Basic Figure Drawing Techniques

[Eleanora Parrot]

Idraw great comfort that I fall in line with the great artists over the centuries who have also struggled with this area of drawing. Van Gogh, for example, began his prolific art career drawing figures in static poses. During the first two years of his career he spent ALL of it mastering drawing. He struggled with problems of proportion as you can see from the drawing on the left below.

For example, ever found human heads challenging to draw?! I do! Its baffling why this is so. In answer to why this is, we over emphasise the features, not the foreheads and hair because that is where our day to day focus lies when interacting with one another. We have to re-train our brains to understand the science of proportion in an un-emotive way. That is why you will often see me sketching the head last in my drawings! I need the rest of the body to gauge the size of the head.

Why include this painting in this article and what does it have to do with stick men and drawing the human figure? To me this painting symbolises not only deconstructing the human anatomy but also stripping it right back to basic shapes. It is not particularly transcribed in an accurate way. The genius result, however, is that the nude descending is still recognisable as a human form.

One of the first things I have noticed about drawing stick men is that you quickly define what type of human drawing you could finally produce. You could be representational with your stick man or more cartoon like. I seem to veer between the two in my sketchbooks. I like to get as close to accurate as I can and enjoy deconstructing an image in order to capture it.

When stuck always think first about the shapes that you see. My confidence has grown out of the practice I have put in drawing humans in blocks of shapes! My brain then automatically identifies the shapes visually.

As you become adept at sketching the human figure understanding the anatomy that lies beneath it will become of more interest and your drawing will become more selective. Thank goodness that Leonardo did all the heavy lifting for us when it came to anatomical studies. His anatomical studies of muscles and arms is only the start of an extensive fascination of dissecting the human body on paper. As you become more familiar with the human body your drawing practice will become easier and more fluid so as you draw make sure you really pay attention and look at the anatomy in front of you. Life drawing is an excellent activity to support you develop this knowledge! You will instinctively be able to head to drawing directly on the paper in your own style as you get to know the subject material better.

Believe it or not basic stick men can get you started on complicated human poses too. When you get stuck just imagine the stick man pose and build your drawing from there. You can draw lines at a slant to describe tilts of shoulders or limbs for example. This too can help you work out foreshortening and perspective by drawing lines relative to a pose.

I explore all of this in my online sketch course taking you from a stick man to a human figure in 3 simple steps. Check it out here if you are interested in learning how to start drawing the human figure. The course includes an hour tutorial as well as supporting pdfs to get you started.

How many of us have started to draw and realise that we run out of room to complete a full figure? Most frustrating! When starting to draw try to learn to tackle the human figure in the whole. You will then naturally be able to gauge sizing and shaping as you become more experienced. You could even start by simply drawing a stick man on the page to ensure you get everything down. (You can see I have sketched in my stick man lines above. They help anchor the drawing further.) This leads neatly onto my second lesson area of using an environment or setting to help you build your confidence drawing the human figure.

If you have ever flipped through my very early sketchbooks you will see that there are practically NO humans and lots of objects. This is rightly the place to start if you are a sketchbook beginner for lots of reasons. The thought of drawing a human let alone capturing the likeness was always a daunting one. To break this down I started to explore how I could add people into my sketching. I have included a 7 minute video as part of this section talking you through my personal progress and confidence building when it has come to drawing the human figure. I have gradually built human figure sketching into the environments of my sketchbook and you can too!

I love how placing a person in an environment brings added credibility to your drawing! These two sketches depicting a Saturday morning were done in my small sketchbook. Watching TV and going for a bike ride. The yellow chair and bicycle help me anchor my figures. Forget for a moment that the sketches themselves may feel or seem advanced. It helps to look for abstract shapes, the angles and curves and aspects of the person and objects surrounding them that help you get them down on paper. I used the clothes (folds of lumpy dressing gown) and angular shapes of the bicycle to help me in these two sketches but also broke down the shapes I could see. Remember too that a good place to start when sketching people is with friends and family as you are more likely to be comfortable with them. The small sketchbook format can support you draw faster than a larger piece of paper.

Observation and practice is key. An exercise I run through on my Sketch from Scratch People course is a page full of human characters in different poses but drawn in the space of 30 seconds to a minute per person on the page. A sketchbook page is the best place for this type of exercise. This may very well start with stick men, which is not a bad place to start. I envy a good stick man!

Look as much as you possibly can, as this will support your brain develop your hand to memory skill. Imagine the stick man as the skeleton of the figure you are drawing. Remember the earlier action point when it comes to stick man drawing.

a) If the figure is moving, loosen up your style. Your lines should be loose and applied relatively quickly. (Remember the stick men exercise of between 30 seconds to 1 minute? This feeds into your experience of sketching quickly.) You may opt for ink as you grow in confidence which is a great medium for conveying movement. I particular love how the artist @suhitasketch achieves fluidity in her human sketching using ink and bright colour. I also use paint too, a light wash that flows with the shape of the person sketched to emphasise movement. Sketches will appear more dynamic, even if the subject is only playing Lego or watching TV. Simple poses can often be the most impactful.

b)Pay attention to the fold of the clothes. Observing where they fold or hang can make a big difference to the dynamic of a picture. Zig zags imply creasing or bends of a body. Skirts or dresses are more complex. Different textures ranging from wool through to cotton may enable you to use different types of pencil stroke. You may also want to use the way light falls across figures to help you (as I have done in the sketch of the two children in chairs!) Keep it simple.

My one piece of advice is that you may as well as enjoy it and build the human figure into the anatomy of your daily sketching. Get used to going through a process that helps you uncover your style even if its a bumpy journey to get there finding it.

Figure drawing, also known as life drawing, is the art of accurately representing the human figure through drawing. It is often done in a live setting, with a model who is traditionally nude. However, it can also be done from memory or photograph references.

They learn to pay attention to subtle nuances of figure movement and gesture. This allows them to accurately depict the figure in motion, as well as create dynamic poses that have an emotional impact on the viewer.

Start by sketching a figure-based framework that will serve as your guide. This means drawing a stick figure or bone structure of the figure you are trying to draw and paying attention to the proportions and angles.

Adding shadows and highlights to figure drawings can create a more polished look. To create shadows and highlights, you should observe how different light sources affect the figure. This can help you add a layer of depth to the figure drawing.

When you are getting started with life drawing, it can be difficult to know where to start. What life drawing techniques to use? What will you have time to do if the pose is short? If the pose is long? Should you look for precision or for individual style in your drawings?

There are many life drawing techniques out there, here is a recapitulation of the main methods and techniques and their common uses as well as some links to free useful resources if you decide to investigate further some of these techniques.

Our life drawing class in North Vancouver is always starting with a series of about 10 short poses of 1 minutes and 5 to 10 short poses of 2 minutes. Then we slowly increase the time for the poses to 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes. The longest poses we draw are 20 to 25 minutes long.

Some life drawing techniques are better suited for short or long poses and some will work for both. But at the end, if you are like me, you might enjoy switching from one method to another depending on what seems best at the time, and to spice things up a bit !

Life drawing techniques can be roughly divided into two categories: formulaic techniques and observational techniques With the formulaic techniques, you apply a formula to locate some main anatomical landmarks. Formulaic methods would allow you in theory to be able to draw believable figures from imagination by building up the body from interlocking shapes, after you trained your eyes and brain by attending many life drawing classes. It also speeds up the sketching time. Observational methods are based on observation, they can be free or precise. If very precise they will usually take longer and are based on careful observation and measuring.

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