I recently had an opportunity to attend a great online seminar hosted by Image Metrix. The topic was sculpting the face, and I was certainly impressed by Ryan’s knowledge and skill level. The real take away for me was more a lesson on how to learn and teach the complexities of human anatomy.
Often times artists will shy away from adopting anatomical names in favor of taking a purely aesthetic approach. What Ryan points out is that we need a common language to help us draw a mental map of the human form. This can apply to any discipline. If you are an animator, you need to know the basic principles of animation so you can describe the type of movement you are trying to achieve. If you are in to writing tools with a language like Python, you will need to understand terminology like classes, functions and strings. This may seem like a pretty simple idea, but I suspect it is often overlooked. I have spent countless hours studying anatomy books as a create my character rigs, but I rarely take the time to memorize the names of the muscles and bones I am trying to represent. I could probably draw a fairly complete skeleton and muscle system from memory, but I lack the terminology to explain what I am doing. Because of this weakness, my drawing would be missing some pieces, and the overall relationship of those parts would appear inaccurate.
As an instructor, a common language becomes even more important. An instructors job is to teach a student how to achieve some result. You may have years of experience performing a task, but you will be useless to your student unless you can develop a common and consistent language for relaying that experience.
If I understand correctly, Anatomy and Form with Ryan Kingslien will be available on YouTube shortly. I will post a link when it goes up. The video got me thinking about the way I work and teach. I suggest giving it a look when you get the time.
