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I studied a bit how other artists draw pecs and stomachs, and here is some subsequent practice!

The three green sketches are to explain some ideas :

Left : The body is mostly pill-shaped, and the upper rib cage is like a sphere. The pelvis area is like an "underwear" shape.

Middle : The pecs almost curve downwards like breasts. I don't yet know the shape of elbows...

Right : This is the "NOT A BEAN!" shape explained by youtuber Ethan Becker (warning : he's like brainrot pewdiepie on crack) in a video titled "Draw Gesture with ONE shape [...]"Side-tangent that I might have already said :

(TLDR : Studying is not the same as practice. Studying is intentional and aims to learn tangible new information)

As a self-taught artist that has no formal education and no teachers, I struggle a lot with improvement. It's pretty common to hear the advice that improvement only comes from repetition and practice. Practice makes perfect! But you also hear the opposite, that "practice makes permanent" and it's bad. If you practice wrong, you'll just reinforce bad habits and dig yourself a hole.

Maybe you'll also hear people talk about "studying", without really explaining what that means. They talk about copying art masters, or copying references on instagram, or studying anatomy. And they'll show you all these nice drawings they've made after studying. Does studying anatomy mean picking up an anatomy book and coping everything and memorizing all the muscles' names? Does it mean watching youtube art videos on anatomy?

It gives off the impression that studying is just brute-force copying drawings repeatedly, or drawing from imagination repeatedly, or reading books or something.

Completely copying another artist's art piece is daunting and difficult. There are lots of things to get right (line art, shapes, values, color, .......) and a struggling artist will make many mistakes and spend lots of time fixing them, to mixed results. It seems like an agonizing way to improve your skill.

So in reality, aimless practice is a chore. It's frustrating and there's no clear sense of improvement. What do you do??? Do you practice or not??? Is this a 10'000 hour journey of putrid boredom and pain???

My understanding changed a lot after watching a youtube video called "How to study" by Robotpencil.

If we think of the definitions, we can already clear things up a bit :

To study : To learn, to analyze, to acquire knowledge

To practice : To train by repeated exercises, to do often

So studying is about theory and knowledge, about learning something, about investigating a specific topic or question. Practice is more about repetition, confirming what you learned and improving your muscle memory.

People talk about practicing a lot, but very rarely about properly studying.

Studying encourages you to analyze a picture and really see how the colors or shapes or characters are designed. Or whatever other question you have. You can trace over it! You can blur the image to see the average colors. You can color-pick specific colors. You can paint over it. You can make multiple transparent copies of the same picture and annotate all over them. Etc. This is not cheating! Rather, this is required and encouraged. These are personal studies that you won't upload publicly.

For the few times I studied, I find it effective to have a narrow goal or a question in mind. When I was studying other artist's images before this sketch, I was wondering "How do artists make the chest look strong, and the pecs plump, dangit???" So I browsed furry art from artists I like and dragged a few muscular reference images into my drawing program and traced over those juicy pecs and torsos. That helped me see some patterns, and use that info to make my future characters more appealing.

If only the furry reference art didn't make me so horny, I'd study more :P