Dynamic Figure Drawing: Learn to Draw the Figure

1. Dynamic Figure Drawing: Hi there. Thanks for checking out this class. My name is Sha Bonn. I teach art and animation, and this is my complete guide to learning how to draw the figure. If you've always wanted to learn how to draw dynamic and expressive figures, or you want to push your drawing skills to a new level through figure drawing, this course is for you. This course is also for you if you're a complete beginner, because what you'll learn is a set of foundational techniques that beginners and seasoned artists can use to dramatically improve their drawing. You're going to learn all about anatomy for artists and how to identify important landmarks of the figure. You'll start out learning how to unlock your own signature for drawing. We're going to explore this through gesture drawing using short, 1 minute, and two minute poses to create fluid, dynamic, and powerful studies. I'm going to explain exactly what gesture drawing is and what it isn't, and you'll learn the real reason behind these ultra short poses like 30 seconds or 1 minute. From there, you'll ship gears and discover the other side of the coin to gesture and that's contour drawing. Contour drawing is a slowed down and considered drawing line. You'll learn all about blind contour, outer contours, and edges, and cross contours. This last section completes a drawing skill set that I believe is powerful and it will never let you down. With this skill set, you'll be able to draw anything. I've been drawing the figure for almost 20 years. Early on, I had the opportunity to learn from a really gifted teacher a set of techniques and approaches to drawing the figure that really opened the door to my creativity and my voice. These are the techniques that I want to share with you today. For me, figure drawing is not just about proportions and anatomy, it's also deeply about creativity and expression. Ultimately, figure drawing is a way for you to express yourself, and I think it's crucial that you learn how to develop your own voice and learn how to work with it through drawing. So I hope you join me in this class and start improving your drawing and your creativity today. 2. Introduction: How the Class is Structured: Welcome to the class. I'm so glad that you joined me and I can't wait for you to start your drawing journey. In this introductory lesson, I'm going to explain the outline of the class, so that you know what to expect, and I'll also talk about your class projects and working with the reference photos of the model. For the first few lessons, I'm going to explain my approach to figure drawing, and cover things like materials, what you need to draw. I'll also talk about what is the natural way to draw and why your way of drawing is actually key to your progress in this class. Then we'll dive into the main learning sections of this class, gesture drawing, contour drawing, and anatomy for artists. Even though the lessons are divided up into these three sections, you can think of all of these aspects as actually forming a complete drawing skill set together. They all work to inform and support each other. In order to be able to draw anything, but especially for figure drawing, I think it's really key to be able to have control and confidence with your line work, and know how to use your pencil or charcoal confidently. It's also key to know how to look and how to observe things as an artist. Then finally, it's really important to know what to look for when you're drawing from the model. To write the demos in these lessons, I'm working from reference photos from line-of-action.com. This is a wonderful online figure drawing site where you can access photos of the model and choose however long you want to draw the pose. I will mention that line-of-action.com is not the only online resource. There are plenty of other places where you can get modeled photos. Another great example is Croquis Cafe. You can check that out as well if you're interested. What I suggest is that you watch the videos and demos that I do, and then hop over to Line of Action or a similar website, and start drawing yourself. It doesn't matter if you're not drawing the exact same pose as me. It's more important that you practice the techniques in a drawing of your own. One thing I would mention at the beginning or my advice to anyone starting at figure drawing is, avoid poses that are very extreme or too dynamic. Just skip through those poses and try to find ones where the model is in a more relaxed or natural pose. You'll have much more success in your drawing than if you try to tackle those crazy poses, or poses of people in Viking outfits. Leave that for leisure when you've actually worked up your skill level. Just look for natural easy poses to draw and ones where the lighting is good. Avoid any ones with harsh lighting like dark shadows, because you want to actually be able to see what it is you're drawing. As I said at the end of each demo, there's an opportunity for you to practice your own drawing. Then what I would suggest for the class project is that you choose one of your best drawings from the class, and post that into the project section. It doesn't have to be the one that you've spent the longest time on or the last drawing that you do. If you find that one of the shorter poses from the gesture drawing section is one of your best drawings, then definitely post that. Then lastly, I would say, keep in mind that the goal of this class isn't to produce one very nice perfectly rendered drawing. The end goal is for you to have truly experienced your own talent and artistic ability through drawing, and also knowing that you can access or tap into that anytime you like for whatever it is you want to draw. Up next, in the next video, I'll explain some of the materials that are most often used for figure drawing, and what ones you need specifically to get started. 3. What You Need to Get Started: For this class, you don't have to have any particular materials, or you don't necessarily have to go out and spend money buying materials. If you don't want to, if you don't have access to that, you can simply use whatever you've got to hand. If you've got something to draw with and something to draw on. In this video, I'm going to show you what I generally use for figure drawing. In a way, it's probably good to consider getting some of these because so much of the process of figure drawing is linked to working with things like charcoal. I don't want you to be put off this course or drawing in general. If you feel that you don't have the materials to start with. You don't have to start with charcoal, you can just use a pen or pencil. In a life figure drawing session or what's called a life drawing session, people will usually work with newsprint paper. Newsprint paper is very cheap quality paper. It's actually made from newspapers. It's very, very light, quite smooth surface for drawing on. You can usually buy newsprint paper, large quantities offered for very cheap. That's why people use it so that you can work through a ton of drawings in any given life drawing session and not have to worry about making terrible drawings and wasting good quality expensive paper. That's something to realize or to understand, is that a life drawing session or a regular figure drawing practice is literally about practice. You're not going to be going in and making perfect finished drawings for each one, maybe all, but in general, a figure drawing session is about practicing your art and that's why you want to be able to work through tons of paper if you can. When working on newsprint paper, a really good thing to work with is charcoal. A pen or a pencil isn't going to be great on newsprint paper. Pencil is probably a bit too light, but generally speaking, charcoal works best on newsprint paper. There are two types of charcoal, compressed charcoal and willow charcoal. I just want to point out the differences because if you're just starting out, it's actually quite important to know the differences between the two. I've got a whole selection of charcoal here. Willow charcoal and compressed charcoal sort of look the same, but the way they behave or the way they perform on paper is very different. Compressed charcoal is very dark. You can get really dark marks with compressed charcoal. Whereas with willow charcoal it's much lighter. I'm pressing down quite hard here and I'm not actually even getting a dark mark at all. Different people obviously prefer one over the other. I would say, with something like willow charcoal, because it's more refined and much lighter, it takes a little bit more control and a little bit more finesse to work with something like that. Starting out, for beginners, I always recommend choosing compressed charcoal when you want to experiment with charcoal drawing, and especially when you want to develop your own dynamic marks for figure drawing. Compressed charcoal comes in sticks like this. They might be a bit longer and you can just break them. They easily break up. The great thing about compressed charcoal, as I said, is that you can get a really dynamic. Range of darks, turn it on its side, draw with it very lightly if you wanted to as well. The one thing about compressed charcoal is that just be warned, it goes all over your hands very, very quickly. If you don't have newsprint paper or charcoal, and you want to just work in your sketchbook, that's totally fine. You can easily do figure drawing in a sketchbook. The one thing I would recommend though, is don't use compressed charcoal in your sketchbook. It's just too messy. You'll have to spray it with fixative in order for it not to smudge. If you don't do that, the minute you close your book, the drawing will be completely smudged out, maybe ruined completely. But you can use a charcoal pencil. A charcoal pencil is a lot less messy than sticks of compressed charcoal. I have one here that I got in the art shop. I also tend to use a pencil called a Conte pencil, which is like charcoal mixed with, I think a wax or a crayon and you can pick that up in a pencil form as well. The brand that I usually go for is Conte a Paris. It's like a pencil, but it's not graphite. I generally avoid using any graphite pencils because I find personally that I can't get as wider range of marks of the pencil as I can with something like a Conte pencil or a charcoal pencil. The other thing you might be considering buying is an eraser. For figure drawing work, I usually use a kneaded eraser because you can shape it and actually use it as a drawing tool. But it's not an essential thing to have at this stage and in fact, I'm not even going to be using it very much at all throughout the exercises or the sessions that we'll be doing in this course. Because I'm trying to focus on dynamic mark-making, I'm going to be encouraging you to make any mark that you want on the page and to keep your marks in your drawing so we're not going to worry too much about erasing things out. That's really the extent of the materials list for this course. There are countless things that you can use for figure drawing. Sometimes I even work with ink and ink wash and paint brush. For this course, you really don't need to make it complicated or expensive. Just keep your materials list as simple as possible. If you've got any questions at all, then please let me know and I'll be sure to help you out and advise about what material. 4. How to Simplify the Figure for Drawing: In this section, we're going to focus on some very basic and preliminary aspects of the figure. I'm going to explain how to simplify the forms so that the complexity of the body is a little bit more understandable in terms of an approach to drawing. Very often when beginners start figure drawing and they're faced with, drawing the figure, it's overwhelming because the body is so complex. Now, once we've covered this simplified approach, we'll then begin to start a much more artistic based approach to actually drawing powerful and dynamic poses of the figure. And that will come in the later sections of this course. This first section is just all about some very basic and simple groundwork. Once we've got this in place, we'll then move on to making much more powerful and dynamic and realistic looking drawings. The thing to know about simplifying the forms of the figure is that it is not a way of drawing the figure. It is only a way of learning of understanding the structure. That really should be made clear because I think beginners missed that crucial point. A simplified version of the human figure is not so much a drawing as it is a diagram. The ultimate aim of this course is to teach you a powerful way of drawing realistic images of the human figure, not stylized or simplified drawings. My main goal in this course is to teach you a way in which you can make strong and powerful drawings in your own unique and expressive style. A style that is not generic. It is not full of symbols, a style that is truly your own, and I think this will give you the confidence and the power. I'll give you the key to be able to do dynamic figure drawing going forward. But with that out of the way, first thing is first, let's explore a simplified version of the figure so that we have some basic groundwork and some conceptual framework to work with at the very beginning. So without getting into anatomical details at all, what I want to point out is that the most important section of the body to focus on for figure drawing is the torso. So the torso is the mid section of the body. Is this region from the pitch of the neck, from the shoulders all the way down through to the pelvis. Now, try to understand this entire section as actually being two sections. It has a circular oval shape at the top and a somewhat boxy, or you could even draw around flattened oval at the bottom. This is the rib cage, and this is the pelvis. Now the reason that I like to identify the top half of the torso as an oval is because the rib cage itself is oval in shape. The lower half of the mid section is somewhat more challenging to see on the surface. We usually simplify this as a box or a flattened oval. The pelvis in reality is actually more shaped like a bowl, but we're going to get to that when we study the figure in the name section. For now, let's just focus on the simplified symbols that we can use as a basic starting point. So the most important thing to note is that there is space between this upper rib cage and the pelvis. This space is crucial to get and to understand because you're not seeing the mid section then as one shape, but you see it rather as two. From the back, both of these sections are not as evident, possibly as from the front, but what is evident is this lovely line of the spine. And the spine is what connects these two shapes together. Spine connects the rib cage and the pelvis so that having that as your connecting line in your drawing is great. It will help you to identify the gesture or the line of action, which we're going to talk about in the next section. As I said, the important reason why we break up the torso into two sections is because not only does this give you a great sense of the dynamic of the upper body. You can see here how the one section moves independently of the lower section. But not only that, you can also start to understand all of these sections as being very much three D in volume. These are not flat shapes, but rather rounded volumetric shapes. From here, if you wanted to continue to understand the figure in terms of basic shapes, you can think of the legs as cylinders. Again, I would break them up into sections of the upper leg and the lower leg. The upper leg will taper towards the knee, and the lower leg will taper down towards the angle. When it comes to the feet, you can think of some flattened out triangles. And that will give you a nice symbol for the feet. From the back, let's just think of these as cylinders, tapering down towards the knee, and again, the lower leg tapering down towards the ankle. Now, you'll note for this practice, I'm not focusing on the muscle shapes at all. I'm not focusing on the anatomy or the bone structure. I'm simply thinking about very basic stylized and simplified symbols. But I think this is a great practice for beginners because it's not at all difficult to trace over the body like this and to break it down and just to in a conceptual way, make some sense out of what at first might seem like a very complex and difficult thing to draw. The same thing goes for the arms. The way I would approach this is you could start off first by making a straight line for the shoulders, the axis of the shoulders. I would always draw in a circular shape for the actual shoulder, and then again, just like the legs, drawing in cylinders, one for the upper, and then one for the lower, tapering that down towards the writ. You can think of this as a great drill. It's almost like a warm up practice. We're not focusing on making figure drawings, we're simply warming up, doing some drawing drills and following the shapes of the figure to make these anatomical figurines. Here, for example, you'll start to notice that, oh, okay, this shoulder is on the outer edge over here and this shoulder is hidden almost behind the rib cages over there. That's possibly something that you wouldn't have necessarily identified if you were just straight out of the gate trying to draw this. But because you're giving yourself this exercise of following the forms in this way, it's easy to identify that and file that away in your drawing memory. Have a go in doing this, download the images that I've left for you and just try to trace over them. You don't need to use photoshop for this practice. You wanted to do this with tracing paper, it's the exact same effect. But start to just break the figure down into these stylized symbols and create little manqus like this. Then if you're feeling very confident, what you can do is start to freestyle it where you are visualizing how the torso would move. The idea here is to draw these symbols or symbolize shapes in various different poses. Start with an oval for the rib cage, draw in a simple box for the pelvis and see if you can then make up the pose that the figure or the character would be in. It doesn't have to be exact, it doesn't have to even be correct. It's just a practice or an exercise to get you comfortable drawing the tilt and the dynamic twist in the mid section of the body. I like to just first of all, throw down an oval and a box It could be completely wrong in terms of shape and proportion. But it's just about trying to figure out the relationship between these two sections. Then simply putting in some cylinders for the legs and some cylinders for the arms to finish off a figurine or a machete in a dynamic pose. Once you get comfortable, you can get very creative with this exercise and put your characters or your drawings into quite extreme poses. I think this is a great exercise to build up confidence in your linework and in your understanding of the body. Now, up next, in the next lesson, I want to focus on some actual anatomical landmarks that we need to be aware of and look out for on the figure or on the model anytime that we start to do figure drawing. When you're ready, I'll meet you in the next lesson. 5. The Important Landmarks of the Figure: Now that you understand or you can see the complexity of the figure in terms of some really basic shapes, it's time to uncover the next stage towards a more robust figure drawing practice. And that is to look at some of the important landmarks that will help you to draw the figure correctly. These are landmarks of the figure that you should look for whenever you start to draw a pose. I want to go through them in this lesson, point them out to you so that you are aware of them. I would suggest that you bookmark this lesson and refer back to it when we get to the anatomy section of the course because these landmarks are great to help you organize the figure and try to make sense of it. So let's start with the torso again. The first and most obvious landmark to look out for is always going to be the tilt of the shoulders and the tilt of the pelvis, especially in a standing pose, but equally in a seated pose. This tilt is going to give you pretty much an idea or a sense of the direction that the model is standing in. Always try to identify this first. It'll be a great indication of the gesture of the body, and it'll help you to immediately know more or less what the dynamic is throughout the whole pose. This tilt is called contraposto, and you'll note that one side is elongated, whereas the other side of the torso is somewhat contracted. This is a lovely aspect of any standing pose, and it's definitely something to look for whenever you have a pose like this. It gives the drawing rhythm and flow, but we'll talk more about that later. Just know for now that this is something that you want to look out for and identify so that you can bring it into your drawings. The next thing to identify is the overall direction of the mid section, and it is very useful to look for this line here right through the middle or the center line. This line is evident on male and female torsos. It's called the linear alba, and it basically divides the mid section into left and right. And it connects the pelvis through the very center of the mid section all the way up to the pit of the neck, this notch here at the top, the clavicle. So this line is great to identify because it will always give you a way to connect everything up, ensuring that you're constructing the figure correctly, keeping everything nicely connected. And it also helps you to see the direction that the upper body is not only bending in this way, but will show you the direction that the body might be turning. So for example, if we look over here, Here is the linea alba, nicely connecting up everything there. But just note how closer this line is to the outer edge of the torso here compared to the outer edge of the torso there. So that tells you that the body is turning that way, and this side of the body is becoming more visible. Now, on either side of the center line, it's also possible to identify two crescent lines that again break up the muscles of the entire stomach area. These lines are added indications of the movement of the pose, and if you spot them, they're very useful in the same way that the linear alba is in helping you to construct the torso overall. So right in here, you'll see that there are two lines that go from the pelvis area up towards the chest. And on this model, it's very easy to identify. I also like to identify or mark down on my drawing a line across the chest of the model just so that I can also connect up the section and ensure that the tilt the tilt is correct. On the back of the body, like I mentioned before, a really good marker or an obvious line to look for is always going to be the line of the spinal column. This gives you all the information that you need to identify the aspect of the pose from the back. And it's a powerful line to get into your drawing. Without going into the anatomy of the muscles of the back, this line will show you exactly the gesture of the pose, as well as help you to construct the entire upper section of the body. Always look for the shape that it's going in and know that at the upper section of the back, it curves out and it curves in towards the lower section of the back, giving this lovely S curve that's very evident at times. Now, the landmarks of the pelvis that you need to look for on the model will be here and here. These are called the iliac crests. They're the top of the underlying bone structure of the pelvis, and they will definitely give you the tilt that I keep going on about. But you want to try and identify them on the model. And if you get them into your drawing, then you'll know that you've identified the tilt of the pelvis correctly. Now, the next major landmark are going to be the legs. And so, obviously, I'm looking for the kneecaps, ankles, and the bottom of the feet. But overall, for the legs, what I'm looking at really are the directions. I always break up the directions between the upper leg and the lower leg. This is really helpful to identify rhythm and flow in your drawings because the legs will give you these obvious rhythm lines by breaking them up between the upper leg and lower leg, going towards the ankle. So very importantly, in a standing pose, I'm always going to be looking to see where the weight of the model is. For balance of forms, the weight of the figure is usually grounded directly beneath the clavicle or the pit of the neck. In other words, the direct center of the torso. So always look for where the ankle is compared to that clavicle. Now, lastly, the arms are very similar to the legs in terms of identifying the two sections from shoulder to elbow and then from elbow to wrist. But the thing to note for the arms really is the construction of the shoulder, which will always overlap the upper arm. And make it appear as though the upper arm is starting from much lower down. This area here is the shoulder, and then the upper arm is here, and then you have the lower arm going to the wrist, tapering towards the wrist. A really nice thing to do is always look for overlap. As I mentioned in the last lesson. This shoulder is not visible, but it provides a lovely overlap for the upper arm to be seen coming out from behind the torso, and that gives a sense of depth and three dimensionality to your drawing. Here, there's an obvious overlap between this forearm and the upper arm and shoulder. One thing I'll also look out for on the arms is where the elbow is in relation to the waist. Because very often the elbow will be visible at the same height of the waist. As I mentioned, all of these points, I'm really not giving you a template to draw. This is just something that I want you to look out for. I've worked with models where the elbows didn't match up to the waist area, and it's something that you need to just be cognizant of, identify it first on the model and then put it into your drawing, not the other way around. Hopefully, these points are helpful to you to give you a bit of a roadmap or a bit of a conceptual understanding of the construction of the figure. Going to move into the next section of the course, where we're going to start drawing the figure in terms of the gesture. I want you to just keep these, these anatomical points in mind, because they will help you to follow the flow and the movement of the forms throughout the model. When you're ready, I'll meet you in the next lesson. 6. What is Gesture Drawing?: In this video, I'm going to explain what gesture drawing is and what it isn't before we move into the techniques and the applications in the next few videos. Gesture drawing is often talked about or defined as being a very fast or very quick sketch. Sometimes it's called a line of action or it's even thought of as a way to draw the figure very, very simply. Personally, I think that these definitions fall really, really short of what gesture drawing actually is and they can even take you down the wrong path completely when it comes to unlocking your own potential to draw strong dynamic drawings and really to capture in a drawing something that you can't quite capture in a photo. I think the reason that people consider it just to be a fast sketch and nothing more is because it's very often associated with some of the short poses at the start of a figure drawing session. If you go to a figure drawing session or a life drawing session, generally speaking, you start out with poses that can be as short as 30 seconds, or one minute, or two minutes. These are seen as warm-up drawings to try and get you to loosen up, warm up, and then move into longer, more considered studies. But for me, I see the 30-second pose or the one-minute pose as something completely different from being a warm-up. There's lots of ways to warm up for drawing. I will get into them later in the course. But really the 30-second, or the one-minute, or two-minute pose is an opportunity for you to develop or to understand what your response is to a pose. If figure drawing students don't understand the purpose of a one-minute or a two-minute pose, it can be hugely frustrating because realistically, how can you draw the full figure in one minute? The point is that you're not meant to. You're not meant to draw the full figure as fast as you can. The definition that I like to use is that a gesture drawing represents a drawing that captures your response. It's a drawing that represents your most immediate, most direct, and most honest response to a pose or to anything really that you're drawing, whatever your subject matter is. The easiest way to get that response onto paper is to take the shortest amount of time as possible before that response goes away or before you start focusing on details. When you're drawing the model, the first time that you look at the pose, you get an immediate impression of that pose. That's what I'm talking about. That is your immediate response. You understand the pose in terms of a dynamic and in terms of the energy or the essence of the pose, and that's what gesture drawing is trying to capture. That's the dynamic quality or the energy that's there. Everything has this. If you're drawing a still life, or a tree, or any scene or object at all, there is a gesture that's present, that's inherent. It's the thing that gives that object its quality of life. A 30-second pose or a one-minute at pose is actually designed to train you to find a way to express that impression through your mark making. It's more important to focus on your marks than it is to focus on the details of the figure or trying to get the whole figure down in proportion. It's much more important to focus on just making responsive marks on the page. Sometimes a gesture drawing is described as a drawing that captures the energy or the essence of a pose. It captures a quality that's present in the model that cannot be captured by a photo or a detailed study. It's something that you see and feel in the moment when you look at the pose. Gesture drawing is a way to describe that. You are trying to capture the energy or the essence or the quality of the pose. But to do that, I'm going to focus on teaching you to explore your marks in order to describe the energy. Because I think it's more effective to work with your marks than to simply tell you to capture the energy or the dynamic quality. In the next video, we're going to look at the techniques that are often used for this gesture drawing. We'll work with a couple of poses just to explore this way of drawing. Then, we'll move into trying out some 30-second and one-minute poses. 7. How to See the Gesture for Figure Drawing ss: In this lesson, before we dive into the actual techniques of gesture drawing and start to practice it with some dynamic poses. What I want to do is just explain to you a really good way of learning how to see the gesture in any pose. So whenever you're drawing the figure, whether it's from life, or from a photo reference, there is always something very specific that you can do to identify the gesture before you start drawing it. And in this lesson, I want to explain exactly how to look for that so that you can see it every single time. And I'm also going to give you some tips on how to then translate that gesture into a drawing through your mark making. In this lesson, we'll go through that. I'll show you a couple of demos of how I do gesture drawing, and then we'll move on in the next few lessons to working with the specific techniques. I'm really passionate about an expressive dynamic approach to figure drawing, especially when you're drawing the figure from life. Because for me, gesture drawing isn't just one aspect or one part of drawing, it really is a way that can unlock all of your drawing. On the one hand, gesture is how you make marks on the page. It's your mark making. Really the two things are very intertwined. How you draw across the page is your unique and distinctive signature. On the other hand, the gesture is also the movement or the dynamic quality that you see in the model. So really your marks or your gesture should match the gesture that you see in the pose. The easiest most basic way to see the gesture in any pose is to look for the movement. So I'm going to pull up some images that I just did a really quick search on Pinterest for gesture poses, and there are loads here to choose from. But let's just start with this idea of movement as a basis for finding the gesture. Gesture is often described as the energy or the essence of a pose, but it's really helpful to look for movement. First of all, always ask yourself, what is the direction of the pose. That's going to be the most obvious pointer to the gesture. The most obvious way to capture that is through a line of action. A line of action will give you one overall basic movement of the pose. But the thing is is that it's just one line. It's not a drawing. It doesn't really say enough and it doesn't fully describe the pose. It simply tells you the direction of the pose. It is useful as a starting point, but to continue the drawing, you need to start to look for movement throughout the whole figure. The entire figure is always going to have various movements. The legs form one movement or direction, the torso forms another. The arms also form their own movements. Then within each of them, the anatomy plays a rhythm that you can look for and describe as movement or direction as well. Look at anatomy, not just as a still life, but as movement. Think about those anatomical features that are actually built to move, and especially if you're in a live figure drawing session, that sense of how the forms move, how they're built to move, you're much more aware of it. Looking at key anatomical markers like the muscle shapes or the underlying bone structure, looking at the round volume, all of these aspects are going to show you the rhythm and flow of the pose. So that's my advice if you're really stuck on how to get started with gesture, look for that rhythm, flow, and movement. And then to draw the gesture, use your marks in a way that matches that flow or that rhythm that you see. In other words, let your marks be much more free flowing than you normally would draw. Allow them to go outside the forms, allow them to go around the form, and don't restrict yourself to drawing neat outlines or to try to get the proportions right. Whatever you do above all else, don't use a gesture line to draw a two D outline. Try to incorporate the sense of volume into your drawing. If you have a problem with the idea of free flowing, if it sounds a bit too abstract and silly. Just try it as a discipline drawing drill. See this as nothing more than a drawing exercise. You don't have to keep the drawings. You can just use it to try and develop your mark making and just see what kind of dynamic range of marks you can make in one drawing. It's also a good exercise to see if you can draw instinctively and if you can draw intuitively, and that can be a really nice counterbalance to very careful studied detailed detailed and nationally drawings. So to summarize, whenever I start out a gesture drawing, I'm first of all, putting down that big overarching line of action, the line that defines the sort of shape of the pose. And from there, I start to build out smaller lines of movement, and I'm trying to relate each of those smaller movements to that overarching big movement that I see in the pose. I want to stress that you should use a free flowing line to do this. It's almost like you're searching out the gesture with your line. Don't be afraid to make marks that go outside of what you think is the boundaries of the figure. Allow your line to flow around the page as much as you can, because that in the end will be the element that captures the gesture that you see in the image. This is a practice that you can do over and over again. It's not just a once off drawing, so I encourage you to do this as much as you can. Overall, I think this is a really good starting point, as I said, and I think the more you work with this approach or this exercise, let's call it, the more connected you will get to your drawing. You'll start to see that gesture really is a unifying aspect throughout the whole pose. It definitely comes with practice. Maybe it can develop over time for you, or maybe it's an instant break for you once you start to work with it. But it is an approach that is going to help you fully understand your own drawing language. Gesture will teach you not only how to draw, but how to learn to draw. And because of that, you will always have a method for discovery through your own marks. The true nature of artistic creation isn't a set of rules that you apply to your work. It's really a process. And your job as an artist is to uncover that process. I think the fastest way to do that is through gesture drawing. So for your assignment for this lesson, I'd like you to go on Pinterest and search out some dynamic poses of figures. And then just spend some time in your sketchbook practicing, drawing just the gesture. Don't worry about trying to make a drawing that looks exactly like your photo reference. Try to follow the steps that I've laid out in this video about following the line of action and then dialing into smaller rhythms and flow lines throughout the pose. Give yourself a time limit, if you can, spend no longer than one or 2 minutes on your drawings in your sketchbook. When you've done these, I'd love you to post them up in the class and ask me any questions if you have any about gesture drawing, and I'm very happy to give you feedback on your particular set of drawings. 8. 3 Techniques for Gesture Drawing: As I said in the last video, gesture drawing is really all about mark-making. There are many, many ways to do gesture drawing obviously. In this video, I'm just going to cover a few techniques that are really useful to work with and to kick-start your own mark-making journey. You can think of these as exercises or prompts for you to explore, develop, or discard if they don't seem useful to you and try something else. I'm just going to use newsprint paper and my charcoal pencil. I'm going to hop onto line-of-action.com, pick a few random poses and just talk you through it. These poses will not be timed. We'll do timed poses in the next couple of videos. This is just like a way to demonstrate these techniques. You can certainly follow along with me if you want with these poses or draw anything that you like and follow along with me. First technique that's often used in live drawing sessions is called scribble drawing. Scribble drawing is basically using round, circular scribbly marks to build up the form or to build up a drawing. Just round, circular forms like this. You can press lightly or more heavily depending on where you want to place emphasis. I'm looking at a pose on my laptop on Line of Action, I'm going to pause it on Line of Action. I'm going to try as much as I can to put down the general shape with the general dynamic quality of the pose with these scribbly lines. I'm not drawing the figure with any anatomical correctness, I'm not going for that. I'm trying instead to work around with literally scribbly lines. This might seem a little bit random at first like why circular scribbles? But one of the important aspects of scribble drawing is that you start to get a sense of volume through your marks. You avoid drawing outlines. I wouldn't want you to draw like this. A lot of people just do that. The idea for scribble line drawing is that you start to feel as though you're drawing around the forms. That's really important to establish a sense of weight and a sense of volume in your drawing. That's one technique that you can work with. You don't have to do it with a pencil. It works just as well with a piece of charcoal. The nice thing with the charcoal is that you can use the side as well as the edge. That goes a long way towards getting nice volumetric feeling in your drawing. That's scribble drawing. It might not look fantastic to you you a drawing in itself. But as I keep repeating, it's all about trying to develop this mark-making and experimenting with it. I should say as well, is that part of this whole process is to really work with the material that you have and see how many varied marks you can get from a simple pencil or pen or anything that you're working with. The next technique that I'll show you is very similar to scribble drawing. In fact, it's almost the same, but let's just separate it out. That is to keep your pen or your pencil in contact with the page for the entire drawing. Again, I'm just using that circular motion of making lines. But I'm trying to not lift my pencil off the page. Again, it's not accurate, it's not anatomically correct. The proportions probably way off. But we're not going for that, just trying to make dynamic responsive marks. Again, with the charcoal, let's see if we can do this. Then the third exercise or technique that you can work with is called the line of action. But I like to think about many lines of action. It's all about looking at the pose or looking at the model and following dynamic energy flows through the pose where you think there might be a balance or maybe weight within the pose, especially if the model is twisting or turning. It's easy to try and see these dynamic lines going through the pose. It's important to note. Don't focus on trying to draw the outline of the figure. Think instead on terms of lines that flow through the body. This is an interesting pose in terms of a line of action. The model standing up and with one leg stretched out in front. It's perfect for trying to describe the line of action. I would generally say that the line of action starts at the foot and goes up through the body towards the head. In this case, the arms are overhead as well. Maybe even up through the arms. I guess I am combining a little bit of all three of these techniques into this one way of drawing by following these lines. As a gesture drawing, that's really all you need to do. You don't need to focus on the anatomy. You don't need to focus on proportion or scale or anything like that. It's just really an opportunity for you to explore dynamic mark-making. Get to know your materials, get to know about how much you can push your materials to make marks that you want to make. Experiment with light and dark marks, see how much you can push your charcoal to get those nice dark marks. Gesture drawing really isn't about making a perfect picture. In fact, I think the moment you let go of that impulse, you have the opportunity or the chance to make a drawing that you didn't think was possible, or a drawing that actually has a lot more energy and a lot more exciting aspects to it. Try this way out, maybe pause the video and try drawing some gesture drawings for a while. When you feel comfortable enough, then meet me in the next video and we'll try and apply these to some 30-second poses, one-minute and two-minute poses. 9. Drawing 30 Second Poses: In this video, I'm going to walk you through the process of drawing 30-second and one-minute poses. As I've mentioned before, these are the types of poses that occur at the very beginning of a figure drawing session. People often use them as a chance to warm up. But as I've said, I think it's really more about a chance for you to draw an impression. What we're going to be doing is not trying to focus on trying to draw the figure in any detailed way and we're not going to try and even draw like the outline. I would encourage you to experiment with seeing how you can draw what you think is the impulse of the pose or what you think is the dynamic quality of the pose and I would encourage you to use your marks as expressively as possible. I'm going to jump over to line-of-action.com on my laptop. When you get to the site, there's a lot of configurations that you can do to set up what kind of subject measure you want to draw. I'm going to go into figure drawing. When you get through to here, you can actually choose if you want to draw the model clothed, nude or kind of all kinds or a mix, and you can choose to draw only female models or both male and female and then we're going to click "30 seconds" for the first couple of poses just to start and then click "Get Drawing". Before I click the starter or the timer, whatever, just to let you know that what I've done with one of my charcoal pencils is I've sharpened it with a blade and that is a really useful thing to do if you want to get a much longer point on your pencil. You just need to use a blade or I use a penknife. pair away on the pencil. Make sure you don't go and try and pare away on the actual charcoal itself because it'll snap. It's better just to pare away the pencil and then I use a regular piece of sandpaper to sand it down into a nice sharp point. If you want to do that, you can, or for this exercise, I'll also be showing you how to draw with charcoal, but I'll start off with the pencil. Get drawing. This is a fine one to do and I think the timer is on 30 seconds so I'm going to go four lines of action and its stance like that. I'm looking for where the dynamic lines go through the forms on the side there through to the stomach over there and that's 30 seconds. Next one up, keep drawing on the same page by the way. It really doesn't matter if these drawings overlap in any way. I want you to just really practice and focus on looking at how there's a rhythm in the forms. That's something that will come over time. I'm just going to keep going. Here you can easily see an easy thing to do is follow the spine. Like that, like an S curveish and I'm using scribble drawing just to work from the top of the pose down to the bottom. But I'm trying to get that dramatic tilt and that's 30 seconds over. I'm going to hit play and the timer will start. I generally do start with the head. The most important part is that torso and then I try to make sense of the shape that the model is making. Oh, 30 seconds is up, it's a very short time. This is the last 30-second pose that I'll do. Obviously, I'm focusing a little bit on the outlines for this one, but generally speaking, I don't want you to draw outlines. It was six drawings that I did in total and what I would encourage you to do is pause these videos, hop over to line-of-action.com, and try out some 30-second poses. Don't be discouraged if the drawings you make don't look anything like the pose or like the model. Just give yourself 10 minutes of this freestyle drawing. Then when you're ready, meet me back here and we're going to tackle one-minute poses. 10. Drawing 1 Minute and 2 Minute Poses: Welcome back. I hope you had a chance to try some 30 second poses. We're going to move on now. We're going to do one minute and two minute poses in this video. One-minute poses are pretty much the same as 30 seconds. It's the exact same technique. You've got a little bit longer. In fact, you'd be surprised at how much longer one minute feels rather than thirty seconds. What I would say is no matter how long the pose is if you're focusing on gesture drawing and responsive expressive poses, it's really just the same technique but you have to try and moderate it somewhat. Make your first marks really large on the page and then start to work in a little bit darker tones, a little bit darker marks. If you go in very heavy and dramatic at the very first few seconds over the time limit of say one or two minutes or even if you're drawing for five minutes, your drawing will get very, very heavy and dark very quickly. I'm looking at the line of action through the back and then through the legs. It's like one big s curve, backwards s curve you could say. The spine goes down like that, come through to the legs, down to the feet. There's a line of action but then you've got to put in the rest. One minute, 21. One minute is gone. Thirty seconds left, one one second. Pose it there, one second. Do another one of this, so two minutes starting now. This is a tricky pose, the model is leaning back. It's not easy but you can still identify a line of action going from the head through to the feet. One minute left, 30 seconds left, 24 seconds, 10 seconds left. On a pose like this or with this model, it's really easy to see lines of energy and dynamic lines within the figure to draw and to follow especially around the legs and especially around the arms. I'd encourage you to look out for these dynamic lines as they flow through the body especially if the model is very muscly. But it doesn't have to be like on a muscly figure, you can also see these dynamic lines in any figure really. But take a break now and jump into your own sketchbook and try and time yourself to do one minute and two minute poses. Then when you're ready, join me in the next video. 11. Drawing is Seeing: In this video, I'm going to explain how you can develop your own observation and learn how to look at things like an artist. When I think about figure drawing, there are two aspects that I think are most important. One is expression and one is observation. In the last section of videos, we looked at expression and specifically how you can use your marks to express your artistic, emotional, or intuitive response to what you see. Now before we move on, I want to point out that gesture drawing isn't necessarily a technique that you'll learn once and then move on to the next one in order to progress through a set of specific techniques. It's much more holistic than that. Gesture drawing is something that you can use and work with over weeks, months, years or even a lifetime of drawing practice. The way that you draw really is your signature. Gesture drawing is something that will help you to develop that. The other side of the coin to gesture drawing or to mark-making is how you observe the subject that you're drawing. Whether it's a model in figure drawing, a still life, or anything really. In that sense, along with gesture, observation is really important to learn and develop through your drawing. In these next lessons, I'll show you ways to learn how to observe as an artist. I want you to learn how to see shapes instead of symbols. In this video, I'm going to explain what I mean by this. I'll explain how and why we normally see things as symbols and why in this sense, we can say we're not really observing correctly, or at least not observing fully. The way we see when we draw and consequently, the way that we draw has to do with the way that our brain handles the task of drawing. Rather than being just about talent, being able to draw artistically has to do with the processes that go on inside your brain. This idea was first researched and put forward in a book called Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain by Betty Edwards. Our normal response when we see anything really is to give it a name or a label: we see this and we call this a coffee cup, we see this and we call it a pen, when we see a person's face, we see all of the complex shapes that make up that face as names. We see eyes, nose, and a mouth. Crucially, these labels and names are actually intrinsically linked to symbols in our minds. Symbols are simply a shorthand way for our analytical or thinking process to understand complex shapes. Here's the thing; this analytical thinking process is a function of our left brain. Our brains have two sides, and they are both largely responsible for different tasks. The left side of the brain is much more analytical, logical, and verbal. The right side of the brain is much more intuitive. It's responsive and holistic. It's the artistic side of the brain, you could say. When the processes of the left brain are in play, when we're drawing, we tend to name shapes and handle the drawing task by just using quick symbols that we know will be shorthands for the complex shapes that we see. The left brain will tell you, don't worry about the complexity, an eye looks like this. If the right side of the brain is in play, then drawing becomes much more about simply following shapes and edges instead of just drawing a shorthand common shape that we all know represents an eye. Now, that complex shape simply becomes a series of edges and shapes within shapes and lines to follow. This is much easier to draw because you just have to follow these lines and shapes. That's what pure observation is all about. It's simply about seeing things as shapes rather than seeing them as pre-conceived symbols or as shorthands. These are the processes that we want to work with when we're drawing because the analytical logical process or that way of thinking is often quite stronger or more dominant, you could say in most people, we want to be able to switch over to the right side of the brain anytime that we want to draw. Luckily, there are a few techniques and exercises that you can do to help you to do just that. When you're ready, meet me in the next lesson and I'll show you how to draw in a way that is going to engage the right side of your brain. 12. Blind Contour Drawing: This first exercise in this section of videos is called blind contour drawing. What you're going to do is spend the entire drawing time only looking at the reference image and not looking down at your drawing. Be warned, you'll probably end up with a drawing that looks nothing like the model or nothing like what you expect it to look like, but remember that that's the point. The point isn't to make a nice perfect drawing or even a drawing that looks like the model. Really what we're doing in this exercise, in this drawing drill, is trying to explore line, shape, and contour. You can use anything you like for this drawing. You can use your sketch book and a pencil or a pen, it doesn't matter. I'm going to hop over to line-of-action.com, pull up a pose. I'll actually just pause this. You should probably spend maybe 10 minutes on this drawing. The way to start off a blind contour drawing is, first of all, when you look at the model, decide where you want to start your drawing. I usually start somewhere near the top and work my way down. I'll pick somewhere around, say, the neck. Then put your pencil down onto the page to correspond to that point. Then what you're going to do is just simply move your eyes slowly along the outer edges or wherever you see the contours moving. As you do that, you move your pencil in the exact same time. Remember, this is a slow drawing; try and move your eyes and your pencil as slowly as possible. I start out. I'm just taking my line across and around the shoulder as it moves down. Now, I'm trying really hard to just look at the outer edge and not think about the shape or think about the thing itself that I'm drawing, just following the edge, following the shape of it. Then when your line meets another line like another edge as in this instance here, what you could do is you could either follow it back up to this point or just switch over and follow this line. Now I'm following model's arm as it moves across the body and down around the elbow and over to here. Now at this stage, my line has met another contour line. What I'll do now is just take this line up and follow it down the leg and around the knee. Whenever your line meets another line, for example, here, you can follow the leg down this way or you can switch over and follow this other leg. The point is that you're just getting really interested in following the edges and the lines, and it doesn't matter at all if it makes any sense. Some going around the feet and now I'm going to start to bring my line back up on the other outer edge of the leg. You really are trying to follow all of the movements of the line. It's not just one straight continuous line or curve anywhere in the body, there are always modulations in that line, there's always movements that you can catch. The idea of this exercise is to train you to see those. A really good example is right about here. If I was in left-brain mode or that side of the thinking processes I talked about earlier, I might just assume that this line goes straight up to the shoulder. Whereas, in fact, the more I look at it, the more I realize that there's different curves to the line and it goes out, and in, and maybe curves a little bit here, and then it goes around the shoulder like that up to the chin. I'm at the chin. Now what I might do is follow an inner contour line down the neck, and even across the sternum, and down through the torso like this, and over to the outer edge. Again, I'm seeing a lot of variation in the line, a lot of movement. That's fine. I'm going to come back across over to this arm. Following it up, across and around the shoulder, and I'm pretty much nearly at the point where I started, right right. I think I'll stop it for now. That's my drawing. As I said, be warned that the drawing that you make isn't probably the drawing that you think you should make when you look at a pose like this. But really what we're doing here is exploring edges and lines, and that's the point of this exercise. I'll leave it over to you. I suggest that you pause this video now and give yourself 10 minutes to do a blind contour drawing. Even if you think this is a pointless exercise, try it out and see if you can have that experience of switching off your analytical thinking processes and just tuning in to a pure drawing mode. Then when you're ready, meet me in the next video. 13. Contours and Edges: In this lesson, we're going to move on from during blind contours and do irregular contour drawing. It's the exact same process, you'll be working with a really slow and considered line. But this time you will be able to look down at your drawing while you're doing, throughout the process. Although I'll suggest that you try to look at the reference image as much as possible. I've pulled up another pose, and I'm going to start out almost in the exact same way as I did with the blind contour drawing. First of all, picking a point on the model to start my drawing, and then I'm going to really slowly work with my line and follow the outer edge. For this exercise, we're going to do as your contours and edges. What that means is just being very aware and mindful of how the forms are shaped. To do that, you're just simply following the edges. Right now I'm drawing around the shoulder of the model as it comes down. I'm being very careful to go as slowly as I possibly can. If you rush this process or if you rush this kind of drawing, you tend to miss out on your observation. I really encourage you to try and go even slower than you think you are drawing. A contour drawing is incredibly slow drawing. It's the complete opposite to a gesture drawing, which is very impulsive and intuitive. A contour drawing is much, much slower than that. I mentioned Kimon Nicolaides earlier and that book, The Natural Way to Draw. He actually formalized this approach to figure drawing based on his experiences working as a mark maker in the First World War. He was drafted into the First World War and he was placed in the map-making section, I guess. Through his experience drawing maps by hand, he came up with this idea with this notion of mapping the body in this way. It proved to be an incredibly powerful teaching tool when it comes to teaching students how to draw the figure and how to see the shapes on the figure. You can think of this as almost like you're mapping out the body. You're moving slowly from one point to the next point, connecting up the edges, connecting up the landmarks that you are trying to draw. Eventually, little by little, making a whole drawing. It requires a lot of patience. I encourage you to just stick with us and just keep going. If you make any mistakes like I've done just here where I realized where I started isn't going to quite match up to where I am at the moment. That's completely fine. I'm not even going to bother to erase it out. I'm just going to keep going and draw over it. Those initial lines which I thought were the chin and are actually not going to match up to where my shoulder is at the moment. I tend to keep all of those lines in my drawing unless something's told you off, then I'll erase it out. But something like this, if you feel like you need to change your linework, just simply draw over it. Try and get into a point of view where you feel comfortable enough that any mark that you make on your page is going to be part of your drawing in the end. Right now I'm just following the contour around the model's face. I would advise you not to get into drawing the features of the face at this stage. Just draw almost like the outer edge of the head if you need to. But don't worry about doing anything got to do with the features of the face, at the eyes or the nose or the mouth. You can just avoid drawing those at the moment. You really don't need to have them in a figure drawing in this way anyway, because we're not drawing portraits, were focusing on drawing the figure. I'm seeing another contour line on this arm over here. That comes almost straight down really to the forearm. Then I'm going to pick up the contour of the forearm and follow this along towards the wrist. I'm trying to as slow as I can. I'm looking at the reference image about 70 percent of the time and then looking down at my drawing about 30 percent. I'm still trying to keep very, very engaged with looking at what I'm drawing as opposed to looking at my drawing if that makes sense. I find that a much better way to help you focus. I would also suggest that you don't get too caught up into drawing the details around the hand. I've noticed that quite a lot of students, they'll be doing a beautiful contour drawing, and then as soon as they get to the hand, the contour line sort out the window and they get caught up in drawing the individual fingers and suddenly, the drawing doesn't look so well observed. What I would suggest is just draw the outer edges of the hand for now and don't worry too much about drawing details of the fingers. The more you look at your reference, the more you look at the model, the more sort of contour lines you actually begin to see. There's quite so many edges and shapes to follow within any given pose really. But this pose in particular is nice and complex, with the arms going across the front of the body like this and this forearm coming straight down in front. Again, on this hand, I'm simply going to follow the outer edges. I'm not going to worry too much about drawing individual thickness or anything like that. When you're doing a blind contour drawing, your pencil is in contact with the paper for the entire drawing session nearly. You tend to not pick your pencil up. But for just a simple outer contour drawing like this where I am looking at my drawing, you can definitely pick up your pencil, move it around, start in a different place, and keep going, and that way you'll be able to try and make the drawing match up a lot better. At this point in the drawing, I would be happy enough if you stopped at this stage and didn't even continue any further because already, this is a lot of drawing that has been accomplished. A lot of very carefully observed edges and lines. But if you wanted to, you could continue, and maybe what I might do is just finish it off by just drawing in the outer edge of the head and the hair and probably leave it at that. I'll leave it over to you. I would love you to have a go at doing an outer contour drawing of a figure. Just focusing on the edges as I've done in this demo. When you're ready, then meet me in the next video, I'm going to show you how to incorporate cross contour lines to really start to make your fingers or your drawings look much more three-dimensional and less like silhouettes. When you're ready, join me in the next video. 14. Cross Contours: In this lesson, I'm going to explain the last component of contour drawing and that is cross contours. I'll demo how you can use cross contours to draw the figure and then it'll be over to you to have a go. This final piece of the contour puzzle is what brings it all together and will make your drawing look real and three-dimensional. Crucially, it is what's going to help you have a much better understanding of the shape of the figure and all of the forms that make it up. I've shown you how to draw outer contours and edges and I really want to make the point that these shouldn't be thought of as outlines. An outer edge or contour is not an outline. An outline implies that something is flashed and that you're just drawing the silhouette, but an outer contour is simply a perceived edge. It's the edge of the form that we can see but we know and understand that that form continues around the other side where we can't see it. Now a cross contour describes the shape of the form as it moves towards us. Basically, this is an outer contour because you can't see this part of my arm, and right here would be a cross contour. It's the shape of the arm as it moves towards you in the front. When you're drawing cross contours, you can think of it exactly like an outer contour. It's a line that follows the shape to the absolute detail following every movement along its path. It's not a straight line or a basic curve. Please don't think of it as a simple curve across the cylinder. Lastly, a cross contour isn't visible on the model necessarily. It's a more of an intuitive line. It's a line that describes the shape as you know it. It really is a much more free-flowing line that is up to you wherever you want to draw it in order to describe the shape that you are drawing. For this demo, I'm going to show you how I draw the figure using outer contours, edges and cross contour lines. I'll explain the process as I go and what you need to know about for cross contours and what you need to look out for. The way I do this is I start out exactly like I started out in the previous drawing. I'm going to use a simple outer contour line and follow the edge along as best I can, really observing the movement along that edge, really observing the shape. In this instance, the model has extremely very defined muscles, especially around the back, so this is where your cross contour line comes in so useful. All I'm going to do is simply trace the shape of the forearms as they are in front. I'm following the outer edge of the back as it moves down and along like this. Now, at this point, I'm going to start tracing a cross contour line to figure out the actual shape of that right upper arm. It's not a simple straight curve from one edge to the other. The muscles actually give that upper arm a specific definite shape that you want to try and get in your drawing. This is where these cross contour lines are so useful and so descriptive. Even by just doing these simple mapping lines, I have already basically delineated the tricep, which I'm not intentionally necessarily going for muscles here. I'm not trying to draw muscles. I'm literally just drawing the shape and the curves that I see. With this intuitive line, this cross contour line, it's up to you where you want to place it, where you decide that the form needs a bit more of a 3D description moving from one side to the other. It's also very useful when you're doing a contour drawing to move your pencil around from one edge to the other. I'll often do this to try and measure things like I'll try and measure the distance or the width of this upper arm from one side to the other using a cross contour line and I find that very, very useful. Right now, I'm mapping from this edge over to the other edge along the elbow and I'm tracing lines going up through that upper arm where there are very obvious shapes. You don't want to draw your cross contour lines too heavy or too dark because it might start to look a little bit strange, so keep them light as you move around the form from one side to the other. I've got some smudges on my page here and just trying to get rid of. Now for the lower forearm, I'm going to use an outer contour line just to trace all the way down to the hand and then a cross contour line from one side of the wrist to the other. That really gives me the shape and the width of the wrist. Similarly, on the other side, I can use an outer contour and then figure out the width of the forearm by tracing the cross contour along from one side to the other. I have to point out, again, this is all based on just simply looking at the reference, looking at your reference image by 70 percent and just looking down at your page about 30 percent of the time just to make sure that you are making your marks in the right place. For example, here, instinctively, I would just try to continue the line of the back straight down, but because I'm working with contours, I can see now very clearly that the lower half of the back starts much further down the models arm, and that's a really good pointer or visual cue to find so that I can make the drawing look more correct, let's say. Another area where cross contour lines come in incredibly useful is around the hands. In previous video, I suggested that you avoid drawing the fingers when you are just doing a simple contour drawing. But here, it's really useful to use these cross contour lines to work out the width of the fingers because you can just trace where the knuckles are, trace where the fingertips are, and that instantly gives you enough visual information to fill in the hand. For the width of the torso, I'm measuring and mapping out using cross contour lines and I have an idea of how wide the torso section is going to be. Now I'm just going to go back up to the top and use obviously a very nice outer contour line to follow. I also find contour lines really useful when it comes to drawing profiles of the model. That can be a very difficult thing to draw. If you just switch off completely about what it is you're drawing and follow the shapes with your pencil, then it makes drawing those difficult areas that much easier. Hopefully, this has made some sense to you. Hopefully, you've got the idea of the difference between an outer contour or an inner edge and a cross contour line. I'd love for you to have a go at drawing the model using this method. Maybe pause the videos now and take some time out. Give yourself 20 minutes and make a really nice contour drawing of the model. When you're ready then, join me in the next video. 15. What Makes a Good Drawing?: In this lesson, I want to discuss what I think makes a good drawing. Edgar Degas famously said drawing is seeing. For a drawing to be powerful or impactful, or let's a good drawing, I think it should be one that has been well observed. It should represent how truthfully the artist observed that thing. Up until now, this idea of good observation in a drawing, I've discussed it in terms of using your right brain to see shape rather than using left-brain processes to see symbols or shorthand. Also I have discussed how to use your line or your mark to express what you see. But I want to make the point that how truthfully an object is observed doesn't necessarily mean that it has to look like the thing. Because you can see so much more and understand so much more about an object than the superficial visual aspect. Observation really means what you know and understand about a subject. I'll give you a really simple example. Take this mug. There is a way that you can describe this in terms of its 2D visual aspect. That's a drawing that looks like the object. But as an artist, you have an understanding of this object that goes way beyond what it just looks like. You know what it feels like to hold a mug like this. You know that it's round in shape. You know that it's a vessel that probably contains coffee. You might have an emotional response to the color or the shape, or it could even trigger memories for you. All of these things are things that you can bring into your drawing in a way that a photo of this mug can't quite capture. That's the power of drawing, and that's what it means to fully observe something in every sense. So observation literally means using all of your senses, your understanding, and even your experience. In that sense, we could define a good drawing as one where the artist observe their subject, but also where they had an understanding or an experience of us. We're now going to be moving into the next section of the course which deals with anatomy. This is a bit of a tricky area for me to teach, because personally I'd prefer to teach regular drawing without having to deal too much with anatomy, but 90, 99 percent of people want to focus or hone in on anatomy, and a lot of people think that anatomy is the only way to draw the figure. I'm going to tell you right now that you don't need to know the names of muscles and bones and tendons to be able to make a beautiful drawing of the figure if you can observe it well. But having said that as we've just discussed, one component of observation is a knowledge or an understanding of your subject. It is beneficial to know something about the structure of the figure, and that's how I'm going to teach you anatomy. I'm going to explain things in terms of the underlying structure. I want to point out to you the major landmarks that you know to look out for on the model so you can make your drawing more better observed than if you didn't know about them. In other words, I don't want you to draw muscles and bones as a medical illustration or a cartoon comic book superhero. That's totally fine if that is what you want to do. If you want to draw idealized, stylized versions or designs of the figure. But as an artist who's trying to develop their art through figure drawing, it's really important to know and understand that no two bodies are the same. No two bodies or no two figures have the same proportions. We all have the same muscles, bones, and tendons, but they appear differently on each and every single person. When you see diagrams of the proportions of the figure, know that these diagrams are not drawings in the same way that a map is not the same as a journey. What you want to do as an artist is take your viewers on a journey and not show them the map of the journey. That brings me to the last point that I want to make before we get into anatomy. That is, I would add one more thing to this definition of what is a good drawing? A good drawing is one that's well observed. It's one where the artist has a knowledge or an experience of the subject. I think it's also one that allows the viewer to see something in a new way. If you focus only on drawing anatomically correct figures that are more like diagrams that anything else, you will have added nothing new to the world. There are millions of diagrams like this. But if you draw what you see with an understanding or a knowledge of your subject and with an expression that you've developed through your marks, then your drawing of the figure, which let's face it, we've been drawing the figure since prehistoric times, your drawing could add something brand new to the world, something that the world has never seen. As we move into the next set of videos and start studying proportions and an anatomy, know that these are just guides to help you understand what to look out for on the figure and not prescriptions on how to draw. 16. Understanding the Torso: The first and the most important aspect of the figure when it comes to drawing and what you need to know about in terms of the anatomy, is the torso. In this lesson, I'm going to break down for you the structure of the torso and explain what to look out for when you're drawing. The torso is made up of the rib cage and the pelvis. It's essential to know this because two parts mean that the entire section can move dynamically. The top half can move almost independently of the bottom half. The top half of the torso is made up of the rib cage. Now, you can think of the rib cage as an oval shape, and remember, I'm conceptualizing here in order to explain the structure. The actual model doesn't have necessarily an oval shape, but the underlying structure is more or less oval in shape. If this shape is oval, then that means that it's rounded on all sides, not just on the edges. On some models you can see the actual ribs but not on everyone, so it's good to be aware that the ribs have a specific shape or an arrangement. They are wider across the chest and then tapers in towards the top. Plus the ribs are higher towards the central part here in the front, this is called the sternum. The top of the rib cage is an important landmark, it's the pitch of the neck. If you see this on the model, you'll usually be able to tell a few things from here. You can use it to understand the direction of the head, the width of the neck, and most importantly, the tilt of the shoulders, because this is where the clavicle or collar bones sits. It goes all the way around the front, towards the back it attaches to the shoulder blades and also then to the cervical spine. This is going to tell you if one shoulder is higher than the other. The muscles of the chest give the top half of the torso its overall shape. When you are drawing, once you figure out the direction of the rib cage, this is where you can use a closely observe contour line to follow outer shapes and edges. The muscles that you need to look out for to draw these shapes are the abdominal muscles, the obliques at the side, and the pectoralis muscles around the chest. On the back of the model, the spine attaches the rib cage to the pelvis and along with the muscles, it actually holds the whole structure together. So think of this line as giving unity or cohesiveness to this whole section. The pelvis then is the second part of the torso, and it's much more difficult to describe because it's a lot more hidden. You can't really see the pelvis as clearly as you can see the rib cage. You can think of this area as a block or a rounded block if that helps you to simply distinguish the section from the rib cage, and that's really necessary to do because this area between the rib cage and the pelvis has to be taken into account in your drawing. You have to look out for the muscles of the abdominal region, look out for the oblique muscles on the side. That's what's going to give you the waist and the length of the waist. If thinking of the top of the torso as an oval and the bottom half as a block, if that works for you, that's okay. Just remember to note that distance between these two areas. But just to be clear, I'll quickly explain here that the pelvis is actually more like a bowl shape than anything else. It's made up of bones that are higher in the back, they curve around towards the front, and overall, it is slightly tilted forwards. The important landmarks to find or to try and identify on the model are the tops of these bones here, these are called the iliac crests. You often don't see them as clearly on every model, but knowing where they are is important because that's what's going to signpost for you, the actual tilt of the pelvis or the tilt of the hips. If you know to look for these, then you'll immediately know or be able to see if one side is higher than the other. When these two sections move or tilt, this is what gives the body it's dynamic quality or its sense of motion in any pose, and the thing to look out for is the opposing tilt of the shoulders and the opposing tilt of the hips. If ever the rib cage tilts this way and the pelvis tilt this way, then the shoulders and the hips will be in opposition. One side of the waist will be contracted and the other side will be long. Now, this simple relationship actually forms the basis for most of your dynamic poses. In art terms it's called contrapposto, and it's really important to look out for it when you're drawing the model. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to put all of this sort knowledge together with the techniques that we've covered so far, such as gesture drawing and contour drawing, and I'll show you my approach to doing some quick torso studies. 17. Drawing the Torso: For this torso studies, drawing the torso, what I want you to do is really get familiar or comfortable with identifying the sections of the torso as outlined in the previous lesson. What you're going to do is try and see if you can see the rib cage and the pelvis of the model, and see if you can identify the difference between the two or the tilt or the twist if there is any. In this case, the pose is quite straightforward to start out with. I'm just drawing a very, very rough gestural line to indicate for myself where the underlying structure is. That would be the rib cage and the pelvis. Then I switch over to a contour line for more careful outline or other edges. Really, that's my approach for doing these torso studies. I don't get too detailed into drawing muscles. In fact, on this model, even though this model is quite muscly, you can't really identify the abs. They're not as defined as there would be, say on other models. What you do in that case is just rely on your contour line to follow edges and forms. I'll do another quick one on this side. This is a three-quarter view from the back. The first thing that I do is plotting the line of action of the spine, or at least, that gesture line that goes from the spine through to the pelvis. Now, the muscles on the back are a lot more defined in this pose, so it's much easier to see them. But again, I'm just working, first of all, very lightly with a gesture line and then coming in to do the other edges, making sure that I'm getting those contours down exactly right. When I'm following the muscular shapes on the back such as the lats and the trapezius and all those detailed muscles, I'm really using cross contours. That's about it. One thing I will say for any of your torso studies that you're doing when you're just literally trying to practice identifying shapes and forms, don't worry too much about drawing in the head or the arms or legs. This exercise is purely to focus on the torso. I'm just indicating the head and maybe the arms. That's about it. I'll do one more of the male torso. Another back view. Again, this line of action through the spine is key. Once you get that in, you can almost immediately tell where the tilt of the shoulders is compared to the tilt of the hips. I've plotted out where the pelvis is, and now I'm going to try and very lightly, loosely drawing where the shoulders are and get that important tilt of the head. Again, there's lots to work on in this pose with the whole muscle system across the back. But for me, the most important thing is just getting the spine in the right direction and the contours for the other edges. You can always rely on tracing shadow shapes as well if that helps you to identify the shapes of muscles. For me, again, I personally prefer to use cross contours. Keeping in mind that those cross contours follow the concave or convex curves. As I said before, don't think of cross contour lines as being like rubber bands around the cylinder. They really do follow every outline, and bump, and crevice along the surface that they're tracing. That's pretty much all I'm going to need to do on this drawing for this torso study and really, I think that took a little bit less than 10 minutes and I've got three torso studies done. What I will do now is do a couple of torso studies for the female model, just to show you the difference. Not that there is any difference, it's the exact same process. I started just looking for that line of action going through the entire form, going right the way up through the head, and then I can look the oval shape where I think the rib cage is underneath. On this model, it's not a great photo. I do apologize. It's very, very dark. But you can more or less see the important shapes, and that's really all that matters in this case. Don't get too involved in drawing the features of the face at all. You can simply indicate the outline of the head. That's about all you need to do for there. Then look for, if you can tell or look to see if you can see the bottom of the rib cage and see where the hips are. This is a lovely pose where you can actually tell that the iliac crest on the one side, the left side of the model is closer to the bottom of the rib cage. That's easy to spot. That means that the other side of the waist would be long if the side is contracted. Also, don't worry too much if your drawing is a little bit messy, I'm really just using my line work to figure out where things are. Often, some of the marks on the page might look a little bit messy at the end of the day, but you can erase them if you want to, but don't worry too much. That's pretty much the entire aspect of the torso done for this particular pose. It's a matter now filling in shadow shapes and filling in the form. If you want to add more details, it's totally up to you. You don't have to. But I would be happy enough if you were to achieve a drawing like this where you really looked, and studied, and identified where the rib cage is in relation to where the pelvis is. If you've got that angle of the shoulders versus the angle of the hips. I'll do one more drawing after this and then it'll be over to you to have a go at tackling some of these torso studies. I'll move over to here, and this is the last drawing for this session. So very loosely looking for that. This is definitely contrapposto style of a pose. You can very, very clearly see that one hip is lower than the other. It's totally fine to just erase out if you've made a mistake. Very often, I'll put down indications of the figure and then as I work on the drawing a little bit more, I realized that those first marks weren't in the correct place. So you can erase them out or draw over them, doesn't matter hugely. I'm trying very hard not to get too detailed around the face. It's always a bit of a temptation to get into details. But the minute you start working on details, you really do lose the whole impulse of the rest of the drawing. For these quick short drawings, try to stay as loose as possible and avoid drawing details like the face. I would encourage you now to take a break, pause these videos, and spend some time making torso studies in your sketchbook. Just take half an hour and practice working with the model, the images of the model, and see if you can identify the two sections that make up the torso. See if you can identify any movement or dynamic quality in this area or this section, and just make a few loose gestural studies. Then when you're ready, meet me in the next video, and we'll look at the anatomy of the legs. 18. Structure of the Legs: In this lesson, I'll explain the main markers, the main landmarks that I look out for when I'm drawing the legs. Both the arms and the legs are not easy to draw because they're so long. After so much careful study of the complex shape of the torso, these long limbs can be really challenging, especially in any standing pose. First of all, to understand the length of the legs, I generally always suggest just using a gesture line or a line of action from top to bottom. This doesn't have to be an exact measurement or an exact line, but using a quick gesture line will generally give you at least the direction and the length of the leg. If you wanted to, you could compare the length of the torso to the length of the legs. A general rule of thumb is that the length of the torso is equal to half the length of the leg or something like that. But don't draw anything without first checking that proportion on the model. What I think is most important to know is that the leg actually starts very high up in the hip socket, so right up here in the pelvis. This is obvious when you do look for a dynamic tilt or a twist in the hips. The bone of the upper leg then angles inwards from the hips down towards the kneecap. The kneecap delineates the midpoint of the leg. I generally don't really get any more detailed than indicating it by drawing what I can see in terms of the contours of the kneecap. But I can point out that the knee is simply made up of the end of the bone of the upper leg plus the top of the bone of the lower leg with the addition of a 3rd bone, which is the kneecap. It's important to note how the upper leg tapers towards the knee on both sides. At the back of the leg, good markers to look out for are these two tendons that will definitely give you an indication of the knee from the back and an understanding of the direction of the upper leg. The shape of the muscles are important to look for and they're what gives the upper leg its overall shape. Again, slightly different on each person, but looking out for how these muscles descend into the knee area is key to drawing them correctly. Also remember it's crucial to look at the contours. None of these lines are straight or even a simple curve. They're not one continuous line from one point to another. They will always have bumps and curves, and if you can spot them, then you'll be observing correctly. When it comes to the lower leg, this isn't set directly underneath the upper leg, it's actually more set towards the side when you're looking from the front and slightly set towards the back when you look from the side. This is what gives legs their spring-like or dynamic ability, almost like shock absorbers. The lower leg is actually made up of two bones. The larger bone, which is the tibia, starts on the inner side of the knee and goes down to the ankle, and the smaller one, the fibula, starts slightly lower down. Now I mentioned this specifically because the ends of both of these bones will indicate the ankle. It's really good to know that the inner ankle bone is usually higher than the outer one. There's always an obvious angle here to look out for and that will help you so much to be able to draw the foot. Without getting too detailed about the foot, just look for this angle, this arch, and this flat area for the toes. That's the extent of the major landmarks of the leg. In the next video, I'm going to explain the basic anatomical markers of the arms. 19. Structure of the Arms: [MUSIC] There are certain generalized proportions of the arm that can help you to draw correctly like units of length or basic shapes. But before I explain those, I want to make sure that you first of all, again, like I said, with the legs approach drawing the armor gesture. If the core of the body or the torso is where the dynamic aspect of the pose originates. Then very often that dynamic energy, or let's call it a quality, is carried through the arms. Arms are often overlooked because we tend just to follow a line of action from the feet to the head. But don't forget about also following lines of action through the arms. You can plot out this line of action with this direction, with a gesture line. Then refine your drawing. Fill in the form if you like. Using a careful contour study. The first and most basic point about drawing the arms is that from the shoulder to the elbow is more or less the same distance from the elbow to the wrist. The second point is that the length of the arm, if it's done at the side of the body, usually comes to the full length, usually comes to about just over halfway up the thigh so the fingertips, if they're relaxed, will generally get to about here on the upper leg. The shoulder is made up of the shoulder girdle as well as the muscles of the shoulder. These act almost like a cap around the shoulder and come down and insert into the bone of the upper arm. The main muscle of the upper arm is the bicep, and that comes down from the shoulder and inserts in here. It gives the upper arm this shape and curves down into the elbow, and the tricep at the back also inserts towards the elbow. Then when you look at the lower arm, like the lower leg, it's actually made up of two bones. The ends of both make up the wrist. You can actually feel on yourself how these bones overlap each other at the elbow, then run into parallel down towards the wrist. The muscles of the lower arm and the extensors and flexors follow this curve and run down into the flattened out area of the wrist. At the top around this area, it's much more rounded in shape. As the bones descend to the wrist, this area becomes much more flattened and almost blocky or rectangle-like. Drawing the hands can be as complex as you would like to make it. What I generally do is think of the hand in terms of a blocky shape. I'll look out for how the direction is up the palm. Then to draw the fingers, I always recommend, first of all, indicate the fingertips. It's much easier to draw fingers of the hand if you have the fingertips first and then work back towards the overall hand rather than the other way around. If you really wanted to study the hand in detail, then get good at drawing hands, then I highly recommend that you practice doing a few blind drawings of your own hands. This is going to help you enormously to understand and to follow contours and shapes in hands. These basic shapes are really all that you need to know about other than your observation in order to draw the arm. 20. How to Compose Your Drawing: Now that we've looked at the figure in terms of all the separate parts such as the rib cage, pelvis, the legs, and the arms, in this lesson, I want to give you some advice on putting all of these together in your drawings and how to approach drawing the complete figure. In the next lesson, I will be talking about proportion and measuring, but in this lesson, I want to show you a technique or a simple tip that is really effective when it comes to composing the figure on your page. In other words, this tip is going to help you ensure that your composition will fit on your page before you start drawing. One of the biggest challenges that beginners will have [inaudible] is how to fit the drawing onto the page. Many people start out drawing and by the time they get halfway through or towards the end, they realize that they don't have no space to put the legs or the arms or the head. This is usually because we start with the torso and we put so much focus and attention onto that section that it gets very, very big. There's a very simple trick to deal with that. When you look at the pose and you get the idea for the overall proportion, simply draw a very light, almost imperceptible figure of eight on your page. This figure of eight represents the placement and the size of the torso. Now just to be clear, it isn't a shorthand for the torso or a version of the torso, it's really just a way for you to understand where you're going to fit your drawing on your page. The figure of eight is very simple because it can correspond in some way to the rib cage and the pelvis, but it doesn't represent or it's not a simplified version of the torso, it's simply a marker on your page for the placement of that section of the figure. Once you've got that figure of eight on your page, you can either erase it out so that it's not so visible or simply start drawing over it. The idea is that once you have the small marker down on your page, that will correspond, as I said, to the placement and to the size of the torso. Immediately, you're going to know if your entire drawing is going to fit onto your piece of paper. You can judge from this simple placement whether or not you'll have space to draw the full length of the legs and the head as well, if it's a standing pose. If a figure is lying down, for example, or if its in a foreshortened pose, simply adjust the figure of eight to that perspective. In the next lesson, what I'll do is I'll explain how to proceed from here and how you can use things like proportion and measuring to ensure that the rest of the figure actually matches up to this placement of the torso. When you're ready, I'll see you in the next lesson. 21. Comparative Sighting and Measuring: In this lesson, I want to explain how to sight or keep your drawing in correct proportion. This is almost the very last piece of the puzzle in terms of how we've progressed through this course up until now. With this final approach or technique to drawing, you can start to bring all of the other techniques together and make a finished and complete drawing that will demonstrate your observation, your understanding of what you're drawing, and your unique expression or way of drawing. For me, it's very essential when I'm drawing not to break the flow of what I'm doing and to try and stay in contact with my drawing and be present with my drawing throughout. When it comes to sighting or measuring, I don't stop what I'm doing and measure with my pencil like a lot of people. The way that I do measuring and sighting and the way that I ensure that I can stay in proportion is to use one very simple method. I can sum it up in one word. That is comparing. What I'm doing when I'm drawing is constantly comparing the part that I'm drawing to another part on the model. I'm doing this at all times throughout my process. In this instance, I've started by plotting out very roughly my figure of eight on the page. I'm at least confident that the area of chosen for the torso in my drawing is going to fit the whole rest of the figure and I can see that I've got room for the arms and the legs. That's perfect. In that sense, that figure of eight has helped me enormously to get at least that much in place on my drawing. Now I'm drawing very loosely and gesturally and I'm making sure that I use the lightest possible line that I can because these are all explorative lines that are figuring out the forms. I don't want to put down anything too heavy just yet. I'm looking for gesture lines throughout the pose. You could say really at the stage I almost have an envelope of the whole pose, at least in my mind, I now know and understand where the extremes of the pose are and importantly what the tilt of the pose is, that tilt in the torso. From here though, I still need to be super careful about proportions, even though this is pretty much in proportion as a very rough outline. When I start to go in and put in details, I need to start drawing with other comparison in mind, like comparing, say, the angle of the hips to the angle of the base of the torso, things like that. The angle of the hips to the angle of the upper body. Here I'm comparing the width of the torso to the length or the side of the torso, like the waist. I'm comparing the angle of the hips to the base of the torso. I'm comparing where the belly button is to the side of the hips. All of these things start in form and bring the structure together as well. How I can describe this really is to say that I'm constantly comparing size, length, and direction as I draw. It's almost like any section that you are drawing at any given time needs to be done in relation to some other section or area of the body. In this way, you can constantly look at one area in comparison to another. You're never drawing one area in isolation. This, for me, is incredibly important when it comes to angles. I'll look for the angle of the upper half of the torso and compare it to the angle of the lower half or the angle of the hips. I'll look for the angle of the neck and be able to judge how the angle of the head sits into the pose. Angles are as important as measurements of length, though, we tend, generally speaking, to try and straighten up our drawings an awful lot. It's crucial to get tilts and angles correct and to do that, you need to be able to compare one angle to another in order to get it right. Another way to do this is that you can also use one section of the body, like the torso, as an established unit of length or unit of measurement. Then simply compare whatever it is you're drawing to that basic unit. This is very helpful, especially if you're not super confident with comparing things just yet. It's a great way to start out for beginners because it'll make sure that the whole drawing is constantly being related back to one section. I recommend trying that out as well, is just anything you draw, like the head or the arms, measure that through your sight, and then compare it to the length and direction of the torso. Then just keep coming back comparing one to the other. My third tip for comparative drawing is that whatever you're drawing, always look at what's beside it. Look and see exactly the shape and the direction of the head that is beside the upper arm. If I'm drawing the waist here, I can look and see what's beside it, which is the hips or even hear the bent leg. As I'm drawing the leg, I see that the knee of that extended leg is actually only slightly lower than where the bent leg is. That really helps me enormously to understand how to draw this really long extended leg. The bent leg is almost marking out for me the halfway point of the thigh of this upper leg. That one simple marker will help me identify where to draw the knee of this really long extended leg. That's another tip. When you're drawing something, compare something next to it. The reason that I like to draw in this way by comparing things through my drawing process and not by stopping and using my pencil to measure, is because I find this way of drawing gives the whole piece a very unified feeling at the end. You haven't stopped your process, you kept in contact and engaged with your material and your subject throughout the entire drawing time. I think that feeds into an overall sense of unity in the drawing. In the next lesson, what I'm going to do is show you a drawing process from start to finish. You'll be able to see how I take a drawing from the very beginning stages, right the way through to the final stage. When you're ready, meet me in the next video. 22. Process Video of a Long Study: Okay. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hello. Mm-hm, Mm-hm, Mm-hm, Mm-hm. Okay. In this exercise, this is an essay test. Hello.