Back to Basics

I've been spending a large portion of my time lately doing anatomy studies, In my current sketch book I'm visiting each section of the human body and doing in depth studies of the skeletal and muscle structures starting with the skull and facial muscles. I've just started my work on the facial muscle drawings and decided it would be nice to push these studies and do paint overs on the finished drawings. I was going for a more old world design with inspirations from Da'Vinci's sketchbook.

The facial muscles are always my favorite muscles to draw. There just cool to look at . I painted extreme light around the dark edges of this drawing and dark shadows around the light edges to really make the overall image have a little more punch

Every heavy metal fan with any self respect, knows how to draw a skull. Its one of the first things I ever learned how to draw and still one of my favorite things to draw. The hardest part was trying to not make it look all stylized and evil looking which was the most challenging part of these studies.