Yupp, 3D stuff.

I love 3D works.

I usually do straight renders, without retouching them in a photo editing program. Makes it so much more challenging to set up everything correctly in your scene before you render.
Fortunately, there's a lot of free and cheap 3D stuff out there nowadays for people to start fiddling with. For instance, DAZ Studio is a great 3D program, and it's free. You can't model in it, but you can set up your entire scenes and render them.
On DAZ 3D's website, you can access quite a lot of quality models that are free, and even in the store the products are of highest quality and very cheap.
There's almost always a sale going on too.
Okie, I got carried away there, but I love to talk about 3D.
EDIT: Another nice thing about 3D is, that even if you usually hand draw your pictures, it's extremely easy to load a figure, adjust the body dials to fit your needs (muscular, thin, etc.), pose the figure and do a render.
Voila, you have an anatomically correct "sketch" of the character you want to draw.