I am seeking advice on human anatomy for drawing. In your opinion, what should be the primary focus when beginning to learn how to draw human figures? Below is a list of specific aspects of anatomy. Please indicate which one is the most fundamental to master first.
This is pretty much a matter of opinion and really depends on what you want to draw. For example if you like painting beefy guys brawling it out, muscle structure and joint movements will be your primary focus. For artistic nudity you want to focus on gestures, surface anatomy and basic proportion. I also think it’s not helpful to hyperfocus on just one thing since many topics touch each other, like you can’t really do basic proportions without not also learning something about skeleton and muscles.
To add to the good advice above, what you find personally comfortable can also play a role here.
There are thousand ways to structure a body and if you find you can start a head better from let’s say, the skull landmarks rather than a guidelines head model like Loomis then by all means, give you bony landmarks extra love because it’ll be at the core of how you structure every creature you do.
That’s not to say you should ignore the approaches and areas of anatomy study that feel unnatural to you, just that they might be more efficiently used as sanity checks after you got the sketch going for example, not as the starting point for it.
I think you’re looking at it from a wrong angle. First assess what your skill limit is currently. Always try to understand where your limitation is, then try to work to remove the limitation.
For example, if you still can’t draw a human mannequin in various poses, then maybe basic proportions and gesture should be your focus.
If you can do that, but the drawing looks flat, maybe you need to look at the bone structure and landmarks, and joint movement.
If your problems start at higher “zoom”, where the limbs or body surface needs to be well defined, then you probably need to understand the major muscles and how they respond to flexing, stretching etc. Also, I think you can go a long way just knowing the bare minimum about the muscles and bones, don’t need to learn their names, etc.