Learning figure drawing

I guess most people think that to learn figure drawing one spends each day at an easel confronted by a naked person. Your role is to observe and draw. I have done some of this, perhaps twice in the month, but it is not where the workload lay for me.

All the material presented in this month’s blog entry was drawn on A4 scrap paper. I used various pencils and found that the easiest to work with are ‘Staedtler tradition’ and a normal plastic eraser, and a decent pencil sharpener.

Paul challenged me to draw a person based on my mental model of the human form. The purpose of this is to establish my understanding of proportions. So I began, drawing the standing man without any reference material in front of me.

Drawing out of my head became a daily activity, early attempts revealed significant problems between what I thought a person looks like and the reality. I think most of the problem is not a faulty mental image so much as an incomplete image held in the brain.

Once I realised my problem, I began reading and studying human anatomy. Apart from several books on anatomy for artists, I also found 3D anatomy models (apps) that I could refer to via my phone! With these supporting tools, and with Paul pointing out various failings, I started to focus on specific parts of the body, such as how the knee looks.

The next hurdle was to overcome the stiff lifeless appearance of my ‘little man’. By now I was drawing this figure each day and would by the end of the month have clocked up about eighty images of ‘him’. To loosen up a bit Paul suggested drawing a curved line and then fitting the form to it. This proved to be great fun, I love it!

Then it was just little men from the imagination – it remains a significant challenge as you can see from the last few I have drawn. These examples are about the sixties or seventies in the count of my drawings based on the mental image.

The standing man becomes a little too tedious after three weeks so I began to look for different poses, each presenting their own challenge as different parts of the anatomy come into view. What I found was a little loosening up by swirling the pencil to get a feel for the shape to be drawn helps as a starting point. The image below illustrates this process quite well I think.

My interest in animals and in Paleontology led me to start exploring how to represent the animals of the Permian period. A little research into their skeletons and works by other artists resulted in the image below.

With a prehistoric animal under my belt it was time for the little man to pose in different positions; my next effort was to put him on all fours.

Then I began to just doodle with both animals and the human figure.

My imagination began to take hold.

I started to try and tell a little story with my little men.

In conclusion, after a month of effort I am able to draw a recognizable figure in a variety of action poses. Much remains to be learned. I think the majority of the knowledge I need lies in knowing what and how the different parts of a person fit together and the relative proportion of the various parts. For example the hand is three quarters of the length of the upper arm. The forearm is longer than the hand but shorter than the upper arm.