Drawing People: Practicing the Human Figure with Open Resources

It’s Open Access Week! Every year this international event brings the academic community together to discuss the benefits of free and immediate access to information, especially scholarly resources.

This week, I’ll be sharing open (and semi-open) resources for artists. When I’m not at the library desk, I like to draw, and I’m always on the hunt for high quality reference images. When learning how to draw people, you’ll often have to figure out a pose without the help of live models. References, however, are not always free or easy to find. Here some of the resources that I’ve found helpful over the years.

Practice and Reference

Line of Action

Provides both nude and clothed photos for study. Artists can start a drawing session by choosing the kinds of models, and the time intervals between photos. There are also posts here that give advice for improving your technique.

Bodies in Motion

This collection of motion images provides rapid sequence photographs of athletes and dancers. These images are a good way to study how the human body moves. Most of this content is only available with a subscription, but there are some free sequences. When browsing a section, click the “free” tab on the right-hand side of the page.

AdorkaStock

This stock photo collection has models with plenty of different body types. There are some fun poses in here: from fantasy to action, to sci-fi settings. All models are wearing clothing or flesh-tone bodysuits, so no need to worry about using it in a public space.

Sketch Daily

Provides a variety of photos in timed study sessions. You can choose to practice bodies, hands, feet, heads, or animals and structures. It’s a good tool for warm-up drawing with no fuss.

The Book of a Hundred Hands by George B. Bridgman

This book depicts musculature and examples of drawn hands in different positions. It can help you to focus-in on your hand drawing skills.

Figure Drawing for All It’s Worth by Andrew Loomis

Okay, so this one is from the 40’s and it shows; the majority of nude female figures are still sporting high heels. However, Loomis still offers many helpful tips. It contains an exhaustive instruction of perspective, musculature, the mechanics of motion, shading and lighting as well as exercises for practice.

Gesture Drawing

Gesture Drawing – The Ultimate Guide for Beginners

Practicing with the gesture technique can help you break out of “stiff” poses and figure out how to imbue your figures with character and expression. This guide contains an overview of gesture, videos of instruction, and a list of books on gesture.

Clothing

We Wear Culture

A good fashion reference site that showcases clothing through time and around the world. The information here gives context for clothing, bios of fashion icons, overviews of fashion movements, and the history of clothing items. It’s a good tool to inspire clothing design for the people and characters you draw.

History of Costume

You’ll have to create a free account on the Internet Archive to view this one. It’s a collection of costume plates from the 19th century. There are later editions of this book available, but this edition still contains original clothing pattern drafts.

Instruction

Love, Life, Drawing

This website provides free tutorials and podcasts on drawing topics with a focus on human figures. Sign up for the free “fresh eyes” drawing challenge, a ten-day course that teaches students to identify gesture and structure of the form.

FZD School

This resource isn’t human-figure specific but these videos are great resources for learning how to draw and design. Try “EP 30: Character Silhouettes” to buff up your character illustration skills. This channel is especially good for creatives interested in comics or illustration.

Muddy Colors

Muddy Colors posts helpful tips on all kinds of art topics from over 20 practicing artists. The site hosts paid classes from their contributing artists, but there is plenty of free advice here too.

Additional Resources

Character Design References

An independent website that showcases concept art from animation, games, and comics. There’s a little bit of everything here. I’d recommend checking out their visual library. There are anatomical references, character/creature design references, vehicles, props, and lighting/color tutorials.

Met Publications

The New York Met Gallery offers 609 publications of art, photography, sculpture and more, all free for download. This is an excellent place to find inspiration.

Happy Drawing!

Open Education Week 2022

Open Education Week

Open Education Week brings awareness to the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement and to the how OER transforms teaching and learning for instructors and students alike.

What is OER?

OER refers to open access, openly licensed instructional materials that are used for teaching, learning or research.

Why is OER Important?

OER provides free resources to institutions, teachers, and students. When incorporated into the classroom, OER can:

  • Lower the cost of education for students
  • Reinforce open pedagogy
    • Allow educators to update and adapt materials to fit their needs
    • Encourages students’ interaction with, and creation of, educational materials
  • Encourage open knowledge dissemination

OER Incentive Grant

The University is giving faculty an incentive to adopt, adapt, or create OER for their courses instead of using expensive materials. The OER Incentive Grants will fund faculty teaching undergraduate courses. Instructors can submit applications in three tiers:

  • Tier 1: Adopt – incorporate an existing open textbook into a course
  • Tier 2 Adapt – incorporate portions of multiple existing open textbooks, along with other freely available educational resources, modifications of existing open education materials/textbooks, or development of new open education materials
  • Tier 3: Create – write new openly licensed textbooks

The preferred deadline to submit a proposal is March 11th. If you are interested in submitting a grant but cannot make this deadline, please reach out to Sara Benson at srbenson@illinois.edu. To learn more about this program see the webpage on the Faculty OER Incentive Program.

Upcoming OER Publication

In conjunction with Sara Benson, copyright librarian at UIUC, and the Illinois Open Publishing Network (IOPN), co-authors Christy Bazan, Brandi Barnes, Ryan Santens, and Emily Verone will publish an OER textbook, titled Drug Use and Misuse: A Community Health Perspective. This book explores drug use and abuse through the lens of community health and the impact of drug use and abuse on community health. Drug Use and Misuse is the third publication in IOPN’s Windsor & Downs Press OPN Textbook series. See the video below to learn more about the process of creating this textbook.

Happy Open Education Week 2021!

Every March, librarians around the world celebrate Open Education Week, a time to raise awareness of the need for and use of Open Educational Resources on our campuses. Many libraries are engaged in promoting these resources to faculty and administrators in order to help reduce the cost of course materials for students.

OEWeek 2021 Logo

“Open Education Week Logo.” OEWeek. https://www.openeducationweek.org/page/materials. Licensed under a CC-BY 4.0 license.

Open Educational Resources are learning materials that are published without copyright restrictions, meaning they can be freely distributed, reused, and modified. Faculty who assign Open Educational Resources in their classes help eliminate the barriers to academic success students can face when they cannot afford their course materials. The Florida Virtual Campus survey has demonstrated over several iterations of their survey how these costs negatively impact students – whether it’s dropping or failing a course, changing major, or struggling academically.

OpenStax is one of the most well-known publishers of OER and is often used by librarians as an example of high-quality, low-cost textbooks. While librarians often work as OER advocates on their campus, we are not always the ones publishing our own, original OER. This makes the publishing of Instruction in Libraries and Information Centers: An Introduction in July 2020 a unique and exciting accomplishment that will benefit Library and Information Science students for years to come.

Front cover of Instruction in Libraries by Saunder and Wong

This textbook, authored by Laura Saunders, Associate Professor of Library and Information Science at Simmons College and Melissa Wong, Adjunct Lecturer of Library and Information Sciences at UIUC, is freely available for students to read online, download, and print. The book is the first open access textbook to be published by Windsor and Downs press through IOPN, the University Library’s publishing unit. Other open access books available through the press include Sara Benson’s The Sweet Public Domain: Celebrating Copyright Expiration with the Honey Bunch Series.

Interested in the ways libraries are celebrating these accomplishments and bringing attention to the need to continue our advocacy? Check out the Twitter hashtag #OEWeek to join the conversation.

OASIS: The Search Tool for the Open Educational Resource Desert

Guest Post by Kaylen Dwyer

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license so they are free to access, use, remix, and share again.

Source: The Review Project. For more information about OER, the University of Illinois’ guide is available online.

There has been discussion of the cost of OER to professors and institutions in grants, time, sabbatical funding, and more. Yet professors felt that the main barrier between OER and the classroom were not these hidden costs, but rather lack of awareness, the difficulties of finding texts to use, and the monumental task of evaluating the texts and tools they did find.

The U.S. Public Interest Research Group’s study, “Fixing the Broken Textbook Market,” determined that many students chose not to buy their textbooks due to the costs despite concern for their grade, and felt that they would benefit from open resources. Even as textbook costs have skyrocketed and faculty awareness of OER continues to increase, only 5.3% of classrooms are using open textbooks.

Enter OASIS (Openly Available Sources Integrated Search), a search tool recently developed and launched by SUNY Geneseo’s Milne Library. OASIS addresses the main frustration expressed by faculty—how do I know what I’m looking for? Or even what open sources are out there?

Oasis Logo Image

The easy-to-use interface and highly selective nature of OASIS are both evident from the front page. At the outset, users can start a search if they know what they’re looking for, or they can view the variety of OER source types available to them—textbooks, courses, interactive simulations, audiobooks, and learning objects are just a few of the tools one can look for.

Image of the options within Oasis for OER materials

Users can also refine their search by the source, license, and whether or not the resource has been reviewed. For those who need a text which has already been evaluated, this certainly helps. At launch, there are over 150,000 items available coming from 52 different sources like Open NYS, CUNY, Open Textbooks, OER Services, and SUNY. And, as a way to increase awareness of the tool and open resources, OASIS also created a search widget that libraries and other institutions can embed on their webpages.

OASIS is one step closer to getting OER into the classroom, providing equal access and increasing the discoverability of texts.