Fearless Figure Drawing: Use Stick Figures to Draw Human Bodies

1. Introduction: If you can draw a stick figure, then you can draw a human body. Hi, my name is Eddie Parsons and today we're going to be exploring the art of clothes, figure drawing, the discipline of drawing full body human character from head to toe are going to take this notoriously intimidating skill and make it super easy with three simple steps. First, we'll create the frame for our characters using stick figures. Then we'll flesh out our drawings with simple shapes, and we'll finish up with details like hair, facial expressions, and clothing through this class, we're going to see that figure drawing can be easy, accessible, and fun. So grab a pencil and paper and let's get started. 2. Overview and Encouragement: Welcome and thank you so much for joining me. Before we get started, let's take a quick overview of what we're going to cover today and how we're going to go about it. Our project for today is to create a series of five closed figure drawings. A figure drawing is a drawing of a full human body from head to toe. Now often you'll see figure drawing classes and books that will have you starting out with creating nude figure drawings as a way to better understand human anatomy. Now there's nothing wrong with that, but we are going to be creating our figure drawings today closed for a couple of reasons. First, when you're just starting out with figure drawing, you may feel a little bit overwhelmed by nudity or the complexities of human anatomy. Second, our goal for today is not to create photo-realistic bodies. Our goal is to create very, very simple, expressive characters that will get you started on your own sketching practice. As you continue to build confidence with creating characters, you can add more detail or change the style as you like. Here's how the legendary illustrator Quentin Blake puts it in his book, drawing for the artistically undiscovered. The anatomy we show here is not right, but it's not wrong either. If you decide to add more detail later, you won't need to unlearn anything. And neither forget nor despair. Sins of botched details will all be forgiven if you catch an essential bit of posture or gesture. Now, figure drawing can be a intimidating practice for artists because the human body is the most complex and wonderful thing, and it's also the most common thing that we see every day we live in human bodies, we know what they look like. We're going to make a complex subject very, very simple by breaking down the process of our figure drawings into three 0s. Our first step will be the frame, will create a basic frame for our character using a modified stick figure. And we'll also take time during this stage to think about important things like balance and the action of the body. The second step will be shapes. We will literally flush out our character using some very simple shapes. And the third and final step is details. We'll finish off our character with details like facial features, hair and clothes. I'm going to be drawing digitally today so that you can see what I'm doing really clearly as we build up our figure drawings layer by layer. You can feel free to draw traditionally with a paper, pencil and eraser. Let's get our supplies together and start on our first pose. 3. Frame: Okay, so the first step to creating our figures is creating the frame. The frame is a simplified stick figure that we're going to use to decide the position of our body and arms and legs. And a couple other important things like action line and balanced line. And I'll explain that as we go. So we'll start the basic frame of our drawing by creating a stick figure. Now for me, when I draw a stick figure, I usually do the head, the body, two legs, and two arms. Maybe that's how you draw a stick figure two. But for this class we're going to be doing something just slightly different, but still just as easy. So as we're drawing stick figures, we will do a head, a body. We're going to use a horizontal line for the shoulders and a horizontal line for the hips or the pelvis. And then we will draw the arms and legs. So imagine those two horizontal lines that we've added in as maybe the collarbone and the pelvis. The two units that connect your arms and legs to the rest of your body. So this is the first photo we are going to be drawing from today. It's a really simple, really basic, relaxed standing pose. All of my reference photos today are from the open source image website on splash. And this is just a really good, simple place to start. The subject in our photo is standing, he looks relaxed. He's almost directly facing toward us. So I think this is going to be a really good basic posts to start with. So as I mentioned earlier, we're going to start with the frame are stick figure. And I'm going to begin just by drawing an oval, basically about the same size and shape as the head and the photo. It doesn't have to be perfect. And then I'm going to take a line from the bottom of his chin to the middle of the hip bone area here. And he's standing nice and straight here. So this is pretty much a straight line. And then I'm going to add in my shoulder and hip lines. So we can see as he's standing pretty much evenly waited on both feet, his hips are going to be pretty much a straight line and his shoulders are relaxed. The shoulder line will probably be curved like that. So let's try to replicate that over here. And then before we put on the arms and legs, I want to talk briefly about two lines that we need to keep in mind as we're building our frame. So the first is our action line, and the second is our balanced line. The action line is the line of action that the figure is doing. Now for this one, because he's standing up straight or action line is going to be a straight line from the top of his head to the area where his feet are. So if I were to just take a line from the top of his head to his feet, it would be a straight line. Now if we had someone who was bending over or sitting or dancing, that line may look different and some poses that we're going to do later will reflect that. So that's our action line. The balance line on this simple pose is going to look almost the same. It's from the center of the shoulders straight down. So the action line may be curved, but the balance line will always be a straight line. The balance line is your center of gravity. And what we want to make sure of as we're building our figure, is that the balance line should always be right in the middle of the two feet. If your subjects is standing on two feet, or the balance line should have one foot at the end of it. If your subject is standing on one foot, as we continue to create subjects in different photos for different figures, you'll begin to see more and more how action line and balanced line can be different and are very important to creating stability in your figures. So for right now we have a straight line down the middle, both for action and for balance. So let's go ahead and just sketch that in to remember that his center of gravity is right in the middle of his body. And then we'll add on the arms and legs. So I'm going to attach the legs to either side of this hip line that we drew earlier and the arms to either side of the shoulder line. So we'll start with the legs. These are pretty straight. Not super pent. This the leg on our right is maybe sticking out a little bit more. And then the arms are bent in front of him. So I'm just going to put an elbow about halfway down. And they're crossed with his hands folded in the center of his body. So this is our basic frame for our first pose. Also keeping in mind the centre lines of action and balance that we'll continue to explore later. In the next lesson, we'll move on to fleshing out our character with some simple shapes. 4. Shapes: So now that we've created the frame of our first figure drawing, we're going to start fleshing out our drawing literally with some simple shapes. So for me when I'm drawing people, it helps me to look at certain parts of the body and think of them as very, very simple shapes. So in my class, learn to draw faces with four simple shapes. We drew faces with a circle, an arc, or a curved line, a squiggle or a compound curve, and a straight line. And we're going to be using some of those same shapes today. It also helps us, you're looking at photos to think in terms of rectangles. Triangles are pentagons. Any simple shapes that you can draw that helps you block together the body. When I'm drawing a body this way, I tend to start at the top of the head and work my way down. And as I'm drawing all through the class today, you'll see me using some smoothing on my digital brush and long smooth pen strokes. This is something that I've mentioned in my other class, but when I'm feeling not particularly confident in my drawing or I don't feel like I know what I'm doing. I tend to draw in very short, choppy strokes. And maybe you've noticed the same thing in your drawings. But as much as I can today, I want to use those long, smooth strokes to create my simple shapes in my drawings because it makes my drawings look more fluid and confident as an end result, I think you'll find that in your drawing to if you try to emphasize those long, clear pencil and pen strokes. So just like we did in my face drawing class, I'm going to express the bottom of the head with two arc lines that meet at the chin, drawing on the photo so you can see the top of the head. We'll just make a simple oval and add ears with too little semi-circles. And you can add as much or as little detail as you'd like, depending on what style you're going for. The neck will express with two simple curved lines on either side of our center action line. And then the shoulders are relaxed. So we'll follow them down with curved lines on either side. Before we put on the arms, let's go ahead and do the torso. So if we connect the shoulder line to the hip line all the way around, we end up with basically a rectangle with some slightly curved edges. So let's go ahead and do that over here. Just thinking of the center body, the torso as a big rectangle. Maybe because the shoulder line is a little bit wider than the hip line, that our rectangle will be a little bit wider at the top than it is at the bottom. And then we'll come down and do the legs. So limbs, I tend to express as pairs of curved lines. So we have a pair of curved lines for the thigh area. Another pair of very barely curving lines for the calf area. And you'll notice that I'm getting narrower as we get down towards the bottom of the angle. Same thing on the other side. This leg is sticking out just a little bit more. Now when I say these are curved lines, you'll notice that they're very barely curving. It depends on the figure that you're drawing for some characters, you may want to exaggerate those curves a little bit more. Here I'm noticing that these legs are pretty much straight down, so I'm not covering my lines very much at all. Will come back up and do the arms pretty much the same way. So pair of curved lines from shoulder to elbow. And another pair of curved lines getting thinner from elbow tourist. And then we'll come down and do the hands. A lot of artists struggle big-time with hands. Maybe you find that to be true for you. It's definitely true for me. I'm gonna keep my hands fairly simple because super detailed hands required their own study. We could do a whole class on that. But there are a few simple tricks that I use to draw a very simplified hands. And the first is to think of the poem area from the risk to the bottom of your fingers as basically a square. So let's go ahead. The hands are overlap. We don't see a whole lot of this left hand at all. But let's go ahead and draw it just a little square shape. At the end of that risk for the hand that we see really well, the opposite thumb is kind of wrapped over it. And we'll come back and clean this up. So it looks a bit tighter layer. And then I'll just draw a series of parallel lines coming out of that square and close them off for the fingertips. There's a lot more you could do to make those hands look more realistic. But in a simplified drawing from a distance that tends to sell pretty well, I'll come in now and just erase that square shape that I drew. Clean up the rest a little bit. Kinda thumb, opposite wrist. And I'm gonna go ahead and do the same thing on the whole body, just any area where there's overlap. So for instance, these arms are in front of the torso here. So I'll go ahead and erase the lines of the torso that are behind so we don't get confused later on about what lines for keeping and what lines we're getting rid of. And if you're working traditionally with pencil and paper, which is my favorite way to draw. Feel free to take your time. A race, adjust until something looks right to you. Don't labor over it. This is just a rough study, but sometimes tweaking helps you find a good position for something. So I'm coming down. I realized I forgot to do the feet. Let's go ahead and add those in. So the feet we can express basically with a long U-shaped that gets a little bit wider as we get towards the heel. And these feet are kind of pointing out to either side as he's standing with his weight balanced between two feet. Alright, that is our basic shape layer. In the next lesson, we'll add on the details of clothes and hair. 5. Details: Okay, so we created the stick figure that was the frame of our figure drawing. We sketched out roughly the basic shapes of the body. And now we're going to add details like facial features, hair and clothes. And we're going to do that by using those same simple shapes to replicate what we see in the photo. So just like I did with the shapes of the body, I'm going to go back to the top of my drawing and work my way down. So let's zoom in up here on the head and the face. Now, I've spent a couple of classes talking about the head and the face. So if you want more detail on facial features and hair, you can check those out. Today, we're not going to spend a whole lot of time on them. I'll just go quickly on the head and the face here. Just sketching that in, you can absolutely use the construction lines that we talked about in my other classes to help you place these facial features. And again, I'm going very simply today, but you can add in as much or as little detail as you'd like to. And I'm using different colors here just so that you can see the difference between one layer and the next. If you're working with pencil and paper, one color is absolutely fine, but it may be helpful to switch colors as you go. Just to see how the drawing builds up layer by layer is falling His hairline, it's cut very short. And we'll come down and do his t-shirt. So he's got a t-shirt with a unique curved color here. So that will just be a curved line across the neck like so. It kind of goes around the back as we can see. And then another line following that for the collar. It's fitted at the shoulders, so we'll pretty much exactly follow the shoulders down like we did in the previous layer. And then you can see the sleeves kinda start to hang away from the arms a little bit. So we'll come out a little further. Then. The arms that we drew, I drew that a little bit too long. You can see it's not quite close to the elbow like how I drew it. So I'm just gonna go back and do that again. Again, if you're drawing traditionally, feel free to erase and tweak. Same thing on the other side. And let's talk briefly about clothing wrinkles. So I'm noticing a little bit of bunching here around the shoulder armpit area. And we'll just express that with some curved lines starting at that point of tension where the arm is pressing up against the torso and fanning out. So good things to look for when you're drawing. Folds in clothing are points of tension, or maybe points of draping where cloth is hanging together and then draping away, for example, as we move down here into the body of the T-shirt, you can see that there are some folds that are quite close together up here on the side of the body and then they drape away. As the shirt hangs looser farther down. So we will do the same thing over here. And you do not have to draw every single wrinkle. I'm spending a little bit of time on that just to explain that maybe comes down and bunches at the bottom here. Moving on now to the pants he's got genes on. And they are fitted pretty much all the way through the leg except at the very bottom they get very loose and very Bungie. So I'm going to follow the leg pretty closely up here. Maybe until we hit the knee and all start draping away. Then M is a very heavy fabric. So when I'm drawing and I tend to use big blocky shapes to pencil that in and add a few more folds and bunches there. Same thing on the other side. Maybe a few folds there along the knee. Will come down and do the sneakers. So I'm pretty much following the foot shape that I drew earlier. I may come back and add another little layer just to show the sneakers are adding a little bit of height to his foot. We have these laces. I'm just expressing those with a few simple lines across the foot and a little bow. Right there. It's come back up and see if we've missed anything. Oh, he's gotta watch on. Let's come back and do that. So it looks like a digital watch. We've got this kind of square shaped face on it. And then the strap wraps around the wrist like so. We see a little bit of the strap on the other side because it's wrapped around. And there we go, we've got our details on. So now we can spend a little bit of time cleaning up our drawing just a little bit. We can get rid of the frame layer completely if you're drawing traditionally than you can erase that. And I'll come down to the shapes layer. I'm just erase anything that is underneath clothes that we don't need anymore. Okay, there we go. I think that's a really great rough study of this photo. You could continue tidying this up. You could add more detail, you could add color or lighting or shading. This is a really great foundation for more detail and whatever else you'd like to add to your drawing. But for now, let's move on and do a few practice poses. We'll look at some different body types and different types of people in different positions and poses for us to practice these three steps on. 6. Practice Pose: Woman in a Dress: So now that we've walked through our first post super slowly and breaking down the process as we go, we're going to practice on a few more poses going through the whole process from start to finish on each one. So this is a fresh photo, a new pose. This presents a couple of different things for us. So we've got a female figure. So that's different than the male figure that we did before. She's got a loose long dress on, so that's going to present some different things as well. And she's leaning with her weight on one foot. So that is going to change our pose from the two-foot pose that we did before. So again, we're going to start with the frame on this pose. I'm actually going to begin with the action line first to help me put together my stick figure. So I'm just on the photo first. I'm just going to take a line from her head trying to stay in the middle of the body as much as I can. Kinda bends this way and then down to the ground. So we've got a very subtle S curve happening here on our action line, which is different from the straight line we had on the action line in our previous sketch. So I'm just going to replicate that very shallow subtle S curve over here. Okay? And then I'll build our stick figure. We've got the head that's tilted to the side. And just a rough oval there. We'll let our action line B, our body. And for the shoulder line, because she's leaning on one foot, her shoulders are tilted up into the right just a little bit. So I'm going to reflect that in my drawing over here. Her shoulders are tilted. The right shoulder is a little bit higher than the left one. And let's see, the hips are almost tilted the opposite way, tilted to the left to balance out. And before we put our arms and legs on, let's look at the balance line. So again, remembering that the balance line is a straight line and it begins at the center of the shoulders and goes straight down. And as we talked about in the last lesson, we see here that her left foot or the foot that's on our left is supporting the center of gravity. You she's got her knee popped over here. It's not holding any of the weight at all. It's all resting on this foot. So we need to remember as we draw are balanced line over here that one of her feet needs to end up right here. Otherwise, she might fall over. I challenge you to try this if you're standing on one foot, try and see if there's any way you can stand and keep your balance without that foot being centered under your shoulders. I've tried it and I can't do it and I'm betting you can't as well. So for our figures to look nice and balanced and stable, we need to make sure that we have one foot down there next to the bottom of the balanced line. So let's go ahead and draw in that leg to make sure that it's supporting this pose. It's straight, straight from this hip that's pressed up, down to the bottom of the balanced line right there. And then the other neat is bent, but the foot flexed. So we're going to reflect that with the bent line and kind of comes back towards the figure like that. The arms are relaxed. We've got one arm resting on this knee that has popped up here. About halfway down. I'll just gently bend the elbow and the other is bent outward and draped along the side of the hip. Okay, so there we go. There's our frame for this drawing. So I'm gonna go ahead and scoop up a layer. I'll change my colors that you can see what I'm doing. And we'll start filling in some shapes. So our head is tilted slightly to the left. I'm using the construction lines that I showed in my face drawing classes. And I'm just gonna do a simple curve for the chin here. Come up on the other side. And you can add as much or as little detail as you want depending on the style that you're going for. For me, I'm going to keep things simple. The neck is going to be shorter on the left side than it is on the right side because the head is tilted to the left. So that's going to stretch out our right-hand side of the neck. And it will fold in towards the left. Got curves for the shoulders. And let's have a look at the torso for this figure, let's express the chest area as kind of an oblong oval that takes up about half of the torso area. And then we'll connect it to the hips with some curved lines. Kind of an hourglass shape. The legs. We kind of have to use a little bit of imagination because we can't see exactly what's going on under her long dress. But we do know that we can use curved lines to hit about the halfway point to the knee. And another set of curved lines for the calf. On the other side. We know that this extends this way. And then that leg will get narrower as we go down towards the ankle. The feet are going to be interesting because she's got Bear feed. So we'll see a little bit more of what's going on here. This photo on the left is a pointed out towards the left and it has the weight of the whole figure resting on it as we mentioned before, so it's flat. And then we have the flexed free foot over here on the right. So I'm noticing that this side is pretty straight because we've got the heel as the foot is pointed over to the left. And then this is almost a triangular shape happening here. I don't normally draw each individual toe on a barefoot because my style is kind of simplistic. Maybe I'll emphasize the big toe to kind of show that she is not wearing shoes. And then we see a great little curve of the heel there on that popped foot. Again will kind of point out the big toe. And we'll make a taller triangular shape for that flexed foot coming back up, let's do the arms. Almost the same thing as what we did for the legs. Getting narrower towards the wrist. On the other side. And you can see because of the action line that's curved a little bit, the whole body is kind of bending over towards the left. So I'm reflecting that with the outside of the arm as well. Come in and do those hands, the hands are relaxed. So we have kind of this square bit of the palm here. It helps me to think of it as a square and we have almost a square shape over here as well. And if you want, you can draw it as a square and erase later. We have a few fingers that relax and come down. And the curved thumb, again, curved thumb on this side. These fingers are kind of wrapped around the leg and relaxed. And before we move on to details, let's just come in and clarify and clean up a few things. So again, just finding places where there's overlap or I'm just keeping the outline of the shape. We can erase those squares we did for the hands. Clean that up a little bit. And then we'll go ahead and hop up a layer and I'll switch to blue so that you can see what I'm doing for details. So we'll start up top here at the face and hair. Again, I'm just going super simple on the face. Few arcs, some circles for the eyes, some eyebrows. She's got a very confident expression. Will come up and do her hair in these super cute like double buns. And again, I'm going quickly on this. If you want more detail, you can check out the other classes. But again, you can add as much or as little detail as you would like to. Let's come down here and do her dress. So she's got kinda roughly off the shoulder dress. So lets take just a long squiggle starting over here on this left shoulder. And we'll take it right across the collar bone and follow that line of the shoulder. Same thing on the bottom of the sleeves. This is very cute and summary, it does have a pattern on it. You can draw it if you'd like to. I'm just focusing on the basic shapes of the dress and communicating that. It's got a little kinda high waist band and then the skirt looks fitted at the hips and then flows out and it actually looks like it's being blown by the wind here. So that'll be really fun to draw. So I'm just falling the shape at the hip. And then coming down, I'm noticing that the fabric is gathered up here at the waist span, like maybe it's gathered to an elastic waves span. So I'm going to keep my pen strokes very close together up at the waist and then they'll fan out as I get lower down. Just taking very long fluid pen strokes as much as I can. And then I'll kind of connect these lines underneath there. The fabric kinda blows up over the knee and then comes back down. And there's a little bit of kind of billowing over here on the side. This is very pretty. And we see the back of the dress underneath. And you can add a few more little flourishes there again, if you want to draw the pattern, feel free to. And I think that is just about it because she's not wearing shoes. So let's zoom out and clean this up a little bit. We can get rid of the frame layer completely because we don't need it anymore. We'll go to shapes and just erase, clean up. Anything that's under the clothes we don't need anymore. So we don't see the legs underneath the dress, but it's important to draw them anyway so that we can place them correctly. So we could continue cleaning this up. But for now I think that's a good rough study of this photo. Let's move on and do another post. 7. Practice Pose: Child Playing: So this photo is going to be great for our next practice, pose a, because it's just adorable and a great photograph. But be a Child's pose is going to present some different things to us in terms of proportion. And this is also the most active pose that we've done so far. Okay, so we'll start with the action line. She's bent over just a little bit and standing on one foot, kind of leaning over. In this playful curved. In fact, let's just emphasize that and make the action line for our drawing. Bending line to the left. We'll go ahead and place the head right there at the top oval. And we'll use our action line for the center body. She's got her shoulders. Left shoulder is a little bit higher than the right one. She's got her arms spread out. And then hips are pretty much straight. Let's look at the balance will take the center of the shoulder and go straight down. And just as we suspected, this foot is supporting. So we know when we placed his foot that it'll lead to end up right about here. So let's go ahead and start with that lag. That means that this slag will come in towards the center like so. The left leg is bent. So it comes down about halfway and then bends back up towards the wall that she's leaning on. So we'll have a little bit of fun with perspective there. And then the left arm is just slightly bent and going up, while the other arm is bent a little more downwards. So you have that bend halfway. And then up and just a little bit lower on the other side. This is a really fun, playful pose to play with. Alright, so there's our frame. Moving onto shapes will create the jar with some rounded lines. Children's faces tend to be a little bit more rounded than adults. We don't see a whole lot of neck because her shoulders are raised around her neck area. So we'll just express that with two short little lines and then bring the shoulders up around her torso is almost exactly a rectangle connecting those hip and shoulder line. So let's go ahead and draw it that way. And then we'll use those curved lines for the knee here. Another on this side. This leg will lean in towards the center, so it'll kind of press into the slag. And then on this side we have the leg that comes up and behind that because it's going away from us. Remember the basic rule of perspective is that things that are farther away are smaller than things that are closest to us. We just see a little bit of the heel here. And this foot comes out towards the left to balance the figure on this side. Kind of a long U-shape with that flat heel on the back. Ok, let's come up and do the arms. Can will use to some gentle curves that getting narrower towards the wrist come in and do those hands, the hands are kinda reaching out, somewhat relaxed. You see the thumb on that side. And the hand kind of reaches up and we see the fingers kind of received like so back of the hand. And then this handled this side is facing more towards us. We have the thumb again and the finger's kind of reach out again. I am very much simplifying this more realistic hands will take some practice and some specialized dedicated study. Okay, so those are our basic shapes. Let's go on to the details. Zooming in up here to the head. We don't see her eyes because she's got these great sunglasses on block. Those in. Her nose is peeking out from underneath. And she's smiling. The hair looks like it is in tiny braids and it's in this little button pony tail that's kind of more on the right side than it does on the left. Maybe the hair is moving over to that side as she's moving. So we'll just draw the top of the hair in. It's pulled back. And then we'll use some really energetic squiggly lines to suggest the hair on the side of the head. Alright, so coming down to the closed down here, she's got on it looks like a t-shirt and then maybe denim or sham Bray shirt over over top of that. That's a little bit looser. And then some tight fitting pants and sneakers. So let's draw the bottom layer of the close first, we'll draw the t-shirt. Kinda similar to how we did on our first pose. The T-shirt looks like it's pretty fitted. Not very far away from the body at all. And maybe there's a little bit of wrinkling there. And then we've got the color of the shirt that comes up and around. And this is very loose, floating very far away from the body. It's kind of swinging out towards the right as the figure moves. I drew just a little bit too long there I think we go and we can kinda see the underside of it there. We'll add a few just little dots to indicate those buttons. And the sleeves are cuffed just above the wrist. So we'll just wrap that around. It looks like it's a little more fitted through the sleeve. Some wrinkles, some bunches there as she's moving her arm. Same thing on the other side. These pants are very, very fitted. So I'm just going to follow the outline of what we did earlier. I don't even maybe it's because the pants are black that I'm having a hard time seeing, but I don't even really see any wrinkles on these pants. They look like leggings. That's how close fitting there. So we're just going to follow that very closely. Add on her little sneakers here. Maybe a little bit of extra height on the foot there. The laces. And we just see the back of the sneakers there. Alright, let's clean up just a little bit. Could embrace pretty much all of that because all of that is underclothes. And that already looks a lot cleaner. It's cleaning up a little bit where the wrist overlaps with the hands. We'll take away the frame layer. And that's a really great, really active study of this pose with a lot of movement in it. Let's move on. We'll tackle a sitting pose next. 8. Practice Pose: Seated: So our third practice pose is going to present some fun and different things for us to play around with. We've got a seated pose, which is different from the standing poses that we've done up to this point. And we've got an older woman, which is different than the young adults and children that we've drawn up until now. So as we have done with our previous poses, we're going to start with our frame, with our action line. And this will be the most dramatic action line we've done so far because our figure is seated. So this lady is bent over as she's sitting. She's reading a book. And then her knees come up in front of her and the likes go down. So the action line will be that bend and down towards the legs. Will go ahead and place her head there at the top of the line. It's tilted down because she's looking down at this book. Her shoulders are going away from us because we are viewing her from the side. So we'll draw that shoulder line tilted up and toward us. It's actually going to run into the head, which makes sense with what we're seeing here in the photo. The hips will do almost exactly the same thing. Right about there. And then her legs, it looks like the leg that is farther away from us is going to come up and crossover the bottom like so let's draw bottom leg first. It will go up and away, and then back down. And then the faraway leg will come over and cross. We only really see one arm again because reviewing her from the side, it comes down to just above the hip and into her lab. And we will go ahead and place the other arm. We probably won't draw the whole thing because it will be covered up by the torso, but it's good to know where it is. All right, so one last thing before we move on from our frame, I didn't forget about the balance line. It's going to be a little bit different than the balance lines we've done before. If we take from the center of the shoulders and goes straight down, which is how we draw balance lines. You'll notice that her feet are pretty far away from the end of that balanced line. We don't need to worry about the placement of the feet with a sitting figure because her weight is not supported by her feet. It's supported by the bench that she's sitting on. And you can see that as we follow the balanced line down. All right, let's move on and put some shapes on this frame. So we're viewing this lady's head from the side. So I'm just gonna sketch in that chin and ear shape. Her neck is completely tucked up into this jacket. But let's go ahead and imagine that it comes down pretty much in the same place that we've drawn these other Next. Her head will cover up this far shoulder, but we do see this shoulder. And we'll go ahead and follow the arm down with curved lines like we've done before. Let's go ahead and connect that neck and shoulder. And we see a little bit of the back as we connect the shoulder to the hip area, the front of the torso will almost completely obscure the arm. Here we just see a little bit of a peeking out on the other side. And then we have these legs which are going to be a little bit interesting. So just like I did on the frame, we'll go ahead and draw the bottom leg first, following this gray line that we drew earlier for the frame. Curved line up for the thigh. Another curved line down with calf will draw the a100. Let's go ahead and draw this whole leg knowing that the other leg will overlap and then we'll come back and erase. Got foot here, which is pointed off in front of her. And the other leg will come up a little bit of it as behind the pans here. Got the knee right here. That will come down over the other leg. And this foot is hovering higher than the other one because it's supported by the crossed over leg. And the toe is kind of pointed off into the air. A little more complicated than what we've done before. Let's go ahead before we put on the hands and erase what's overlapped so we know that this leg is behind the other ones. Some of that can go and that the hands are over the lap so we can erase a little bit of what we drew with the leg. Let's come back and now and we'll do those hands. I'm gonna shorten these arms a little bit just based on what I'm seeing in the photo. That's the beauty of working from photos. You can kind of compare and adjust. And as you go, you'll begin to build instincts about how long arms are, how long legs are a next and the proportions of all of those things. So she's holding a book. I'm gonna go ahead and sketch that in. Because when a character is holding an object, it helps me to sketch the object first and then place the hands on top of it. Will go ahead and create another square shaped for the poem here. And the fingers are kind of wrapped around. And you see the other hand kind of picked up like maybe she's about to turn a page. We just see a little peak of it there. All right, that was definitely the most complicated shapes section we've done so far. Let's go ahead and add on some details. So we'll start up top here. She is wearing sunglasses, so we'll pencil those in first. Her nose comes down from between the lenses. And here because we're viewing her from the side. I'm just kind of building those facial features onto the edge of the face. Here. Kind of swoops down over her forehead and then comes down around her ear. And she's got a couple of nice hair clips there, clipping her bangs back. And as we saw before, she's got this hooded coat on that comes right up around her neck. So we'll just put that in with some curved lines. That wraps down around her back. She's got a great puffer jacket on that's pretty fitted. Comes around her wrist like so. And it's got these great like stripy sections all the way down, like it's kind of quilted and puffy. I thought this was part of her jacket because it's almost the same color, but I think this is actually a bag. It's a big square shape that's hanging off of her side like that. Yeah. And then there's a strap that goes down across the shoulder. And then it looks like she's got on a skirt and tights. So it will follow her thigh pretty closely here because it's pressed up against her thigh by the bench that she's sitting on. And then we'll kind of drape a little bit more as it's freed up over the knee. We can see maybe some draping a fabric there. And then we'll follow the leg very closely for her tights. And she's got these great sneakers on that are kind of a bit clunkier than these fitted tights that she's wearing them with laces. I'll go ahead and draw in the book in the blue so that it's differentiated from the hand. And we'll clean up just a little bit. We'll zoom out. Clean up that frame. And there we go, a seated pose. We have one more practice posed to go, and it's our trickiest one yet we're gonna do a dance pose to finish off. 9. Practice Pose: Dance: So our last pose of the day is going to be really fun and dramatic. It's definitely not opposed that you'd see in everyday life unless you're a dancer, because this is a dance pose. So we are going to start with the action line. This subject is bent very far over to the right. So the action line is going to be a really dramatic curve that ends right there at the foot. So let's just replicate that over here. And then we've got her head, which is tilted back and pointed up. So we'll put that oval right there. The shoulder are almost vertical. She's got one shoulder very far up and the other one pointed down. And the hips are maybe tilted just a little bit. The other way to balance that out. Generally you'll find in figure drawing, if your shoulder line is tilted one way, then the hips might be tilted in the other direction. Let's look at our balance line real quick. We'll take the center of the shoulder and go straight down. And just as we suspected, this one foot is supporting the pose. So we'll go ahead and place the balance line over here. So we know that her foot needs to end up right at the bottom of that balanced line in order to help balance the pose. So this leg is very straight and the other leg is bent. And then tucked back into the other leg. Her foot will end up being tucked into this leg. This arm bends down and kind of drapes along this leg. And the other arm is sticking almost straight up. So there's our frame. Let's move on to shapes. So just like the woman in the previous pose, we're seeing this face from the side. So we'll do a curve. And then I like to kind of do a, a flatter line for the chin right there. And that gets short on the side and long on the other side. As She's tilting her head in this direction, follow the shoulders, will come back up here and extend that into the arm. Let's do the torso real quick. So the torso is bent really dramatically over this side of her torso. It's a very dramatic curve, and on this side it's very, very short. So this side is stretched out and the side is tucked in. So we'll take from the shoulder to the hip along arc. And from the shoulders to this hip you see it's a shorter arc, resulting in that shorter distance that we see here. The legs will continue with our curved lines. So I'm noticing that her legs kinda get narrower towards the knee and then curve back out at the calf, getting narrower again at the angle. This is a very athletic figure. The side of the leg looks to be a little more straight because we're viewing it from the side. We're basically seeing her shin bone there. And we'll connect it to me feet. So this is interesting. It looks like all of her weight is supported on the ball of her foot and then the heel is lifted. So we'll have that tall triangle shape. And then the pad or the ball of her foot is supporting her weight. Again, I'll just kind of suggests her big toe come back up and have a nice little curve for the heel. The other foot, we do not see the toes. There's this kind of a curve into the leg or the toes are tucked. Another little curve for the heel. I'll go ahead and just gently erase that area where the ankle overlaps with the foot. Let's come back up into the arms. So this arm, as we mentioned, is going to drape down towards the leg. It's not resting on it. There is a little bit of space in between. It's hovering gently over. Come back and do the hand there in a minute. I'm noticing that I've made the arm too long though the hand on the knee are right in line with each other. So I'm going to back up and make that arm just a little bit shorter. Honestly, the best way I know to learn about proportion is to observe as we're doing here with our reference pictures and replicate as we do with our studies. And then as you do that over and over again, you begin to learn and get instincts that you can take into original drawings that are not from photos. Up here we have this kind of curve, the armpit leading up into the elbow and the curve from the risks to the elbow. And I'll just connect that. And let's make sure that this arm and this arm are generally the same length. Just looking from here, I think I've placed the rest a little bit too high. I'm tall, I've got long arms, so I think my instinct is to give all of my characters long arms to, okay, let's come back and do those hands. So this hand is relaxed and draping down. We've got the thumb, the back of the hand again, we've got kind of a square shape going on here. And the fingers draped gently down. Up here, we've got another square shape. Connect that to the wrist. The thumb and the fingers are reaching up. Like so. Forgot to place an ear when I drew the head. Let's go ahead and do that. And now let's move on to details. So zooming in on the face, I've marked up this photo pretty badly. But we've got the nose because she's tilted upwards, we kinda see the bottom of it. Sometimes I place the eyes first, in this case the nose. Is literally sticking out to me. So I've placed it first. Just see a little bit of I on the other side. She's not smiling in the photo, but I'm gonna go ahead and draw her smiling because why not? We've got her wonderful, amazing hair that is hanging down. Let's just kinda wavy really long. And then in terms of clothes, she has a two-part Leonhard here. So the top part is cropped with long sleeves and then the bottom is kind of a high wasted scored. So we will start with the top here, the wingspan of this, because HER torso is stretched over, we almost see another reflection of that short side, or rather stretched outside on the left and short side here on the right. So we will take that arc right underneath the chest area. And that goes down. It has a very high collar on it. Up on the neck. It's very fitted, but we do see some stretching. Here in the chest area. There'll be a little bit more bunching and wrinkling as we add in this leaves. So because it's very fitted, I'm mainly following the line of the arm, adding in just a few little zigzag bumpy areas at the elbow and a few more at the shoulder. Come down and do the same thing on the other side. All right, and let's do the bottom piece of this two-piece output. So we have the hips, the waist band, which goes pretty much straight across. Well above the hips, you can see the hips are down here, but it's pretty high wasted. And almost meets with the bottom corner of that top. And then it'll come down to the top of the thigh area. It's kinda hard to see because it's black on black. But there's a little shorts piece. It goes over fitted over the thigh like that. And then there's little skirt bet over top that drapes over it. I don't know if drawing on it helps you see that distinction. So we just see a little bit of short on this side and then drape over and across. And there's a little bit of draping from the way spanned across as well. She's not wearing any shoes or accessories, and those are all of the details that we need to draw. Let's go ahead and clean this up a little bit. And there we go. As with any of our drawings today, we could continue doing more, but for now, that's great. Joined me in the next lesson for some details on your final project. 10. Final Thoughts: Of course, this is just the beginning of figure drawing. There are so many other kinds of people and pose is out there for you to draw. For more reference pictures. You can check out my Pinterest board clothed figure drawing references linked in the class resources below. I hope after this class you feel ready to continue practicing on your own. Because as you continue practicing your figure drawing, you'll begin to build more familiarity and muscle memory, withdrawing the human body, and then you can begin making more creative decisions to fit your own style. Here's a quote from one of my favorite figure drawing books that's really helped me on this topic. It's called character costume figure drawing. Drawing human figures should be fun. Nobody was born in a neat artist and nobody will become one overnight. But I believe that with some effort, anybody can draw. Although improving your drawing skills requires tremendous effort, enjoying it and being interested will greatly help when you are driven to do well. You will keep experimenting, keep practicing, keep playing, and keep at it because you're only going to get better from here. Don't forget to share your sketches in the project gallery and tell us a little bit about how your drawing time went. And if you have any questions, you can leave them in the discussion board below, and I'll be happy to get back to you. You can also get in touch with me on social media. I am at any draws things on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. And now you can find out a little bit more about me, my art, and my teaching over at Annie Parsons arts.com. Thank you so much again for joining me today. Heavy drawing, and I'll see you next time.