Figure Drawing Muscle Study

A piece from my figure drawing two class at Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design.

The school paid for a body painter to come in and paint the muscular system on the body of the model. The actual model was completely covered, he basically looked like something from posemaniacs.com. It was cool to look at, but it wasn't all that helpful for learning the muscles (which, according to my teacher was the point of having the body painter come in). The problem with the body painting was that it was a very simplified version of the muscular system, and some areas they just painted red and called it good. I only used the model as a reference for the pose for this piece, and then referenced the muscles from my various anatomy books. I also decided to do a ribbon of the muscular system around the model, rather then completely covering him, because it seemed much more compositionally interesting than just covering the whole model.

All in all I'm pretty happy with this piece. It was a fun experiment and very challenging. (Why do most Anatomy books only provide lateral views of the outer side of the limbs?! ) If I've screwed up any of the anatomy please don't hesitate to tell me!