Human ANATOMY Lecture for Artists: Centerline & Spine

center line is a line that you can look for on the front of the figure and also on the back of the figure so what you'll see in a lot of these slides is i will be drawing center lines that are on the front and on the back of the figure on the front of the figure it's a little bit harder to find on the back of the figure much easier because it literally is the spine very clear but on the front you got to work a little bit harder here's another example from the side view you can see the center line from the front and you'll see that there is a natural curvature to this and by the way those of you guys who have been following along and caught the last stream with christian bale i hope you guys have been doing your homework because there's information from the last stream that is going to really help you understand the stuff that i'm gonna be talking to you about today okay let's move on to the next image so here's a really dynamic dancing scene this is hugh jackman with michelle williams i don't know why they're dancing amongst all these laundry sheets it's like okay i guess so if that looks dynamic but the whole concept of the center line is that if you only look at the center line the center line essentially sums up the basic character of the gesture of the figure so if you look at the slide you'll see michelle williams is like i don't know apparently she's about to like fall off the building any minute wouldn't you guys think that you should not be dancing at the edge of a building but okay i guess whatever floats your boat so if we put the center lines on top of michelle and hugh do you guys see how dramatic michelle's central line is how it's like really pivoted up to the left and then you see how hugh is like standing very straight up and he really has this beautiful posture and so what's cool about this is you can only look at the center line not look at any other part of the body and yet you can still have a fundamental understanding of what the gesture of the figure is the one thing you need to know about the center line because i have a lot of students who get confused about this and so i always make sure i bring this up when i mention the center line on the front of the torso it's on the surface the center line is not inside the torso it's like right on the skin and that's very important because if you think about the center line as being inside the torso it doesn't make any sense at all okay well looks like a lot of you guys haven't seen this movie i'm so disappointed how can you guys not watch like every movie that hugh jackman is in okay let's get down to some of the bones because some of these bones are going to help us out in terms of finding where the center line is okay so we have the front of the rib cage the first bone that i want you guys to look at is this bone that's right down the middle of the rib cage and it's called the sternum you can see it's highlighted in green and the sternum is a really important bone because it comes right down the middle of the rib cage it holds all the ribs together it's this intersection so it's a fundamental part of the rib cage okay now if we isolate the rib cage from the rest of the figure now we can see a little bit more clearly where the center line is going to be so here again we've got our sternum and i like to call the sternum the necktie bone you know why it looks just like a necktie like look at that isn't that just like super convenient it's also funny to me that it's exactly where you wear a necktie it's like okay you guys have like no excuse to not remember where the sternum is because this is just making it so easy because here's the thing i don't really care if my students don't know all the complicated anatomical knowledge i just want them to be able to identify things so even if you can't say like sternocleidomastoid it doesn't matter as long as you understand the location of it okay so that's the necktie bone now the thing that's really interesting about the sternum is that from the front view it just looks perfectly straight but the thing is if you look at the sternum from the side view does everybody see how it curves forward okay pop quiz those of you who saw the christian bail stream why do you guys think it matters that the sternum comes forward that it's curved it's not like a perfectly straight bone actually see if you can guess that's my little pop quiz okay so there's the sternum right there and now here we have a comparison so this is the sternum on the front of the ribcage we also have the sternum on the right side on the side view so this is very important that you understand what the sternum looks like from multiple points of view i think i see this a lot when people teach anatomy they tend to think about things very much in terms of front side and back which is okay from a practical point of view but you have to conceptualize the bone as the sculptural object okay let's see who did their homework sterling is saying because the rib cage angles forward ding good job nice work guys yes terence oh thank you for joining us don marie this is your first stream jojo says to identify the angles salty person says it's for the balance nothing is that straight on the human body so it leans to balance out oh you guys are so making me happy oh my god this is like teacher's dream come true when people really get the stuff okay so does everybody see this this is leftover from the last stream the rib cage tilts forward and then look at this oh my god wow the sternum curves forward so it follows the angle of the ribcage okay let's review so for those of you who did not get to see my stream about major masses with christian bell which you should go and watch because oh he looks good in that video too anyway if we go back to batman this was in the last stream so this is just to solidify some of the information although some of you guys are like knocking it out of the park which is fabulous okay so remember the neck tilts forward the rib cage tilts forward and then the pelvis tilts back so all of this information you guys it's totally interconnected you can't isolate certain concepts from others and that's why i'm breaking it up so much because you have to start to see where all the content starts to connect okay so let's go back to the sternum now we know where the necktie bone is this is an important spot it's not a bone but it's this little thing called the pitch of the neck you can find it on yourself it's just this little smudgy thing and it's basically this little area that's in between your collarbones okay so again it's the intersection it's like where everything comes together that is your pit of the neck now if you want to sound smart and maybe you're trying to impress somebody because you're like jack in titanic and you trying to land kate winslet you can say manubrium okay but if you want to be accessible you can say pit of the neck okay now i know wolverine's not in the greatest showman okay i'm well aware of this okay however there are no shirtless people in the greatest showman i think there was like some strong man but he was like half covered and you couldn't see his manubrium so i was like okay this is not gonna work out let's just throw in some wolverine this will definitely take care of it okay now let's try to find those landmarks on wolverine so here is the pit of the neck and i'd recommend you guys just try to find it on yourself because once you see it and then you can like feel it in between your collarbones it's a lot easier to locate remember it's a manubrium now here is the sternum so if we go back and forth you guys can see on wolverine it's pretty pronounced okay but if you have somebody who's like not that muscly you may not see it that visibly but that's basically where it is it's connected to the manubrium okay let's see let's go to the next one all right so just to remind you here's the sternum i just stuck it there but actually this is a very funny slide see it looks like he's wearing like a bright fluorescent green necktie which does not look very good on you wolverine i think you look way better when you're not wearing anything so anyway let's see floor wilmette is from belgium it's 4am here this is your first live stream wow i am so impressed you guys thank you so much all of you who are showing up in the middle of the night to learn artistic anatomy okay so here's how you put it together the center line on the front you start with the pit of the neck at the top you go downwards to the sternum and then you keep going straight down and you stop by the belly button see you guys all thought the belly button was not that important it is if you don't put in the belly button your center line is going to go off in some weird direction okay so it's pit of the neck sternum to the belly button and that is your center line so that's what you guys are looking for oh it's the first stream for yrt 36 very cool thank you so much for joining us okay now here's the thing i think a lot of people have a misconception that if you're going to learn anatomy you can only look at naked people or people who are wearing the very little okay now that is helpful and it is really great to work with the nude model if you can but i think what's even more powerful than that is if you can spot this stuff on people that are wearing clothes you got to be able to do both and so this is something you guys can train your eye to do this just walking around well i guess right now we're not really doing that but maybe the people who you live with maybe they could be your references okay so here's hugh and he's bending back okay so look at this there's his pit of the neck it's underneath that fancy cravat whatever it is he's wearing there's his center line now do you guys see how if you only look at the center line you already understand that he's bent back like if his center line was perfectly straight you would understand that he was standing up straight but he's not he's bent back like that when will it be wow 3 am in portugal all of europe is staying up late just learn anatomy wow you guys are big art nerds i love it awesome okay let's go from the center line and we're gonna go back do a little bit of review with christian bell which is fine i'm okay with that i can have hugh and christian in the same stream do you guys see how dramatically his head is tilted back the head doesn't actually naturally sit that way so if we go back to christian he looks really good this looks like a really bad movie it's a movie called knight of cups by terence malik it looked totally horrible but he looks really good in this movie so anyway the head sits upright just like this and for those of you who remember you look for the orientation of the ear to see how the head sits upright you look at the tilt of the neck moving forward and now let's go back and you can recognize those two things because here's the thing it's not useful guys if you can identify stuff on an anatomical chart that is a good start but you have to be able to see this stuff past the top hat and the cravat and the silly red outfit and everything that is a sign of somebody who really knows their anatomy if you need everything spelled out for you that's not a good thing because at some point you're going to want to draw a picture of somebody with clothes on i guarantee you at some point that is going to be necessary okay wow 5 16 a.m in saudi arabia oh yikes i can't get up before six that's just like way too difficult okay now does everybody see this so you have head tilted back neck tilts forward and then the rib cage tilts forward because you can also see the center line curving forward as well okay now let's go back to dr paul rochet artistic anatomy which by the way if you guys are looking for a good simple straightforward anatomy book this is one i recommend it's great it's not expensive it's paperback i don't buy it to read it i buy it to look at the charts because i find the charts just ha ha bare bones they're just really easy some of the other nanny books the pictures are too complicated you can't really see past it okay so here we have back side and front view of the spine we're going to talk about the central line on the back of the figure now okay now does everybody see how on the left hand side the back view of the spine you totally can easily make the assumption that it looks straight and yeah it totally looks straight right and if you are standing right behind you and he's not wearing a shirt this is what you will see okay gotta gotta focus now okay okay now from the side of the figure whoa it's a totally different story does everybody see how curvaceous that is i mean it's like a snake it's so different and that's where things go wrong for people that they make the assumption that oh it's straight but then they don't realize that from the side view all those angles that the neck and the rib cage and the pelvis are making that's what makes the spine really behave that way okay so it looks curved now you can see if we actually take the spine and we put it in the context of the rest of the body it's a little bit hard to see because you have the rib cage that surrounds the spine the pelvis gets a little bit in the way your shoulder blades get in the way so it's a little hard to see but i highlighted it in green so you guys can start to understand the context of that and you'll see also same thing on the back view that if you're standing straight on like that it's going to look straight okay and that's what happens all the time is people draw it straight and that's when you get in trouble it's so rarely like that most of the time there is at least some degree of curvature okay let's go back to hugh and michelle williams again dancing amongst laundry sheets like what interior designer decided that that was going to be romantic okay whatever i'll take it i mean he's such a good dancer oh my god i love his legs he looks so good in this movie shame on you guys who did not see this movie because he's so good in it let's see rebecca says wish my spine looked like that studying my own body makes it unique because you grew up with scoliosis oh wow yeah i know somebody a friend of mine has scoliosis and actually their shoulders to this day even after having surgery are crooked like one shoulder is noticeably higher than the other okay so we have hugh and we have michelle and you know you look at this picture and you think oh they're standing up straight right yeah they are but check this out if you look at their center lines does everybody see the curvature in there and it's because we're looking at a profile view so this is similar to what we talked about with christian bale that even though bruce wayne is standing up in an awesome tailored suit he still looks quite curved and that's what you guys really need to look for ripple of aqua is saying do you have any tips how to draw people with misaligned spines or really bad posture that's a great question i mean i think a lot of it has to do with relating different parts to each other so for example if you are drawing somebody and their shoulders are not even you can say okay which shoulder is higher that's oftentimes the very first thing you need to talk about and that might seem obvious but it actually is not a lot of the times when i'm working with students doing figure drawings and drawing class a lot of them will actually even it out like i'll say to them hey look at those shoulders again one is like way higher than the other and they go they're like whoa why did i even that out and so i think a lot of us we think we're showing the difference between the two shoulders enough but we're not we're actually underestimating it so it goes back to what i was saying earlier which is that when you guys see those angles in the figure you gotta exaggerate them because if you draw them to be accurate they're always going to come out understated so if i'm trying to draw somebody who has a very severe shift of posture i always do it more like to the point that it makes me uncomfortable but i think it's very very important in fact i saw a woman when i was in taiwan and i am not exaggerating she looked like she was bending over to pick a penny off the sidewalk except that was her real posture like that's how she was walking down the street so i'm glad you brought that up because not everybody has this kind of posture heba is saying i feel like the shoulders influence the central lines a lot sometimes easier for me to start with the shoulders to get the gesture right the shoulders are very important but the thing about the center line is that the center line goes through the whole body so it just cuts right down the middle the thing about the shoulders is it only goes across and so you're missing the whole bottom of the torso which is the rib cage central line goes through the whole thing so you're trying to establish early on the stuff that is right in the middle like the center part of the figure okay let's take a look at this now on the back it's very straightforward you just say okay central line is the spine okay it's harder when they're not wearing when they are wearing clothes but it is something that i think conceptually for a lot of people it's a little bit easier to wrap their head around okay does everybody see this now i've taken away hugh and michelle and we are only looking at the center lines now you could look at this and say okay clara those look like gummy worms great nice job or you could look at this and say wow i have a fundamental understanding of what hugh and michelle were doing i know that they were standing up i know that they were facing each other i mean isn't that like mind-blowing that too little lime-flavored gummy worms could express that much information about the human anatomy that's amazing okay so that is why the center line is so so important paula is saying determining posture might make you think the central line is skewed when it's the center line that is affecting where the shoulders are yep because the thing about your bones is your bones don't like move up and down like if you have shoulder blades they move in relation to each other so if one goes up the other one goes down it's all a series of reactions sterling richards wants candy now yep well you know it's all about food food and hot white men okay yes i know i know he was not in the greatest showmen but again there just weren't any pictures of his visible spine in the greatest showman so thank goodness we have this still of wolverine jumping out of this scene where he's having adamantium put into his body by sergeant striker but i was like wow this is really good because this is a very dramatic scene he's bending over you can see his spine really really visibly okay so this is all in the name of art education okay right this is all what it's about okay so here we have his center line and if you guys look at it you see how it's horizontal now if we went back we looked at michelle and hugh their center lines were not doing that their center lines are very upright this one's like really cutting across the page okay now you have to look at the spine you got to remind yourself it's not straight you think it is because it looks straight if you're going straight on but remember it is not okay let's go to the full cast of the greatest showman because there's a lot of dancing in this movie if you guys are really into musicals this is totally the movie for you i mean the music is really sappy but it's it's fine i mean he's such a good dancer i just love him he's so like graceful okay so does everybody see how all the figures in this scene they're all doing the exact same thing okay they're perfectly in sync and they're all standing upright okay so nothing is different about any of their poses now if i go in with my lime flavored gummy worms does everybody see how all the center lines are exactly the same like they're all parallel to each other because all the figures are doing the exact same thing okay now look at this if i take away all those figures and we only look at center lines we're not looking at anything else okay i could ask you guys hey what is this group of people doing fundamentally with their figures and you could say to me oh this is a group of people and they're all standing upright that's incredible that is so much information just packed into a single line and this is why the center line is so fundamental however you don't have a center line if you don't have major masses which is why you got to go back and watch that christian bale video all right let's go to another scene now you can see their dance is starting to get a little bit more worked up the dancers are starting to do poses that are much much more dramatic and so if we go in this time we have cherry flavored gummy worms okay so the cherry flavored gummy worms they're starting to bend a little bit they're starting to twist a little bit more they're not hyper dramatic yet but they're definitely not like this one which is where they're just standing upright okay so if we go here well here let me go back to this image okay so here is the cast figures they're starting to bend and now look at this okay even here you have an understanding of how these dancers relate to each other like you you look at the two gummy worms on the left hand side okay you can see how one is tilted this way and the other one is bending upwards okay one line packed with information it's really incredible okay i was very proud of this scene okay because wow they're starting to do some crazy stuff in this this is like you know one of those scenes where you're just like oh my god the human body can do that like how did they ever figure that out okay so now they're starting to do these crazy poses and the part i was very proud of in terms of finding the still because it takes a while to find the right still is the two people that are hanging from the ceiling do you guys see those people they're like all knotted up and i think they're both upside down so their center lines are doing something really wacky okay it looks more like a croissant or something like that okay so let's put some lime flavored gummy worms on top of these people do you guys see the center lines at the top those two hanging dancers like that's insane like how can you get your center line to do something like that like the ones on the bottom are a little bit more realistic but the two people top is like oh my god and then also do you guys see the two figures towards the bottom on the left and the right of hugh who's in the middle they're right across i mean those two figures they're doing like crab walks there so you can see that very visibly sarin is saying so the central line is either on the chest surface or the back correct so if you were on the front of the figure it's on the surface of the skin and on the back it's literally just the spine i think for a lot of people the back center line is much more visible the one on the front you really do have to find the sternum you got to find your pit of the neck the belly button is pretty easy to find but you have to do connect the dots on the front if you don't do connect the dots you'll have trouble trying to see where everything is okay now let's take away all the dancers look at that that is crazy okay you can tell definitely from the slide that these people are doing major acrobatics okay so we're distilling all this information okay anybody remember the scene oh this is like the most cringey scene it's got like zendaya dancing and doing like hoop stuff with zac efron i mean the only reason they put them in this movie is because hugh and michelle were like a little too old for the young people to have somebody to be mustang after so you know this movie has hot white guy for every age although i don't think zach is that great he's so boring he's fine he's just a little generic he's just not cute so whatever okay so now here is the scene where they're like flipping around and if you guys look at it zach is in a very different pose he's like bent backwards he is less flexible than her she's like a little rubber band or something okay and so you can see her center line her spine is like very visible like you can really see that like s curve that you see from the side but we're looking at zach from the front and so he tends to look a little bit more straight okay let's see now if you look at zendaya you guys see her rib cage tilting forward pelvis tilts back it follows the center line it all lines up it's like magic it's just the cool thing it's like a perfect little math problem where everything just like wraps up in a nice little neat bow sterling is saying why is his center line past the belly button well because in theory it just keeps going and it does go past the symphysis pubis which is the pubic bone okay and then you have the genitalia okay so technically speaking it does keep going but really once you get to the belly button there's not a lot of space left so i just go to the belly button and that's pretty much it but yeah it does literally just go right through the symphysis pubis which we will get to later so i will explain that in greater detail salty person says the edit where they remove the background music showed what the characters would have heard makes it much less cringy i don't know i just feel like they have no chemistry like they just look so choreographed like it oh my god like i just can't stand it like if you look at hugh he's just so like oh everything's just so easy for him and he's so cute in this movie okay so again we're coming back to hugh and michelle and this is very very dramatic again so if you look at their center lines he is tilted back she's like arched backwards very dramatically and now if you look at their rib cages the rib cages become even more visible now because the poses are just that much more dramatic and then here you can also see that the pelvises are tilted back so let's take away the center lines just for a minute so that way you guys can see the angle of the rib cage and the angle of the pelvis saren is asking are males normally straighter in alignment less curve and spine angles than females i don't think so i mean there's a lot of really generalized ideas about oh in general male figures tend to have this and female figures tend to have this but i don't know that i like those types of statements especially because gender is a completely different thing today than it was say when i was growing up and so i feel like it's really out of date to say oh all women have smaller rib ribcages than men all men have bigger pelvises or whatever i i don't know it just sort of bothers me because i think that just everybody's unique and so i tend not to think about like oh men in general have this neil is saying nope efren is just not a good dancer exactly like you can totally see it when he dances like he does not have that like fluidity and grace that hugh has because oh and also his voice is not as good he's just he's just like a really younger not as cute not as good dancer and boring version of hugh jackman there we go okay so here's where we're going to actually start to bring it back to drawing we are actually going to get there i know a lot of these first videos there's like a lot of setup there's a lot of fundamental basics you have to understand first but in this video i am going to bring it back to drawing just very briefly wilson nathan is saying so do center lines from the front and back match up at all it seems like they would i assume it's not that easy i would assume that they do because your sternum which is the necktie bone on the front i'm pretty sure it does align with your spine like i can't imagine that your sternum would be like three inches to the left of your spine it seems like you'd have a very crooked rib cage but from a scientific point of view i don't know for sure but i'm gonna say if you eyeball it i would guess that's the case sarin's saying yep case by case in different humans yup i i just feel like it's just it's too hard to generalize about the human figure ripple of aqua says to be fair to zac efron he's never worked on broadway like you yeah but he's i don't know he's so boring plus his body's not remotely as good he's too like chunky i don't know she was way better so anyway all right so the center line the whole concept behind it if you want to bring it back into drawing it should be one of the first things that you draw and don't worry i will have a video where i really do walk you guys step by step the order that i recommend drawing things in because i know everybody has a different preference like some people will say oh i always start with the head or for me the torso is better i have really specific reasons why i draw things in the order that i draw them in so i will definitely be explaining that later but we still have to understand this i guess rebecca's enjoying my roast well you know something if you just put another white guy next to hugh jackman they're all gonna suck unless it's michael fassbender or christian bale then it's fine you know as long as it's not like large christian build like dick cheney christian bell not into him okay now here's a student gesture drawing and i think you guys can see from the back view that the center line pretty easy to find and you can see because this is a figure that is bending forward sort of arched a little bit you can see that curvature of that center line okay now on another back view this is again somebody who's standing up straight and so you would think for a lot of people they would say oh the spine is straight but it is not if you go in and you look at it you can see that curvature salty person is asking what's a plumb line a plumb line is basically like a piece of string that you hold vertically and it usually has like a little weight down at the bottom so that way when you hold it up like this it is a perfectly straight vertical line and i know a lot of people use it in drawing to measure out the locations of different body parts i have never used a plumb line before i rely entirely on observation i mean if it helps you go ahead and do it i just hate measuring like for myself i'm not saying measuring is a bad thing i'm just saying i don't like to measure things like ever i feel like i have an allergic reaction to rulers and so i just don't really like using plumb lines in general okay so here's a front figure and do you guys see how this figure is sort of leaning to the left and so therefore if you look at her center line it's not perfectly straight it's tilted a little bit to the left gtm is saying would the center line start at the top of the neck like the spine well the thing is the center line is separate from the neck like the neck has its own full-out anatomy i mean yeah the spine goes through the neck like it's actually in there but the thing is once you get into the neck the spine is like inside the neck like your spine is not like on the surface of your neck like that would be weird if you could like feel vertebrae like underneath your neck on the front and so that's where it gets a little confusing because then on the neck there's all these other muscles like sternocleidomastoid your trapezius starts coming up the back of the neck and so the neck is just so much more complicated that i don't find it helpful to think about the center line is going into the neck because i think it just gets a little bit too confusing there's too much that gets covered by muscle up there to make it visible whereas like if you guys touch the back of your back and you can feel your spine like you can feel the indentation like actually this is a good thing if you guys do this if you touch your chin to your pitted neck so if you do this okay and then you take your finger and you touch the back of your neck you're gonna feel one vertebrae that's like sticking out a little bit that is called your seventh cervical vertebrae because it's a seventh vertebrae down from the top and that's how you can feel oh yeah my spine is right there it's right underneath the surface of the skin here it's not really i mean i suppose if you like really pressed hard maybe you could get into your spine but here there's just a lot of other stuff all right guys i hope you will take some time and check out ourprof.org lots of goodies there for you if you have not joined us on discord i highly recommend it because there are some pretty cool people hanging out in that discord and i would love for all the cool people here to go hang out with those cool people over there so go down to the video description below you guys will find the invite link on our discord server and i would love to see you guys over there so we can chat about dorky things after streams please subscribe to our channel so you can join the art prof family and thank you so much to our top patreon supporters who keep the likes on thank you to all of you guys for all of your awesome comments for keeping me thirsty with hugh jackman don't worry that's never going to be a problem thank you guys so much everybody stay safe i will see you next time bye

Channel: Art Prof: Create & Critique

Views: 10,921

Keywords: anatomy art class online, anatomy art practice, anatomy art school, anatomy art study, anatomy art tips, anatomy art tutorial, artist anatomy figure, artist anatomy practice, artist anatomy study, artistic anatomy, figure drawing for beginners, figure drawing lessons, figure drawing proportions, figure drawing tips, life drawing anatomy, life drawing basics, life drawing proportion, greatest showman, hugh jackman

Id: fR0A3ioY6k8

Length: 36min 27sec (2187 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 11 2020