Drawing Basics: Simplified Skeleton Drawing

Here is something to help you practice setting up a figure drawing. The following exercise is a way to help simplify the process of drawing a human figure. 

Why would we simplify the human figure when drawing? There are many reasons to do this. One reason may be the need to draw quickly. For example, you may only have a minute or two to draw before the model changes poses so the need to simplify becomes necessary.

Another reason is that those who are new to drawing the figure  find it very difficult to do. The human figure is a complex collection of forms and can it feel a bit overwhelming at times trying to draw this complexity. One solution to this is to pick and choose the elements that you are going to work on first in order to create a process that allows you to work on the drawing one step at a time.

There are several ways to organize and divide the process into simple steps. I would say that there are as many approaches to the process of drawing as there are artists. How you choose to organize your drawing process is up to you. Just remember that looking for ways to simplify the drawing in order to focus on one or two things at a time will help you troubleshoot problems and make drawing the human figure easier.

In the steps I show below I look for the skeleton within the figure, then drawn it simplistically to work out the gesture and the relative sizes of the forms or parts of the body.  

Let's begin. To see the rest of the post click on the read more link below.

Anatomy Basics: The chest muscle

Most artists that draw the figure are familiar with drawing the chest muscles as they fit on the torso. Not everybody is as familiar with how these muscles connect to the arms. This is a critical component to understanding how the shapes of the arms and torso come together as well as how the muscle moves the arms.

Today, we are going to look at how the chest muscle connects to the skeleton and what kind of shapes these muscles make.

Drawing Basics: Drawing the head, a step by step of the constructive method

This time around I thought I'd demonstrate how to draw a head by building up to the features from basic shapes and forms in a step by step approach. 

The method I demonstrate  below is a combination of techniques I have learned over the years. These are fairly universal techniques that can be found in many resources and are taught at most schools that offer foundational art instruction.

Here, I want to show how to construct the head as we draw rather than just mimicking the features that we see. This will give us a better understanding of the forms of the head and face and allow us to make up the head in different postions without requiring us to look at a reference every time we need to draw the head.

Let's begin.

Drawing Basics: Contrapposto pose, how the body adjusts to balance

This is a brief post to help those who struggle to get the figure in their drawings to feel like it has weight and is not just floating on the page.

The body is always adjusting to balance itself and one of the ways we can learn to see how the body balances is to study a pose called the contrapposto pose. It  is a pose that has been used by artists for a very long time to create a natural stance. It is also a great way to introduce how the body will react to gravity.

Let's take a look. 

Anatomy Basics: Just having fun drawing the back

Charcoal drawing of a back

Every weekend I run a workshop for the students at the school I teach at. Usually, I don't draw during the workshop as I am going around assisting the students. This time, however, the model struck a pose that I found so interesting I that could not resist. So I will pulled out the newsprint pad.  

Later after the workshop one of the students was asking me about where all the muscles of his back were in my drawing. I was doing the best I could to explain but not all the lines in my drawing were representing muscle boundaries and interpreting someone else's drawing can be tricky.

So, for him, I took the drawing home and did it again, showing were all the muscles are. If it can benefit one person it can benefit others, so I thought I'd share it with you. 

Take a look.