Figure Drawing - Comprehensive Guide to Expressive Life Drawing

1. Introduction: Hi. My name is Charlie Sha and welcome to figure drawing a comprehensive guide to expressive life drawing in this class, I'm going to show you how to break down the human form into easily understandable geometric shapes and layout general proportions for both the male and female body. Once we've got the basics in place, we'll talk about expressive gesture drawing as well as fund shading and coloring techniques . Iraq things up. I'm gonna walk you through a real time, figured wrong session and explain to you all of the decisions I make along the way. So if you're ready to deepen your understanding of observing and drawing the human figure, let's get started. 2. Materials - What You'll Need & What I Like: the first thing I want to talk about our materials now. I'm specifically going to be going over the basic materials that you would want if you were sitting down to draw. Some people will get into more experimental stuff a little bit later. But the three primary categories I want to talk to you about first our paper pencils and also charcoal pencils and some little extra things you might wanna have handy. The three most important things I think in considering paper are smoothness, size and tone. Now all of these sketchbooks here in the same size there nine inches by 12 inches, and I really wouldn't recommend anything smaller. Having larger paper is going to allow you to be looser and smoother with your figure drawing, which is going to result in more accurate gestures. And the same thing goes for smoothness. Having a nice, smooth paper is going to allow your pencil to glide easily over the paper without catching on too much texture. And ultimately it's just going to give you something that's looser and more free flowing and has a lot more action and movement. The two primary sketchbooks I have to show you are this tone tan sketchbook by Strathmore and also Strathmore its basic sketch sketch book again, these air nine by 12. And if you found something larger, that would work really well, too. I also wanted to include a mixed media sketchbook, just in case this could be useful if you wanted to accent your figure drawings with color or anything like that, starting with sketching pencils, you'll see that I have a set here that range from harder to softer, and they kind of do the opposite of what you might think. Or at least you have sort of what I originally thought. The harder the pencil, the lighter of the line overall. And the reason for that is, ah, harder pencil. The graph. I, inside of the pencil is going to push more and is going to be a bit more structured and a bit more rigid to wear a softer pencil. The graphite rubs off a bit easier, and the softer pencil is easier to sort of like pushed down into the paper so it leaves more graphite behind. And that's denoted on the pencils. H being hard and be being bold so you can see as I moved up. The softer my pencil gets, the darker that stroke gets as the pencil is leaving mawr graphite on the page. You don't necessarily need an entire set here. If you were gonna have just two, I would recommend HB and something of a higher boldness, like four B or six be something like that that's going to give you a darker tone. Sketching pencils can be used in a couple different ways. Of course, straight up and down will give you a finer line while holding the pencil on its side will allow you to shade with the pencil for broader strokes, for shading or just for laying in a solid amount of a particular value. And, of course, that's going to vary depending on the pencil you're using as well. When it comes to charcoal pencils, you'll notice that I sharpen these myself as they don't tend to like regular sharpeners very much just because the truck als a bit more delicate and easily just snaps off in a pencil sharpener. The three that I have here are soft, medium and hard, and you can see that even here it's similar to the effect of the other where each one is going to give you a little bit different in tone and also just a little bit differently. Laying on the page Well, I wouldn't say these air necessarily required. I do know that a lot of figure drawing artists preferring to start with charcoal because the tools are extremely versatile. This is actually a white pastel pencil. You can also use just a white colored pencil. I recommend having this, especially if you're using the tone paper like I mentioned before. This can be great for adding highlights or for blending your colors if you wanted to do that when it comes to miscellaneous tools before things that I'm gonna be showing you today are ink markers in various forms a pencil sharpener, an Exacto blade for cutting and sharpening your pencils and an eraser. Now, when it comes to this blade here, I'm just using, like a standard exactly i foot. We've had for a really, really long time, and this is good in a good way to get long, precise lead graphite charcoal of whatever form out of your pencil the pencil sharpener that I use when I want to you. This one is made by Kumar Come. I think it's a German company, and it's a two step sharpener, which basically just means that the first step sharpens away the wood and the second sharpens lead, leaving you with a longer tip. The two brush markers that I have here, This one is the pen tell pocket brush pin, and this could be really handy for getting organic brush marks. If, for example, you wanted to go right in with the marker instead of starting with the pencil, this could be really fun to just challenge yourself to not look back and to not worry about mystic mistakes you make. Because usually, especially for doing quicker gesture drawings, everything moves really quickly, and it's good to just get into the habit of enjoying the flow. The other thing that I have here, it used to actually just be like a water brush, but I diluted it with some ink, and this could be really handy in using for shading. This is my favorite way to shade, and that's also why I might recommend a mixed media sketchbook 3. General Proportions: Now that we've got all of our materials ready, we're going to jump right into talking about general proportions. Well, it could be argued that you could start drawing of the human anatomy with gesture drawing, which is looser, more fluid drawing that simplifies the form and focuses more on the gesture and the flow. I think that's starting with general proportions is really useful because it actually allows you toe have an idea of what it is that you're actually trying to capture in a gesture. So while things will start out a little bit stiffer and a little bit more rigid in these first initial gesture drawings, I think it's really important to kind of layouts and proportions and establish our landmarks and some guidelines. So we know what we're looking for when we break that down to a more simplified form. So these lines that I've laid in here are just going to be our guidelines so that we have the proper height of the figure and the height that I'm going to be using is what's considered to be the ideal figure, and we're going to be saying that these are eight heads tall, so I've hashed mine out so that each line is about eight inches tall and I've section those off in tow one inch segments. And it doesn't have to be an inch because the guy that you're using is actually the height of the head from the top of the head to the bottom of the chin, not including the neck or anything like that. And once we've got those lines in, I'm just gonna go ahead and start laying in our forms. And while we're doing that, I want to talk to you guys about specific landmarks as faras where things are going to be falling. So, of course, the first thing to get in is your head. The important thing about the head is not just the height of it, but also the width. We're going to be using the width of the head to determine our shoulder with. For the male, the whip of the shoulder is about three heads. I'm gonna go ahead and sketch in at least the male side, and then, as I lay in my landmarks, will talk more about where things specifically fall. Once we have the numbers and and it's a little bit easier to follow along. Now that we've got a basic form in here, let's talk about some of these landmarks. Of course, you can see first here, the height of the head is one head and again, if you're using that, it doesn't matter how many inches you make your figure. You don't have to actually measure it out at the six head mark. So two heads down from the very top. That tends to be where the nipples full, um, a little bit higher on the males and on the female's. Just because on the female, the breast thing a little bit lower at the five head mark. That's right where the naval is and you can see I also true, like a triangular shape from the tips of the shoulders down into the middle of the naval on . That can just really help with establishing the form at the forehead mark. That's generally where the crotch falls, so you could say that the pelvis area, the center of the pelvis, is halfway down the figure, and then you can split the legs into two heads, each from the knees to the bottom of the feet. I actually personally while this is closer to accurate anatomy, prefer to make fish in area a little bit longer. I like to elongate that form personally and maybe even shifted so that the hips are not as long. But that's a personal stylization choice on my part. And then you can also see that about 1/3 of a head down from the three head mark. If we're going from top to bottom, that's where the hands fall. So the tip of the hands, if they're balled into fists, generally tend to fall somewhere around the middle of the hips. Let's go ahead and apply these same techniques to our female form, and then we'll talk about it a little bit more once we've got it late in. So right away you can see with the female form that we've got some differences. The shoulders are a bit more now, maybe 2.5 heads instead of three heads wide. And also one thing. A big difference we've got is that in some instances the hips could be very close to just as wide as the shoulders, which creates more of that hourglass shape. The male form is a bit more rectangular and kind of a bit more triangular, and that the shoulders are the widest part of the body. And on the female form, the hips tend to be the widest part of the body. But other than that, we're following a lot of the same landmarks here. I'm just kind of measuring out the width of the head compared to the width of the shoulders . And as you can see on the male form, we're following that. Three heads rule a bit more to where the female form is a little bit narrower and a little bit more like 2.5 heads. It's really important to consider the with of the hips when you're talking about your form . If you find that your female forms look too masculine or your mail forms look too feminine , it this could be a reason why. I know that's something I struggle with a lot with male forms is I oftentimes want Teoh. Bring those hips back out and make them whiter again. But I have to keep the male form a bit boxier. Otherwise, it does look more feminine, and if you're going for something more androgynous, it can also be helpful to know these terms so that you can mix and match to get a balance that you want. I'm also comparing a little bit some of the wits here so you can see on the female form. The most narrow spot other than the head is the coming in of the rib cage at the center of the waste near the naval, the widest part being the hips. And then it gets narrow again toward the shins and the cows. You can think about the feet as triangles for the time being, and it's also really helpful to consider some of this negative space. So your legs actually do kind of curve on the inside, leaving this empty space. And again there's occur where the hips curve in to me at the knees. So I'm just gonna kind of shade in some of that negative space just to give you a little bit of an idea of what that form looks like now that we've got the basics of our general proportions. Late in, let's go ahead and talk a bit more about simplifying the form into geometric shapes 4. Simplfied Construction: Let's take a few minutes to talk about simplified construction. And what I mean by that is that this is going to sort of be the building blocks were going to be building our figure on. You can think of us in a way as sort of a simplified skeleton. We're going to break this down in a couple different categories, starting with the head. The two main portions of the head are a circle shape for the cranium and then a sort of triangular shape on the bottom for the jaw. And by varying the size and shape of your bottom shape and the relative proportions of these two, you can create basically infinite variety of different types of characters. While things like this you may want to maintain some proportions, like the eyes tend to tall fall at the tops of the ears, and the news tends to end at the bottom of the years. But really you can create tons of variety and knowing just small little landmarks of where things normally fall can help you to create characters that are not only unique but also anatomically still kind of makes sense so you can make characters that look tough or young or cute or old, and the variety is really endless. It's totally up to however many different combinations of shapes and proportions you want to use when it comes to drawing the head at different angles. You can see here that as the head turns to the side, it's not actually a sphere, but more of an elongated sphere. It's a bit more oval shaped when looking at it from the side, and when looking at the head from the side, the ear is going to be the most visible at the side. What I really wanted to show you at this angle is another one of those little proportion tricks, keeping in mind that the eye tends to fall at the top of the ear. Or really, where the year starts, we can draw a straight line out from there to know where to put our I even at this angle and another straight line out from the bottom so that we can get the bottom of our news. And I like to sometimes use a rectangular shape to encompass the eye and the nose to kind of get the shapes and proportions all correct moving on to our tour. So the first shape we're going to focus on is another sort of elongated sphere. This one will think of a little bit more as a barrel. And this is gonna be for our rib cage. What I like to do is I like to think of the rib cage as a barrel with a large opening on the bottom, And what this helps to do is it helps to remember that all of these shapes are three dimensional. We don't just want to say a circle or a square or a rectangle, because we want to remember to keep form in mind when it comes to the actual shape and the way the shapes lay on the body. It's important to remember that the oval doesn't go straight up and down. The rib cage kind of curves out, and then the will use the term bucket shape of the pelvis does the same. And if you want to kind of understand this shape, you can just sit up straight in your chair. If you're sitting in the chair and you can feel your rib cage kind of point downwards and out and your pelvis does the same, but they kind of shift at alternating angles. And the best way to experience some of the terms that I'm talking about, or the way that the body moves, is to just focus on your own body for a second. And think about how the shapes move when you tilt your body to different angles. Here, you can see a little bit of that bucket shape that I was telling you about for the pelvis, and I like to kind of remember to point those out a little bit and again, almost every time I'm doing that, I'm like sticking straightening my back straight because the spine is not actually straight . The spine curves. So when the spine curves forward, it pulls these two shapes forward as well and a little bit of coming out of the pelvis. An important thing to remember is that the bones that connects the pelvis to your femur, that area it often comes out before it goes in for the legs. So especially in the female form, the just below the pelvis, actually where the bones, the top of the femur content to be the widest part of the body especially on females, which is why the hips are so wide for the arms were going to be using two cylinders, a sort of standard cylinder for the top part of the arm and then for the forearm, A tapered cylinder. Let's slightly more narrow at the end, where it connects to the wrist. So if you draw a general arm shape and these air approximately the same size, you can kind of see how those cylinders will lay in there together. And the thinking about three dimensional shapes is really important because it's gonna help you a lot when you're drawing these things from different angles. Here you can see I've denoted some of the joints in between two main segments of the arm where the armed curves of the elbow. Also, we can think of a joint where the wrist means the forearm and another one where the top of the arm meets the shoulder. You could just wave your arms around like crazy to kind of imagine that movement and the different joints were these different shapes connect. Go ahead. Just we've your arms around for a second. It's fun, I promise. Legs were similar and that we're gonna be using basically two cylinders, but they're slightly different this time. So again, we've got that top cylinder for the thigh area. But then, when we get down to the Cavs, it's a little bit more tapered even than the arms, because your calf muscle tends to judge out a little bit, especially in the back. And just like with the spine, we want to remember that the legs don't fall into a straight line, either. There's a curving shape of the muscles that kind of goes a bit more forward at the thighs, and then as the cab muscles goes down past the knee, we're going to see that covering more backwards. But you always want to remember to keep the weight kind of centered, and that's gonna help to keep your figure from looking too wobbly or, ah, two unbalanced. That's really helpful to remember the curve, but also the way that the weight falls when you're looking at hands. I like to break them down into several different shapes, and if you've seen my hands class before, you already know this. So I'm not gonna go into too much detail here, but we've got a rectangular form for the poem, a cohen sort of shaped to represent all of the fingers and another shape for the thumb and that pad, where the thumb meet your palm as well. And those are the three main shapes I like to break hands down into for feet. We're going to go with a wedge shape, and that is really helpful because you don't really want a rectangle because there's a curve coming from the leg down to the totes. So it's really important to remember that this three dimensional shape has this curve to it , and that's really gonna help in making your feet look more realistic. And also, as you can see from the outside of the foot, the big toe is gonna stick out the furthest with each toe sticking out less as you get down to that smallest or pinky toe. And here you're seeing what maybe slightly more familiar as a foot shape that footprint sort of shape with the ball of the foot. Ah, curve down to the hell for toes. How I like to break it down is one big shape for the big toe and then separating the rest of that space into four equal segments for each of the four remaining toes, and they do tend to occur in towards each other a little bit. I know it may seem like we went through all of these different features fairly quickly, but if you could break these down into three D shapes and move forward from there, it's a lot easier to remember. And the great thing about a skill share class is you were welcome to go back and revisit these topics as many times as you like, just to familiarize yourself with these basic shapes because we're going to be referencing them Ah, lot through the rest of the class. So take your time, don't feel rushed, and I hope that you will create a practice sheet like this as well. 5. Gesture: Let's go ahead and move on to talking a bit about gesture also referred to as flow, action, rhythm. All of those things were going to be were for using this term to refer to the general movement and overall direction of a sketch or figure drawing. But really, gesture is kind of an everything. It's the direction. Where is the eye leading you in what direction does the artist want you to look when they've created their peace? What are the curves? What are the lines that things follow? That's kind of what we're gonna be looking at here. So starting with this very first sketch, you can see that that first line I put in, we're going to refer to as the line of action. And while this isn't necessarily it doesn't represent the spine or any part of the body. It just represents the flow. The gesture, and what I'm using that for is to make sure that I'm not just drawing a super stiff pose. I'm actually trying to give weight and dimension to the form by looking at the way that the body is being held in the way that this figure is carrying himself And that's really important in not just drawing the same forward facing pose every time, but actually working on getting some weight and life into your poses again. Here you can see I had that s shaped curve and generally with line of action. You want to keep it really simple to see S or I really those shapes of curves. So this one is this s curve that's really is complex is you want to get having those simple curves inside of your figure drawing forms is going to be really helpful and getting flow without things staying too stiff. And I hope these two examples are helpful in that regard. The other thing I want to talk to you is a bit about that weight that we mentioned. So the curvature of the body and we're going to slow things down here to talk a bit about connectedness and counterbalance. You can see I've drawn these two lines at opposing angles, and I'm going to be drawing a figure within these lines. One thing you can do to easily create a forward facing figure, like if you were just designing a character or something like that, who is just looking forward. But you didn't want to draw the standard standing still looking straight forward pose, especially when you're working with a feminine characters. One of the easiest things to Dio is to just bring one shoulder down. And if you told your body physically right now doing that, you'll feel that when you bring one shoulder down, you can feel a stretch on the office, it side where your hips and your shoulders in between that space stretches out and a squash on the other side. So the side where your shoulder goes down, you can feel kind of in your like abdominal area of the side of your stomach, where your oblique muscles are that that care area kind of pinches and squashes together. And whenever you have an area where that figure is leaning like this toe one side, you're gonna have to have the stretch on one side and the pinch on the other side. If I tried to do a pose like this but didn't pinch the side where the shoulder moves down, it would just make it look like that side of the figure was anatomically smaller than the other one. Instead of the fact that all of the same body parts are there on both sides, but we're squashing it, and one thing that's really important and opposed like this is we have our figure slanting toe one side, and you can see that the shoulders and the hips are at opposing angles. But the knee is going to be in line with the angle of the hips. If you draw a central line down your character, it really helps to remember the weight so we can see where the weight falls, which is always on the straighter leg and opposed like this. You can see that that bent leg isn't really carrying any weight, and all of our way is moved to one side, and you can kind of use that to help you place other figures of anatomy. As long as your character isn't falling over, then that head is going to kind of one a line up with that center weight, and here you can see that the knees are lining up with the angle of the hips because they're one knee is going to bend to kind of counterbalance the weight of the hips. Let's move on to talking about for shortening 6. Foreshortening: Two Useful Techniques: Now we're going to spend some time talking about for shortening and perspective. We're going to try to take our time a bit here because some of the stuff is really important when it comes to increasing and enhancing and better understanding, drawing the figure in different poses. So to best illustrate this. I have a ball jar full of water colors here, and when it's flat on its side, we can see this sort of cylinder shape. Both sides look the same size, but as we turn it and the one side comes closer to us, we can Seymour of the flat circle on top and less of the circle on the bottom and also the circle on top, starts to look larger while the one on the bottom look smaller. By the time the one side is completely facing us, it's the only thing we can see. But that back circle is still there. It would just look a lot smaller if we could see through. As we continue to rotate the jar, the same thing happens, but in the opposite direction. This circle looks smaller than it did when it was the only thing facing us, but still larger than the back end. And once we do a full 180 degree turn, we're looking at the same thing again. So let's go ahead and talk about how to take this idea of perspective and actually draw it out. Not yet on the figure, but on a basic cylinder and the first technique we're going to be using to illustrate this out of two I'm going to be referring to as the dot to dot technique. I'm sure it has a more specific name, but that's what I'm gonna call it. The basic premise of this technique is you draw where you're one of the image to start, and then you draw where you want it to end. So for me, a cylinder is really easy to make that happen, because I can draw the circle on the one end and then I can draw the circle on the other end and I'll have to do is connect the circles at the same point on either side. So I've drawn my two circles and we're starting to see that slowly turn, and then I just make sure that my connecting lines are at the top center of each circle. And if I've done it correctly, my perspective should be accurate, and I shouldn't really have any issues. This is a very slight curve in this first cylinder, and what you're seeing is you're starting to see if you look at the top. All of my vertical lines are straight, but Asset Cylinder starts to curb. My vertical lines start to have a curve in a particular direction to them as well, so those lines are no longer going straight up and down. We're starting to see a curve as that left side comes closer to us. Next, I'm going to draw those circles a little bit closer to each other because, like we said with our jar, they're eventually going to be ending up overlapping each other like you can see on the bottom. So this time they're closer to each other and also more different in size. So now that left circle is even larger, the back ones even smaller, and that central stripe that I've drawn just for a sort of ah, an idea of the scale of this is moving. It looks like it's moving closer to the back, and that's gonna get skinnier as well. So now we can see that curve that we had in the first image, and those vertical lines is even greater. That's even more of a curve, because ultimately those curves are going to be complete circles. By the time the images fully turned for our next one, I wanted to show a little bit more of that turn this time with the circles actually starting toe overlap each other. So you kind of think of this almost like any clips, and by drawing the circles first, it makes it easier to connect the points instead of trying to draw those connecting lines. First, you can just draw. This is where it's going to start, and this is where it's gonna end. And then all you have to do is make sure they're connecting in the same point. One thing I could have done a little bit differently. What I'm adding here now is sort of our vanishing point, and we're gonna talk about one point perspective and vanishing points in just a second. But the vanishing point is basically where our horizontal lines, if we were to draw them out until they met, it's the place where the horizontal lines touch each other. And this you can see in a more accurate depiction of this, all of my vanishing points would have been in the exact same spot instead of being in different places. But you can see that the closer our object to gets to the vanishing point, the more drastic the perspective is. So while at the beginning, you can see the vanishing point isn't even on the page. It just kind of would be off the edge of the page somewhere. You mean dinner time. Okay, I will be right there. And then as our object is directly over the vanishing point, you can see that the point is central behind our object. And of course, then our rotation of perspective is complete. So moving on to our second spiral demonstration, this technique looks very subtle and kind of scribbling at first. But let me go and explain what I'm doing here. While the dot to dot process kind of focuses on one end and then the other end and connecting those ends, the spiral focuses on the body focuses on the shape of the subject. So what I've done here is I start with spiraling circles, and this works for not just for circular shapes but for other objects as well. I used it a lot for limbs, like arms and hands, when I'm drawing them in perspective. So what I'm basically gonna be doing is my starting point that is going to be smaller or disappearing in space. The circles air going to start small. And then, as the object gets closer to us, the viewer, the circles get larger. This could be really helpful in knowing what that in between spaces supposed to look like knowing what the body of the object, how that size is supposed to change. So as you're doing the spirals, if you're gradually increasing in size, that could be really helpful. So while the dot to dot focuses on the ends, the spiral focuses more on the in between space and while are in, results are going to be fairly similar. And in this last example, you're going to see that more bit drastically, with the smaller circle being much smaller. And then, of course, the larger side being much larger. And while these two techniques may seem very different, I would highly recommend testing them both out because the more you try these things, the more you start drawing circles and connecting them. The more you just start drawing, scribbling spirals on pages, the more you're going to be able to understand perspective in general. Because really, this isn't a perspective class. It's a figure drawing class. But the importance of this entire section on four shortening and perspective is so that you can look at a drawing or look at a limb or a reference or even life drawing and see the foreshortening happening. Seeing that perspective change and knowing what you're looking at, really, the purpose here is just to know what you're seeing and to not be confused. Speaking of not being confused, we're going to now talk about one of the several types of perspective in this class. We're just gonna be focusing on one point perspective, which basically means we have only one single vanishing point. The stock here. There's also two points perspective and three point perspective, just include increasing the number of vanishing points we have and considering our subject from multiple planes. So we're not gonna talk too much about that in this class. Maybe in the future, we can have an entire class just dedicated to perspective. But for the purpose of this and figure drawing, we're just gonna focus on one point perspective. So what I'm going to be doing is just drawing a bunch of central lines coming out of our one central point, and they don't necessarily have to be equidistant from one another. The important thing is just that there. The important thing is just that they are straight and that they are all running through our central point. And then no matter how many lines we have, and no matter how they are space between one another, as long as they're straight and running through that central point, we're going to have proper one point perspective. That's really the most important thing. Let's start with a basic rectangle now when we're considering drawing along these lines and actually putting this grid to use our front planes. So the part of the object that's facing towards us in the instance of Army Sinjar, it would have been the lived of the jar or the bottom of the jar. That front plane. The only thing that matters with those lines is that they are parallel to one another. So are vertical. Lines should be parallel and a horizontal line should be parallel. And that's in the case of one point perspective. And then we can just use the guidelines that we've already set out to get proper perspective going back towards our vanishing point. So if you were drawing a figure and their arm was coming out towards you or their leg was bending back in space, this is the kind of stuff. Were that that perspective and the understanding of that really comes in handy. So once we've got our parallel lines put in for the end of the shape, you can see where those two points me. I don't have a purple line there to indicate where that line should follow along the graph . But it's really easy because as long as I've got a ruler and I can make a new line, I can keep my perspective proper. Like I said, it doesn't really matter how many lines you have here. As long as they're following those rules of it goes through the point and it's Street. We're gonna have proper perspective. And like I said, don't worry too much. If you feel like you haven't mastered this or it doesn't quite click in your head, the more you start putting your pencil to your paper and just doing it, you will reach that moment where you go Ah ha! I get it if you're not there already. And if you and if you do have a bit of an understanding of perspective, I would still recommend doing this exercise and sharing it with the class. And if you have any additional thoughts about perspective or anything like that, I'm sure that other students would love to hear from you. What I'm gonna be doing is I'm just gonna be drawing in some more examples of different shapes, not just rectangular sort of shapes, but also circles like cylinders and prisms, triangular shapes. What I really want to focus on is what happens when we cross our X and y axes. And I'm by that. I'm just referring Teoh horizontal lines, the straight horizontal line that goes straight across and are straight vertical align that you can see outlined here and you can see from our second shape on we're in different quadrants were in different sections of our graph, so to speak. And as we move, you can see the first shape was pointing kind of upwards. But now that we're down below that horizontal line, the shape starts to point down a bit. And as we move across in this sort of circular motion, you're going to notice that the direction of our shapes change. So no matter what you're drawing, you can kind of ask yourself what direction is this facing? Because even if you're going to a life drawing class, you're not going to sit down and draw on your perspective lines every single time. But like I said, the important thing here is just to look at what you're drawing and understand what you're seeing. So let's work on an example. Let's put an actual figure in one point perspective and draw it out for you. So what I've done is I've chosen an action pose, and I do have a reference that I'm looking at here and I wanted to show you what it actually looks like when we put these things into practice. So here for this arm, by using our dot to dot technique, and I kind of put the bottom of our cylinder being the shoulder and the top of our cylinder is hand. So the hand you can see is relatively the same size of the face. And I think I could have even exaggerated that a little bit more and made that front hand even larger as it comes towards us in space. And I could have made the backhand that's further back in space, even smaller. But you can see it Maurin the legs, the leg that is kind of bent up and is facing closer towards us, that bias much larger than the one that is moving further back in space. I would encourage you to exaggerate Perspectivas. Well, I think I stuck a little too close to the reference on this one, and it could have been a lot more dynamic if I had really stretched things, made the hand larger, exaggerated those things a bit more, and maybe even drawn in my vanishing point so that I would know where these things end. But as you can see, the three key points that are going to show an exaggerated perspective in a drawing is specifically one like this is going to be the relation of the sizes. So the three key points being the forward facing hand the face and then the hand in the rear. And the more we exaggerate the difference in size between those features, the more effective our perspective is going to appear. That did go in and kind of adjust this face a couple of times, but ultimately I hope you get the idea. So while we started with cylinders and rectangles in the end, we're going to have tools that we need to apply perspective to our figure drawings, and that's really the first step in understanding dynamic poses. 7. Shading and Accents: so you've got a sketch that you like. Let's talk about adding some shading and accents these sketches to help you better experiment with form and color and generally humps of fun for these sketches. I actually use this really old varathan pencil in Carmine red. And one of the greatest things about the varathan colored pencils is, as you can see here, I'm able to get a wide variety of line weight and with so some of my original sketching lines are super super light and it may look like a mess. But when I add the darker lines over top, we've got a full form. So I'm going to start with my water brush here that I have inside some diluted ink. I really like to shade this way. It's a really easy way to quickly get down quick shadows. And as you can see in this figure, one of the benefits to doing this with your sketches is that you might notice things you didn't notice at first. Like, for example, there isn't actually just one light source on this particular figure. The shadow runs right down the middle of that form, and we have different colored lights, a cool light on the left and a warm light on the right. We're going to be experimenting with a figure like this a little bit later in our class project as well. But I thought this was a really interesting one, and I wanted to point that out. One thing I really like about something like this is it allows you to actually see the three dimensionality of the figure. So by having that shadow in the middle and we're gonna be putting are two different colored lights in on either side. I'm using water soluble markers or watercolor water based markers for this. And what you can see is that with, especially in the leg on the left, we've got a lot of that cylinder shape becomes really visible because we can see as the leg curves away from the right, we no longer have that warm light hitting the right side. Then we get into our shadows and as a curves even more, we've got a cool light on the left. So observing figures like this could be really, really helpful and helping you to remember that these are three dimensional forms for a 2nd 1 I wanted to experiment a little bit more with quick lines and having fewer lines to communicate the gesture and overall energy of the figure. So an interesting thing about this is I could have given this figure any kind of clothing. I could have totally changed their appearance or what they look like, but I decided to go with something similar to the reference image. But I wanted to communicate the wrinkles and the energy and the movement of the clothing in fewer lines than if you were actually going to draw it out. Realistically, what this does is it helps me to remember that the important thing is to communicate flow. I don't necessarily want to try to render out reality and everything. I just want to capture the energy of the pose, and you can see the hands are literally just scribbling lines. But as long as I keep that direction going and that energy going, my pose is going to be effective. I'm also going to go in with my diluted ink here just to add a little bits of shading, and I really like toe add like an accent color. I feel like it adds a lot of atmosphere to the peace. So for this one, I grabbed this bright pink color, and I'm just deluding that ink all over the place, and this actually drives pretty vibrant. I really like using these markers If I don't want to get out like a whole set of watercolors or something like that, I can use these for quick accents and it's really enjoyable. And I think it really changes the look of the peace. And of course, we can't forget our face. While sometimes when you're focusing on gesture, you might not do ah, full face, it's important to get all of your forms in them, and it's really fun. It's a really fun exercise, and I would highly recommend adding some color to your figure drawings. 8. Class Project: part 1: So here's what I'm noticing about this figure almost right away. I've got this sort of line in light of action in here, and I could tell almost right away that the position of head is almost directly over the position of this back foot. So I really want to keep that wait there. So I'm gonna put in a tiny, readable line just so I can remember how those fall now, while my proportions may adjust along this line as long as the head stays over the foot, I'm gonna be pretty happy with the week. Maybe a little bit more in on the foot. So I'll start by laying in the head shape. Just kind of an approximate thing at this point and then the neck. I want to feel long, so we'll get the next shape in, and I want to think about the bend of the torso now. So how does the torso bend? Shoulder comes down low. I don't want to put it to close up to the head. And I want to think about the direction that the rib cage is facing also. So when we put our rib cage shape in will be able to see the bottom on top the edges of the ribs here so that that shape kind of comes this way. And this kind of turned away from us here. So this is a nen, since where the lighting really helps us to kind of make some boxy shapes that we can use. Um, so what I'm gonna dio It's kind of important to get some long lines in first, and this leg kind of disrupts. Think about the size of the head and relation toe wear the leg balls. So this leg kind of comes across and disrupts our light of action a little bit. So I just want to kind of get that shape in a bit for some scale. It's an interesting foot. The heel is up. Something like that. Yeah. Before you start, you'll notice I tried to go in with some details right away, but it's It's actually really important to allow yourself to get rough shapes in first, like fuller shapes of the entire body before you start going in with details. Because otherwise there's a really good chance that you can have proportion issues toe wear by putting in these kind of three dimensional shapes right away. I am allowing myself to kind of get the size of the body in first. And if you were doing like a time to figure drawing, you know, this is our It's already been three minutes, you know? But really, we're just We're taking our time here Now. I'm looking at this, and I'm seeing that my foot is actually too far this way. And now the very thin pencil you can erase a little bit, but they're not really made to be a reasonable. So I'm actually going to shift the weight down of this leg and then bring it down this way a little bit closer in. It's an interesting angle of the foot, so it's a big mess right now, and that's fine. I think that when you're first getting started, it's important to take your time. And if you want to or not, at least to not feel like you have to go quickly. I mean, you welcome to try with quicker things, but you don't really want to feel like you have to do that. I'm looking here to get this arm where I want it to be. I'm looking at the chin and saying, Where does the arm fall in? Relation to the chant kind of comes straight down and makes a right angle. And now another thing, the relationship between things is going to be key. So we've got this. I'm that's gonna come straight down and then I want to say, Okay, where does it fall in relation to the leg so kind of files right here at the top. And then I'm also going, if this then that over and over and over again. So if this is our leg that I can see that our hand actually starts here and that's gonna help me to get the hand in the right place on the hand is holding this extremely large group. So that's gonna be the position, the basic positioning of our other arm there. And now that we've got the basics in basically endless form, we can start to kind of lay in a bit more of our anatomy, and it's okay if things shift from where we had put them before. And even though it looks like I have scribbled all over this drawing quite a bit at this point, I still haven't used the pencil in its darkest form, so I haven't really been pushing very hard. So you're going to see that I actually still have quite a bit to play with us. Faras values and darkness goes, I'm just gonna get this shape in here a little bit. So this pinching here is really important. The shape that the back makes when it comes down into the hip, get a bring this down and curb it. And then I could use this to address my proportions. We can see this comes about in a point, and I want to look one thing that could be good to judges the width of this side of the ribs and go from there to the edge of the figure. We want them to be a similar in length. And if you want to kind of elongate the form, you can even make that little bit thinner than that distance. And then there's going to be a point out at the bottom. So if we want this to kind of point down a little bit more and from the bone bottom, their point comes out to the naval down drastically in to our crotch area and then out a bit for the leg. I know we're getting really script early, but that's OK. It's important. And sometimes you can tell. I feel for myself. Usually the scribble your am, the less warmed up I am. So it's OK. You can use your scribbling nous official art term to kind of judge where you're at. So for this leg I'm looking and the leg is turned out a tiny but Evan angle. So we're seeing more of this side of the calf than the side. So there is a little bit of a curve, but not much. And then we've got more curve on the side of the leg and this will come down our ankle bone . We can't really see much of the actual heel of the foot, but we can see a bit of the side, but we want to keep this motion to the side, maybe even exaggerate that a bit, because that's gonna be that's going to give us the most of that effect, and you can see I'm starting to use my pencil a bit darker here and starting to get the actual darkness of those lines in. I like a lot. This the angle of this knee here it's actually curves back. It's not straight up and down with the leg, and I always try to remember here, the width of the calf is usually smaller than the width of the thigh. So I want to remember to make that by whiter coming up here. We can see now we've got our darkest lines coming in, so I'm not so worried very much about being scribbling. And that's one of my favorite things about using this pencil. So I want to look on this curve of the leg. How far down does the other leg start? And that's really important. And we also want to make sure that whatever I choose lines up with where the legs starts on this side. So lots of little thoughts that go into this stuff now here on this leg, in the other way, we can see I want to look at the curb. I don't want to just draw what I think a leg looks like, what I think that calf muscle looks like. What is it actually doing? That's really important. So there's actually not a ton of, um, bulge in the CAF because of the way the muscle is working currently and the angle of the leg. It's stretching a lot to allow the foot to be at this angle, so we don't want to add things that aren't actually there. And look, I've already started to bring that line further back, and that's not what I wanted. That's okay so you can see the foot comes down and there's a little bit of this, um, kind of staircase shape for the toes. I like to keep these overall pretty loose, and that's okay. And then we want to make sure thinking about the wait, what direction are these things going? Where they pushing, where they pulling and that can help you a lot in deciding the tiny bits of curves of lines that are overall gonna make your drawings a lot more effective. So let's go ahead and move up to the side. I'm doing this a lot slower than I normally would. I think just because I don't normally, you know, talk through them. But I think it's important to take your time. Sometimes I want to emphasize this curve here. I actually think now looking at it that this is a little too low where I put this particular line in relation to the shoulder so I can look and see where the shoulder is and how I want that to really curb into the shape. But that's OK. We'll go with it and I want to think of the angle of the rib cage and how it kind of goes like this. That's really helpful. So you've got this angle here this year when I think about right now, I'm deciding on the width of the whole body here. So at its widest point, that's what I'm deciding. That's gonna be and you are going to have to decide ahead of time how strictly you want to keep to what you're seeing in a photo. How much do you want it to look exactly like what you're seeing and how much are you going to allow yourself to interpret the figure and what's happening here in the weight of the breast is actually really important because this portion of the chest is kind of pointing upwards a little bit. This this one kinds of just arrests on the chest, so it's not really falling in a particular direction. It's just kind of seating very gently here to wear this one which is hanging off the side of the body, is going to fall a bit more. And if you want to choose now, this is where you can choose if you were going to be editing or changing. If you are using a figure like this for something else the size of the breast, this is where you can really manipulate that. If you're keeping him around the same, you can go. Okay. The back does show I can see the back. You know, the breast doesn't hang further down. But if I wanted them to be smaller, could be much slider. The weight of them would be much less so They wouldn't really hang much at all. Or, of course, if they were gonna be larger, they would hang a lot more. So adjusting any of this stuff inside and that has to do with any fatty area. Really, If you're going to increase the fat, it's going to hang mawr with gravity. So the parts where they would be more pull more weight, pulling in a downward direction. You're going to see more about hang and more of the folds here. This is an important line and one for some reason, really like the line where the chest meets the shoulder. If you could see the muscles themselves, the pectoral muscle does stretch up this way over to the deltoid. So you have the line that comes over across that way. The female musculature is generally much smoother than males, so you're not gonna have us much muscle tone. Generally speaking, of course, I'm not gonna focus too much on all of this. I want to get focus primarily on form. So put this rope and a bit. It could be good to work with anatomy objects sometimes, especially one like this, where it's purpose kind of does matter for how the figure is turning. Okay, I'm gonna go ahead over here, and I want to think about where the naval goes. I don't want to put it here, like in the middle, because the body is actually turning in this direction. So this is actually more of a side plane here, okay? And then for the nipples. I want to think again about the direction that they're pointing, just like with the belly button, so I'm not placing them just, you know, centered. But I'm actually thinking directionally. It's almost helpful to think of them as, like water balloons and that they have weight and they're just kind of bags of fat and they don't stay in one position. They move with the body here. I want to think about how the muscle, the shoulder muscle is pulling and how you can see with this rope how this one is going to curve upwards, a bit more coming into the neck and this one kind of false, gently down again. We've got that line of the pectoral is going up to the Beltway coming out this way. Not in this way. A slight muscle coming to the elbow, but overall, keeping that form nice and long. I'm actually not gonna worry too much about this. Hand hands were just like this will be a single organism all on their own. Sometimes 9. Class Project: part 2: the light reflects nicely off the neck here. Now I have to decide if I'm satisfied with the size of this head. I want the next to come out a little bit. I think what she needs to shift is the position more than anything else. And then I want to think about the direction that her face is looking. So she's actually kind of looking this way. So the whole face is gonna kind of curb in that direction. Something like that. I'm gonna place a bit of hair in. Remembering these forms as three dimensional is kind of the most important thing you can ever dio, because where the top of the head is is going to very depending on the angle of the face. So we've got her hair kind of blowing out like this, and you can kind of exaggerate that the show coming out. And the more we exaggerate the hair, the more it's going to seem like the body is twisting and actively moving in this direction when placing the eyes in the face here and let's get the jaw in first. So we have a bit of a gauge like that, and then the ear is going to tuck a bit behind her hair. And as I said before, the top of the year is gonna come straight out to the eyes and the bottom of the year is going to come straight out to the bottom of the nose and you can still use those gauges even when the head has turned a different angles. So it's gonna be down slightly this way to where she was looking straight out. We would see that turn a bit more like this. So for placing this I the I that is more on this side of her face. We want to remember not to put that too close to the edge of her head, and we want to bring it back and think about the actual skull. So if this is the front plane of the face, the eye is going to sit right about here. And you can just kind of put a line in to get that in the other eyes. Out here on the edge. We've got the nerve. Quote the curve of the nose in between that space, using these lines as reference to get those in the roughly the right spot, and I feel like no matter how many times you draw faces somehow in the figure drawing, this is the hardest part for me. Even though I've drawn faces more than I've drawn anything else. Giving the face proportions correct is still the hardest part. I think part of that has to do with its. The more you study something, the more easily you can tell when it's wrong. So when I draw a cat, for example, I might think, Oh my gosh, that's amazing, cat because I don't really study cats, So I don't really have a ton of inside as to what to cat should look like. So I might think it's good, even though it's not so here. We've got our face. I'm pretty happy with that, and I can choose how much I want to render out this form. I will do a little bit of pencil shading just to kind of show you how that works and again , like in and the one we had done before. There are two light sources coming out on this picture. Looks like we've got a warmer light on this side and a cooler light on this side. I'm going to see if I could do that with just pencils this time. So here you see a place that shadow pretty central. But coming up on here, the shadow actually curves a bit towards the top of her leg. It's a kind of meet with the shadow that's cast by the rope. See like that. And then again, because this leg is facing kind of downward in this direction, we're gonna have shadow underneath there and by curbing my line slightly. Instead of drawing a straight line like this, I'm curving it slightly like this. I can imply a bit of that three dimensional form like the leg is a cylinder like we talked about before. We can see most of this foot is actually in shadow coming up. So this leg, and then we'll do a similar thing in her torso here, where that shadow is kind of centralized, but follows the curves of her body. And then we actually have a lot of shadow in the top part of her body, where the torso is kind of turning in this direction like turning, turning towards her head a bit. So almost from here, got lots of shadow. But you can see when the breast curb there actually catching more light on these outer edges so you can see I've been doing mostly single hatching just, you know, lines going in one direction. If you want to emphasize areas that are particularly dark, you can turn your pencil or turn your angle and do cross hatching so that the lines crossed over each other, and that will give you an even darker shadow when you're using, like a hatching technique. I do want to do some hatching, just generally over the shape of her arm, leaving some room for the lighter shadows. But this corner gets pretty dark like that so you can see how crossing the snatchings over each other just makes those lines extra dark. Lots of shadow on her arm, mostly centralized again and also on her face. There's a fair amount of shadow, not lot. Much of her face is catching the light. It almost seems that her torso, this shape here is the focal point, and then you can decide if you want. Teoh shaved the hair with directional strokes like this, where I'm emphasizing the direction of the hair or I could just do, you know, straight up and down cross hatching because this values very dark. It's basically the darkest value of the whole figure. Is this underside of her hair? And then, of course, the top of her hair is very dark as well. So you have to decide what kind of directional lines you want to use, because cross hacking is basically gonna disrupt the flow. So where going with the direction of the hair appear better represents the fact that that is hair. That's what we're trying to draw. Another thing you can do if you'd like. It's just lightly place in shadows of where her body would cast a shadow. So her feet kind of cast a shadow on the floor as well as the rope itself, casts a bit of a shadow all moving in this direction. I see, and even when keeping things super loose, you can see I didn't use an eraser pretty much at all, other than the one section with the foot. But starting with lighter lines and then being able to build up that value leaves us overall with an effective figure. Even though we started scribbling and did basically no erasing. One thing I will say that's super important is even more important than getting every toe in. The exact spot is having an overall effective shape of the foot. So I'm implying at specific parts of the anatomy, instead of drawing them all well in detail. And that could be really helpful. When you're drawing full anatomy poses, especially for purposes of practice, let's play around a little bit with this warm and cool light a bit, I'm going to start with a yellow color for the warm light, and this is gonna seem released, subtle at first, but the overall effect. I actually find this really nice and helps if you focus on the individual shapes of the light. So this is kind of triangular here. I found that lighting like this could be super, super helpful and reinforcing the three dimensionality of the form. So focusing on the idea that these these muscles and these limbs are all curving. And here you can see where the muscle where the Here you can see where the shoulder curves up a bit. It actually does catch some of that warm light. So does her face as well as her neck. It's almost like the warm light is coming from underneath here in order for it to shine on her face and on her neck as well, because we've got it on here on the underside of her hand as well. But not as much on this plan, you can see. So it's almost like it's kind of coming through here, but not as much in this straight up direction, actually, really like also that even on these interior muscles and organs, you can see how the light hits them. And that adds really nice lighting. We could do the same thing with our blue. An important thing that I kind of missed that's happening here is that the rope itself is casting a large shadow over her leg, and I don't necessarily want to miss that. So I'm gonna put in the shadow coming across there and also in here got a tiny bit of cool light here, but I don't want to overdo it. This isn't to show the direction or the plains. It's We actually want to reflect the light, so lots of light here. Overall, this is just a nice sort of mid tone right here, some cool light on the bottom and here, and by focusing on light, you can really help yourself to see where these planes curves. So by looking and seeing, oh, this curves back up towards this direction. And I would say that the secondary light source might be coming up from a little bit higher , actually also looks to be a bit softer, so it could be further away, which then it's hard to tell the direction. But there's not much of the cool light on her face. I think that her body is mostly blocking the light that would have fallen on her face from the cool side anyway. And overall, I think that's pretty effective. Just adding a bit of shading and also some colors to represent your light. And with that, I think we're gonna go ahead and wrap things up. I cannot thank you guys enough for joining and for checking out this class. I cannot wait to see your projects. I'm so happy to be making content for you guys, and I hope you enjoy. I can't wait to see your figure drawings and let me know if you have any questions or comments or anything else that you'd like to see. See you next time, guys