hi anon, sorry for taking a while to respond, i was thinking of what to say. your problem is a little hard to give clear cut advice for because when it comes to shapes and flow what will help you most is not specific techniques but rather amassing a large visual library in your brain. if i’m trying to draw something very specific i do make an effort to consciously adhere to a certain shape, but most of the time i do not have to purposefully think about it, instead letting my artistic intuition guide me. not that i draw completely mindlessly; what i’m trying to say is that your brain is very good at memorizing patterns, especially ones that are visually pleasing, so after you’ve looked at enough images it will just naturally guide you to conjure and pick shapes that are the most appealing to your eyes. the good news about building such a library is that it’s incredibly easy to do (you literally just have to look at things. online offline people objects animals anything at all) but the bad news is that it takes forever. in fact i believe once you start you will not be able to nor should you stop. but even better news is that at a certain point you stop doing it consciously; memorizing visuals becomes a background process that you are running at all times. however it’s always good to treat your brain to some extra special visuals and by that i mean if you don’t already have one you should start a blog for saving cool images. or a pinterest board. or a folder on your computer. look at images on google search. look at images on tumblr. look at pins on pinterest. reblog references. study other people’s art. save tutorials even if you are never ever going to look at them again. your brain will implicitly remember everything.

BUT in case you were asking for technicalities: when drawing a body i start with the head and then i just draw the rest of it. it is very much a “draw the rest of the owl” thing for me because after years and years and years of doing it i can just do it without much thought. obviously knowing anatomy helps because as they say before you start breaking things you need to know the fundamentals and all that but in my humble opinion “learning anatomy” is also just looking at images. if you think about it technically all art knowledge is just “looking at images”. which is why you should do it often