# 28-Day Drawing Challenge: Anatomy for Illustration and Comics - review & insight | Gareth B. Davies Source: https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/28-day-drawing-challenge-anatomy-for-illustration-and-comics/ [← All courses](https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/) Illustration & Drawing · Deep dive · Rated 8 /10 # 28-Day Drawing Challenge: Anatomy for Illustration and Comics By Gareth B. Davies · Updated July 2026 Josiah (Jazza) Brooks · Artist, YouTuber and Entrepreneur Intermediate · 152 min Jazza strips anatomy down to three repeatable steps, block, shape, define, skipping muscle names entirely to make bodies easier to draw fast. [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2F28-day-drawing-challenge-anatomy-for-illustration-and-comics%2F217652042) New to Skillshare? Your first month is free, enough to take this course at no cost. Jazza opens by admitting he cannot reliably name a quadrant of muscle, and that confession sets the tone for the whole class. Rather than teaching origin-and-insertion anatomy, he teaches shape recognition: the shoulder becomes a lopsided love heart, the tricep an upside-down horseshoe, the calf a pair of stacked T shapes. It is a deliberately unscientific vocabulary, built for artists who need to draw convincingly, not diagnose an MRI. ## A workflow, not a lecture The backbone of the course is a three-step process repeated across every body part: block the silhouette with simplified cylinders and spheres, shape the muscle masses on top, then define only what the final piece needs to show. That third step, definition, is explicitly skipped during the teaching lessons themselves, since Jazza reasons that showing every muscle first builds the foundational confidence needed to later choose what to leave out. It is a smart sequencing choice. Learners build the maximal, over-detailed version before being handed the more advanced task of restraint. Each core area, arm, leg, torso, back, gets the same treatment twice: form (the static muscle shapes) and function (how those shapes distort as the body moves). The function lessons are where the class earns its keep. Jazza draws matching pairs of poses, one fully scrunched and one fully stretched, and colors the working muscles red against the resting ones green. Watching the same limb compress and elongate side by side does more to explain muscular mechanics than a labeled diagram ever could, and it is the clearest throughline connecting the arm, leg, torso, and back lessons. ## Where the four-pose finale pays off The last third of the course shifts from isolated body parts to four invented full-body poses: a male bodybuilder flex, a female lifter mid-rep, and two more relaxed figures. Each is blocked from scratch, shaped with the full extreme muscle structure, then finished twice, once pushed to hyper-muscular extremity and once pulled back to a naturalistic, softer surface. Seeing the identical blocked pose resolve into two entirely different finished results is the payoff for everything before it, and it makes a genuinely useful point: realistic anatomy is mostly about knowing what to leave out, not what to add. The class does have real limits. Because it deliberately avoids muscle names, viewers who later want to cross-reference outside anatomy resources or figure-drawing books will need to relearn the standard vocabulary from scratch. The pacing also leans heavily on demonstration. Jazza narrates his own drawing choices at length, and while the "give it a go yourself" prompts between lessons are genuine practice checkpoints, the class offers little structured feedback beyond encouraging students to post progress. Anyone hoping for critique-style guidance will need to seek that elsewhere. The course also assumes a baseline that some newcomers will not have. Blocking a pose, understanding gesture and silhouette, and reading photo references are treated as prerequisites covered briefly rather than taught in depth, so a true beginner may find the early proportion work harder than the class implies. Taken as a whole, this is a tightly organized, practically minded anatomy course that trades textbook precision for drawing speed and intuition. The 28-day pacing suggestion, one lesson every few days with practice between, matches the material's design: each lesson is short enough to digest quickly but dense enough to reward sitting with it before moving on. For illustrators who already have basic figure drawing under control and want anatomy that clicks rather than anatomy that is memorized, it delivers exactly what it promises. The standout The squash-and-stretch demonstration, drawing the same limb fully contracted and fully stretched, makes the mechanical logic of muscle pairs click in a way that static diagrams rarely do. ## What you will learn - · A reusable three-step workflow: block the silhouette with simplified shapes, shape the muscle groups on top, then decide how much definition to show - · How to break the arm, leg, torso and back into a handful of simplified shapes (a love-heart shoulder, a horseshoe tricep, T-shaped calves) instead of memorizing muscle names - · How muscles work in opposing pairs, so one contracts while its counterpart stretches, demonstrated through squash-and-stretch poses - · How to build four full-body illustrations from blocking through to two levels of finished definition, extreme and realistic - · How to dial anatomy down for softer, more natural-looking figures instead of defaulting to bodybuilder physiques Best for: Illustrators and comic artists who already sketch figures but want a faster, more intuitive route to convincing musculature without studying medical terminology. Skip it if: Complete beginners with no grasp of figure proportion or gesture, since the class assumes you can already block a pose and focuses purely on layering anatomy onto it. Engaging Teacher Helpful Examples Organization of Lessons Clarity of Instruction [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2F28-day-drawing-challenge-anatomy-for-illustration-and-comics%2F217652042)