FIGURE DRAWING



First the bad news. Figure drawing is hard. Not only is the human form very complicated, it's very flexible too, able to scrunch and twist itself into innumerable positions and configurations. Furthermore, because the human shape is so familiar to us, we are, as viewers, extremely sensitive to its subtlties. If it's drawn even a little wrong, our subconscious sees a deformed human, or one with broken limbs, and our instincts make us want to look away. In other words, you do a bad drawing of a car, it's just a bad drawing; you do a bad figure, it will creep people out.

In fact, as we shall see, getting the pose right is the hardest part of figure drawing.

Now the good news (yes, there is some): While there is a lot of Art (yuck!) involved in capturing human poses, actually constructing a properly proportioned figure can be broken down into simple steps, and so can be learned by just about anyone, even me. If you liked the head and face tutorial, just follow along now, and hopefully you'll learn something. If you hated the head and face tutorial, go download some more Abandonware or something.




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