Figure Drawing Fundamentals - Lesson #1 The Process

[Music] hi welcome to figure drawing fundamentals so over the next few sessions i'd like to show you a system that i hope will help demystify and help you get a plan together as you approach figure drawing this class is primarily based at beginners but i'm sure that people coming back to figure drawing or people simply looking for a new approach will find some things of value here um i don't want to focus too heavily on anatomy to begin with there are certain um and that anatomical ideas that we do need to be um considerate of uh and that will certainly help with our journey but i do not want it to become the main focus at least initially as we move through the classes we can look at anatomy in more depth and how it influences the uh the choices that we make so i'd say let's get started one thing i would say before we do though is that um when you're practicing at home um try and stick with relatively simple poses like standing poses from front side back etc and if you get into very complex poses with a lot of foreshortening especially as a beginner that can get quite overwhelming because there's just simply too many things to consider so as i said try and keep the poses that you choose initially relatively simple and then as you build your skill set you can also build the complexity of the poses that you tackle okay let's get started the first thing i'm looking for is the relationship between the upper and the lower torso the reason is that i'm looking for the largest forms of the body first they're going to tell me the most about the pose then i can get down into secondary ideas and some of the more subtle ideas but the relationship between the upper and the lower torso um for me is the most important thing especially with standing pose so i'm just blocking in the upper torso the lower torso in their simplest ideas um in this case a box so i'm just going to very likely get in a center line the reason i do this is i want to be able to measure correctly between the left and the right side of the body having a center line also helps me understand the axis how much the body is turned in space so it's a very useful tool and you can find the center line by looking for the sternum or the navel these are useful visual cues onto where the center line is okay so i've got my upper my lower torso and the third thing i want to find and the thing that i is really important for me to understand is if that if there is a supporting leg and if so where is it so this leg might be coming down this way down to about here and um notice how this supporting leg is sitting underneath the upper and the lower torso um this is because this supporting leg is obviously supporting the weight of those so i really do want to find to see if it's under the center of the form and locate that something like that um the supporting leg's also doing something else the supporting leg comes up this way and let's say this leg is coming across this way like this something like that well the supporting leg is making the pelvis tilt in this direction and consequently the ribcage is counter balancing for that and is um going in the other direction so understanding the supporting leg will help me understand the journey as we move up through the form as to how that supporting leg is affecting for example the lower and the upper torso so that's another reason why the supporting leg is a really useful function now you might have a pose that doesn't have a supporting leg we might have both legs coming out um both equally supporting the weight you will find poses like that but it's still one of the first things that i will look for okay so got in my up alert also i've got just lines indicating the direction of the legs these lines aren't really serving any other purpose right now than to show direction and general proportion okay so just find generally where my head is sitting something like so and the arms so this arm's coming down this way something like this and this arm is actually going behind the form and the forearm is showing itself like that so at this point i have all the major parts of the body down right we've got the head something indicating the neck the upper torso the lower torso the legs and obviously the arms we could subdivide these further and further as we get more into the complexity of the pose or the anatomy but i want to find the simple ideas because it's at this point right here very soon into the drawing where i'll ask myself okay are my proportions generally correct are my hips wide enough is my rib cage wide enough or too narrow all of these kind of questions i'll ask at this stage because it'll be much easier for me to make those adjustments now than waiting until i'm much further into the drawing and you know obviously it'll be much trickier to make those changes at that point so the next things i'm looking for is i'm looking to take this drawing obviously to the next stage of complexity while still trying to keep things relatively simple so what's the simplest idea for the rib cage well i want to find that that arch of the rib cage coming down this way something like this the arch coming down here this is where that center line that we put in before is really useful because obviously that's where the arch of the rib cage is going to start for each direction coming down this way and i'm just very loosely getting in what will be the second simplest form for the ribcage which is obviously this egg shape the first obviously being the box um so i've got a very loose indication of my rib cage now coming down to the lower pelvis or to the pelvis um the pelvis is a very complex piece of anatomy but i want to simplify it as much as possible and i also want to be mindful of what part of the pelvis actually comes to the surface of the body well we can obviously see the hip bone right or the iliac crest and that is going to be coming down in this direction here same on this side it's going to be coming down like so and at the end of the iliac crest there's this little bump that you should be quite visible on the model called the asus now the reason the asus is so important is because that is the point where the pelvis turns and the form goes inside the body so it's really the point of the pelvis where we stop seeing it on the outside of the form now it's also the belt line it's um it's where a pair of pants would hang right here um so it's useful to understand where this is now i usually draw a line between these two points of the aces because they help reinforce what is this axis the axis of the shoulders are coming in this direction the axis of the pelvis is coming in this direction um this is giving us already at this early stage it's giving us rhythm and it's giving us dynamics we have compression on this side we have extension on this side then we have compression on this side and we have extension on this side kind of opposites each other so what the upper form of the body is doing here the lower half of the body is mirroring on this side when we can bring visual interest like that it's um it just helps bring our drawing further so that's the kind of thing i'm looking for the dynamics of the pose what anatomical cues are helping me understand the relationships between these different parts of the body okay so we found the aces and from the aces if i just come down very likely in this direction almost to the bottom of this box for the lower torso i can find the pubic bone pubic bones going to sit somewhere in there coming up the form to what's called the manubrium or the pit of the neck that's a really important part of the body for me to find the reason being is that the clavicles anchor to the manubrium so if i understand that the pit of the neck is roughly here come down sternum here maybe this arch is a little low might be somewhere like that but if i can understand where the clavicles are connected to the monobrium really helps me anchor the arms because the clavicles also known as the collarbones along with the scapula or the shoulder blades at the back they really are what the arms are essentially attached to and they help with the mechanics of the arms so if an arm goes up i want to understand that the clavicle and the scapula are moving in a case like this but the rib cage isn't right so the reason that's important is i see some people that are just starting out they'll see a pose that's like this they tend to stretch the ribcage to accommodate for that whereas the rib cage is an independent piece of anatomy so the clavicle column is what's connecting the arm to the upper torso along with the shoulder blade so this is this section here the clavicles and the shoulder blades are what's called the shoulder girdle you can talk about that in more depth at a later date but if i understand that okay so this clavicle's coming out this way this one's coming very slightly in this direction then i now have something here to attach the upper arm to right so there's the humerus here this is the head of the humerus and it actually sits in a little pocket of the scapula that's coming from the back so if our model was made of glass or was transparent we could very likely see the scapula coming out in in something like this now i want to connect the upper torso and the lower torso together and that is achieved by a muscle called the obliques and the obliques run down the upper torso and they attach to the iliac crest of the pelvis so with that in mind i know that if i can come down the form like this and i can connect these two well i'm using that knowledge of where the hip bone is to attach that oblique which is obviously attached at that point same coming down this way coming down and then attaching there's a very good chance that the muscle or the um fat pad especially on a male will protrude slightly here so it's probably going to have a longer appearance on this side more stretched out appearance than on this side where it's a little bit more compressed okay so let's look down at the legs the simplest form i can come up with for the upper leg would be a tapered cylinder so i'm just going to run that simple idea down this way something like this now this leg is coming towards me just ever so slightly but what that's doing it's creating something called foreshortening so let's have a look at this here for a second so we have the tapered cylinder of the upper leg like this one going straight down something like that because this one is coming towards me imagine that this pencil is the um the upper leg so this is now coming towards me so now suddenly we can see the bottom of the pencil so if we do draw that in tapered cylinder terms this cylinder here is going to suddenly be doing something like this and we can see that underside plane here now we can see that here i like to understand how these forms are moving in space if something's coming towards me um what i found is a useful mechanism is to imagine that my model is wearing striped leggings for example if that same leg was here or those same stripes were coming around the form they'd be going around the form like this right something like that um i might want to indicate that actually on my drawing very lightly it will most likely not be seen um when the drawing is finished but i might want to understand okay well this leg's actually coming towards me this leg is kind of going straight down but and where would that end be if we if we just made that same cut that we see here would it probably be somewhere here like this and it would be a little bit higher than where this knee is here um because obviously it's gone from that to that so we'll talk about foreshortening in more depth um at a later stage but i want you to understand the basic ideas of it because even if you're working with very straightforward standing poses you're inevitably going to come across very mild foreshortening at the very least and you may have a case of where it's a very normal standing pose but an arm is coming out like so in which case if you understand foreshortening even the basic concepts then you can start to think about it in those terms and you can start to apply it to your work okay so um a little thing about measurement and i'll talk about proportion in a minute but imagine your upper torso is here in our simple box idea and the lower torso is here something like this um a pretty much universal form of measurement that you can count on unless a model is very very heavy right but on your average model you can count on the um the navel being halfway between the bottom of the rib cage and the top of the um the lower torso in this case where the we would see the iliac crests coming around the form the very top of it there obviously coming down to that point of the asus that we talked about here and here but this is where we'll find the navel halfway between here and here so with that in mind the top of my box is here the bottom of this box for the upper torso is here if i come down i can find my navel in there now in the same way i have here i've followed these lines around the form i like to do the same with other parts of anatomy too so for example if our model had the stomach was coming out slightly here i might find it useful to actually indicate that something like this and then coming down and then coming down to the pubic bone notice how that starts to give volume and mass to the the whole abdominal area just with one line i'm indicating how the form is turning in space so it's very useful for me especially when i get to light and tone to understand where that turn of form is so for example in this area here the light could hit it but then as the form turns just from about this point i know that things are going to start going into shadow down here and then possibly back into light in this area and then as the form turns again back into shadow so i'm thinking volumetrically i'm thinking more like a sculptor really um i'm trying to imagine what these three-dimensional forms look like on a two-dimensional surface okay so we've still worked in relatively simple form with with relatively simple forms and i like to jump back and forth between a very simple form like our tapered cylinder or sometimes if i feel more confident about the subject i might jump straight to a more anatomical approach which is has a bit more looseness and sometimes a bit more life with it so for example down here i might say okay well i know my calf is coming down here and rather than just drawing another cylinder it might be useful to try and think more in anatomical terms so i've got the the shin bone coming down this way and maybe i've got the inside of the calf doing something like this so i jump back and forth depending on what's most useful for me or what gets me where i want to go as quick as i can so i don't have to be labor over it okay thinking about some of the the muscles in the upper leg here coming in the thigh possibly a bit of a fat pad there then coming down and then into the knee system so you know we've got a plane that's coming around the form this way coming down to the joint that plane will actually tend to get a little flatter more box-like in this area whereas here it tends to be a little softer and rounder so i might just want to indicate that very loosely so that i can understand what the form would be when i come to light and tone now there's a muscle um called the sartorius which is actually the longest muscle in the body and even at this basic stage of understanding anatomy it is one that i think is useful to understand because it's a muscle that runs from the asus attaches just at the aces and it comes down this way and it actually attaches on the side of the leg below the knee now the reason i like to know about this particular muscle is because you may have observed that if i'm just drawing going to draw my topography lines here this tends to do something like this and then it goes around and something like that so this muscle pulling down here tends to create almost like a triangle effect on this side in here and then we get more of the the round effect on the other side where the thigh is on this side same here i may not even see it on the final drawing if i may obscure it somehow or at least at points but what i've note in my experience what i've noticed is you'll almost certainly see it at the top close to where it connects up here and then it tends to reveal itself down here where it helps um cut across the form this way okay so it's just something to be mindful of how do we connect the head to the upper torso well you may have noticed i put this line in um very early on why did i start with this line this line actually indicates a bit of anatomy there's a muscle that attaches at the manubrium here and it goes up and attaches behind the ear i'm sure you've all seen it now the reason i like to find that as a rhythmical idea first is because it attaches to the center of the body look at the way that neckline comes all the way through the center line and comes down this way it helps extend the rhythmical idea if i just start with a cylinder with a ping-pong ball on top um we lose we lose the rhythm and especially at the early stage of the drawing i want to try and maintain the rhythm as much as possible now it won't always be convenient to find this in a very simple way but once again you won't always have a supporting leg but if you see this as an idea for me i found it very useful to help as i said maintain the rhythm throughout a drawing and help tie in that whole idea so if you look at this we have a huge rhythmical kind of s-shape going on um these are some of the things that i think just help make a figure drawing um good so that's why i use it um so but anyway we want to take that one step further now so i actually think i'm going to need to bring this chin down a little because in actual fact the ear is probably going to be sitting about here so i want to know that my eye where my eye line is very loosely and where the nose is something like that i'm not going to get into too much detail in the head right now because we really want to focus on the figure drawing side of this and how these things connect but might try and find the other side of that the muscle on the other side doing the same thing just very loosely and just come down with a cylinder just very very subtly at this point now there's a muscle at the back of the head connected back here to this little bump ridge at the back of the head called the trapezius and the trapezius comes down this way and it actually attaches to the clavicle and the scapula um but it comes down like so actually you'll see it at the front here as well where it's connected um that's something that i want to understand where that is and where it's come from and where it's going to so i don't i even though i'm starting the line here and drawing it down i want to understand that actually at the other side of the head it's actually attached back here maybe about here coming down this way and attaching down towards the deltoid moving forward about two-thirds of the way along the clavicle is where the deltoid starts the shoulder muscle comes in this way something like this and it attaches all the way around the deltoid attaches at the front the middle and at the back to the scapula so once again understanding a little a bit about anatomy really helps me make some informed choices i might have the bicep coming down this way tricep on this side it's going to be the joint of the elbow in here and then i'm going to be thinking about forearm coming down here and then the hand is down here something like this and we'll come back to that in a little while on this side we might see the shoulder in here but if this arm is going back this way that may be all that we see of it at least for right now um let's just talk about the pectoral muscle quickly the pectoral muscle attaches to the front of the rib cage and then it actually attaches to the humerus right about here now one thing to keep in mind is if the arm goes back like this you see this cut right across here that is the pectoral muscle that's cutting across the form and that's why you tend to get that division between the upper arm and the upper torso with the pectoral muscle cutting across so we will talk about that more at a later time but for now just understand that's the case um the pectoral muscle is sitting and attached just above the arch of the rib cage so if i understand if my rib cage is here say something like that and i understand that this pectoral muscle attaches across here and i understand that it attaches to the humerus within at the point where it no longer is attached to or at the front of the rib cage that muscle comes across and attaches up here it also attaches from this point here and comes across something like that and on this side it's going to be doing something like that okay now on a female there's a very good chance we can't see the lower part of the pectoral muscle because the breasts will be in the way um but first one it's useful for us to understand it's there um so now when i attach the the breasts in here typically speaking the breasts will hang lower than the bottom of the pectoral muscle so i can just generally get in a volume in here for where the breast would be something like this and what i like to do is i like to try and find the overall volume of this breast not just the abstract shape of comes from here comes down and the bottom kind of surface where it turns and attaches to the rib cage but i like to find the whole idea and if you look closely at a model you'll actually notice a light change for example depending on where our light is but let's say it's coming from this direction well the light might be brighter here ever so slightly than in this area here because as that form turns um and it turns from the chest to the breast that there's a good chance once again depending on the light direction that that that plane change will pick up light once again useful to understand once i get to the light and tone stage so i'm trying to think about volume and mass and not just line and shape there's a place for line and shape but i'm trying to think about volume first then i can think about all the subtleties of design when i get to the next stage of the drawing so just thinking about the anatomy of the lower of the upper leg here just very loosely we're not getting into a detailed anatomical description we're keeping things as simple as we can for right now maybe this calf is coming down in this direction something like this um the lower leg coming in here something like that so it would be approximately at this stage i will ask myself okay do i have everything roughly where i want it and i think at least for right now everything's looking approximately correct um maybe this arm maybe we can just see a little bit of that kind of in there um something like that notice the way that the upper arm here has gone behind the form attaches here the elbow's probably about here and then this arm comes forward like so so i want to be thinking in those terms um okay so everything is approximately where it should be um and this is the stage i would go from what we've been drawing with until now which is essentially a soft edge like this where we want to start thinking about line like this and that's one of the really useful things about holding the pencil like this is it allows us to go from tone to line without changing the way that we're holding the pencil just going to come down here from the where this edge of the rib cage is here just coming down to the asus kind of helps me find this general volume for the oblique in here same on this side something like that not going to worry too much about the subtleties of that right now so now we have our abdominal wall in here we have our obliques and once again we're going from simple ideas and look at the way i'm subdividing and then subdividing again as the complexity level goes up now this pro whole process probably seems quite mechanical um i think that it's kind of necessary at this stage but you will notice if you go and look at some of the other videos and some of the time lapse videos you'll get a sense of how i kind of abbreviate this process and the more confident you get with drawing the more you'll find that where you can or can't abbreviate something but even though i'm thinking in all these terms while i'm drawing i may not in practice actually go to such methodical steps through each step because i'll intuitively know where something is or where it needs to be as i move on to the next step so it might be useful to look at some of those examples and see how i'm taking liberties with this formula okay all right so we have maybe a foot here maybe this foot's doing something like this um the deltoid is actually going to be coming down a bit further here but once again that's an adjustment i could make at the next stage um okay so i'm fairly satisfied with where we're at now so now i'm going to go to the next stage and once again i may have done this much lighter than i've done it here or i may have abbreviated this stage somewhat in practice but the next stage for me is to go in and put more of a line where the final kind of statement of intent is going to be and what i like to do when i'm doing this is i like to go through a checklist in my own mind so i'm kind of thinking about what it is what am i drawing and i kind of ask myself that as i'm going so i might say okay we're right now drawing the upper leg here coming up to the oblique in here and the obliques coming this way but now i'm going to hit the rib cage so i want to be mindful of that volume so that's coming this way and i want to think about that scapula that we talked about so that's going to be coming up there something like that and i do the same throughout the form and i just kind of ask myself what is it that i'm drawing okay coming down this is the thigh coming down to the muscles of the upper leg down to the knee system in here let's move across the form to here um okay so inner thigh is coming in here something like this coming around this way what's going on on this side of the form well same kind of idea inner thigh coming this way actually crossing over that form then coming down down to the upper leg down to the knee system where things get a bit squarer a little boxier so i'm trying to think in those terms and i find it's especially useful when you're starting out think what is it that i'm drawing joints typically elbows wrists ankles knees they tend to get boxier they tend to get sharper angles to them because obviously all of those joints are where bones come to the surface of the form something like a thigh is going to be a series of much softer forms generally speaking because obviously bone is not coming to the surface in those areas so if i'm going through a checklist in my mind or just kind of thinking casually about what it is that i'm drawing i can say to myself okay well now i've come down to the knee i want to be a bit more mindful that things are getting a bit more angular whereas if i'm drawing the thigh then i can think okay well things are going to be a little softer in this region so now i'm going to come in same thing thinking okay thigh coming up to the hips that up here something like that coming up to the very upper part of the thigh this is muscle here and on this side is actually something called the tensor fasciae latte but you don't really need to concern yourselves at this point with the names but just so you know coming up okay same same drill oblique rib cage now the breast coming in this way something like this coming in doing something like that pectoral muscle cutting across this way but then we're seeing the mass of the breast in here navel our collar bones neck okay so trapezius coming down it's actually a little bump here it's part of the anatomy um so look for it locate it understand that it's there so there's a lot of little subtleties like this where i'll add them at this stage um which is where having a knowledge of anatomy can help with this very subtle refinement stage where i really want to think about what is it that's going on with the anatomy what is it that i want to understand okay so the deltoids coming down this way meeting up with the trapezius not the trapezius or the tricep coming down into the elbow system here and then we can come down to the forearm on this side sometimes a very very subtle fat pad sitting in this area here so i might want to to indicate that coming down the bicep coming down into the elbow and once again coming down into the forearm and into the hand here and i can just can continue this kind of process as i go through the form come down here calf muscle coming down to the ankle something like this and so on as you develop your skill set you'll know where you can afford to take liberties right um it's almost like you have to draw complicated before you can draw simple you know it's the same kind of with writing um it takes quite an advanced level of writing skill to understand poetry and how to simplify everything down and i think the same applies to drawing so we kind of have to go through this stage of really kind of possibly over um explaining everything before then we can find the simple statement the simple idea of how you want to say something um so i could go through just finish all the the little details here um one last thing i'd like to just discuss um today is because i've been thinking volumetrically i can now start to light this form thinking in those terms so for me to understand for example that light might be hitting here but then as this form turns there could very well be a core shadow here same coming down the form here and we could go in and we could start thinking where is the form turning in space will give me a sense of um where my where my form is in light and when it's in shadow but we'll talk about that another day um i just wanted before i go i just want to talk about proportion quickly because it's not something that we've really discussed yet um i think proportion proportion is a it's a tricky thing one of the reasons being is you have 50 people in a room and no two people are going to um have the exact same proportions there are general ideas about proportion um but even with that depending on where you look in history people had different ideas about the aesthetics of proportion or what was the ideal proportion um so i'm a little reluctant to say this is the formula for proportion you have to follow it every time because you may have the first model that comes in front of you may have a longer torso or shorter legs than the proportion that we give but let's just talk in generalities just for a minute so we have our upper torso our lower torso here let's just indicate where the head is it's going to be somewhere in here something like that um let's just put some legs very loosely one thing that you can look for generally speaking is from the top of the head to the pubic bone if i go like this and i come down well that tells me where my legs are which are right here halfway excuse me between the top and the legs halfway is the pubic bone um if i go halfway between here and here somewhere in here this is actually probably just below the knee so i'll just put in my legs here so my knee is probably going to be sitting right about here and then obviously i can come in and i can talk about the lower leg down here so top of the head pubic bone feet halfway um something else you might find useful let me just put in the arch of the rib cage again in here something like that is from the pit of the neck here where the manubrium is to the top of the arch of the rib cage the little bone called the zyphon process to the navel to the pubic bone they are roughly evenly spaced i think this one tends to be a little bit longer but these three are essentially evenly spaced for the most part so it's a it's a point of measurement that you can use um with a certain amount of confidence that it's going to get you at least in the in the ballpark of what's right now if i come to the navel here and i come out this way this tells me approximately where the elbow is so that's kind of useful coming down to below the pubic bone here the wrist and then the hand coming down here um so this is something just to keep in mind as very kind of rough idea with proportion proportions tricky and i know it's something a lot of people struggle with um it takes practice but i would say that if you follow the concept of working with large ideas what's the large idea you know that first stage of the drawing go back and have a look at that um get try and you develop a sense or you will develop a sense as time goes by of what those proportions should be and whether you're in the right ballpark and honestly that just really comes through trying on the trial and error um you know draw it wrong a couple of hundred times and you'll start to experiment on trying to find a solution for why why it keeps going wrong the other thing about proportion though that i just think you need to be mindful of especially even thinking in these terms is as soon as the model turns or goes into a pose that's foreshortened all of these normal standing proportions obviously go out of the window so proportion is it's there's no simple formula if this model was turned like this none of these relationships um work anymore and then you have to start thinking about perspective and foreshortening and as i said we'll talk about that um at another time so i hope this helps um obviously we've got a lot more to discuss and as we move through the um the sessions um we'll start to add more complex ideas and we will start to develop a keener sense for anatomy and we'll discuss all of those things further if you have any questions please leave them in the comments below if you found this useful please like and subscribe it helps me out a great deal and i'll see you next time thanks a lot

Channel: Richard Smitheman

Views: 1,961,354

Keywords: fineart, lifedrawing, figure, atelier, gesture, figuredrawing, gesturedrawing, drawing

Id: gpH8T2CRlLI

Length: 44min 28sec (2668 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 01 2020