en de gezichtsspieren tekenen:

I thought all these excercises were interesting and certainly educational, but also quite intese. In the sense that it requires a lot of attention and focus to fully sit through the tutorials, but it was good to learn more about the human anatomy! Sometimes I had a bit of trouble with some of the proportions, even though I tried to follow the tutorials exactly; for example, the arms in the upper body drawing were way too skinny compared to the rest, so that looked funny at first. And with the facial muscles I also had some trouble placing the properly, but luckily digital art makes these things more forgivable and fixable than on paper.

For the final assignment, we basically had to apply what we had learned througout the weeks prior. This meant that we're allowed to draw any character that has human body features. 

I wanted to challenge myself for this assignment; I've drawn many human characters before and I could just continue doing that.. but I figured I could try something else. So I came with the idea to design a humanoid creature. That way I would still be applying things that I had learned, and I could take and twist those things however I liked. It would be a challenge, as I don't really draw creatures a lot, let alone humanoid creatures.

This was my first moodboard. I basically looked up different images of humanoid creatures. The bottom right image might be a bit confusing as to why it's there; I basically misinterpreted the title, thinking the foot like shape was a creature. So it gave me an idea of creating creatures out of human body parts.

After some more thinking and searching, I eventually reminded myself of insects.. and that was it! I knew I wanted to do something with insects because they are super diverse. So, I started sketching a little bit: 

I hadn't even drawn a face yet, but this sketch looked like it came from the deep pits of uncanny valley. In other words; I was already not fond of the direction. It reminded me of one of those messed up toys from the first Toy Story movie (and I do love those toys, but for this design that direction was not doing it for me). So, in order to go into the 'right' direction, I needed some more direction. That's where moodboard two and three come around:

In this moodboard I searched specifically for humanoid insects, or insect humans, whatever you like to call it. I wanted to see how other artists implemented this idea. What I found is that some artists really went all out (like the image on the right, the one on the bottom, and the one left to that), and then in other pieces the design had some clear human features mixed with (like the one on the bottom left, and miss D'Vorah above him). I liked this idea of where you could tell it was a human that had insect and human features mixed, rather than a complete insect with the build of a human. 

In this moodboard I researched the specific insect that I chose, the green lacewing. As I was looking for insects to take inspiration from, I stumbled upon this little guy. I instantly thought it was a pretty looking creature with sparkling wings; aka I was sold. Actually, my first sketch was already based on this insect, but the moodboard came later.

This was a lot of fun to make! It was interesting to design a character so different than what I'm used to. It took a long time to finish, longer than I'd like to admit. I'm still learning how to do these things faster, but I did want to put in effort.