This is soooo cool!
http://www.posemaniacs.com/thirtysecond
Anyone who's taken a drawing class with me knows that I love 30 second poses. There's even an article on this blog about why 30 second poses are so good for you when they seem so frustrating at first. They have a lot of benefits, but I'll recap the most important in a nutshell: Quick sketches internalize the form into your mind faster. Working that quickly, you can't get hung up on the details, just the "gesture" (or motion of the figure) and the proportions. And after you do these for a while, the "feel" for the figure becomes ingrained and instinctive.
And besides, once you start to get 'em, quick sketching is REALLY fun!
So what do you do if you can't make it to my sketch group? Go to http://www.posemaniacs.com/thirtysecond
There, on your screen, you'll have 30 second poses generated for you to draw. you can actually set it for different intervals, and in fairness, the figures are computer-generated and can be a little hard to "get" for the first 5 minutes or so. It also offers you odd angles that you'd rarely get to see a live model from, like form underfoot, and even a very useful "negative space option."
You can select specific poses from the pose files, and many can be rotated too, and you can also bring up a grid to make it easy to reproduce the proportions accurately.
Stick with this program and you'll find your mastery of the figure increasing quickly and dramatically.
The site also offers other links for specific anatomical part & details, but you may have to engage your browser's Japanese translation in order to get the most out of it. (the Google toolbar offer a really good one, but there are others, too).
Special thanks to Jim Fleming for letting me know about this!
