Figure Drawing - Starting with Basic Forms

1. Introduction to this Class: Hello everyone. My name is Robert Marzano and welcome to my class, figure drawing, starting with basic forms brought to you by Skillshare. The primary focus of this particular technique is to show you that by simplifying the human body into these primitive shapes, you can not only pay special attention to the orientation of the head, torso, and pelvis, you can now keep perspective and proportions in mind as you try to develop your poses. After some basic warm ups, we'll then jump into drawing some arms and legs with this method. Then finally, we'll bring it all together and draw some full figures using these techniques. For your class project, I would like to see you draw at least 10 of these characters in different poses and really explore some various ideas. And most of all have fun with it. So I thank you for considering my class and I can't wait to see what you come up with. As always, keep drawing, keep having fun and bye for now. 2. Drawing with Primitive Forms: Okay, so the first thing I want to show you is that drawing with basic primitive shapes and forms as always a good exercise and this is referred to as sterile metric drawing. And this will help you with things like proportions, Fly men, perspective. It's a lot easier to figure out. The angle and orientation of a torus soul. My drawing, shapes like these. And even Paula's. So if you were to bring this up and say, Okay, well, this is our tour. So what if our pelvis was down here? You're able to kinda figure this out with a little bit of perspective without drawing in vanishing points and perspective lines. And it just takes a little bit of practice. So at first you might practice just drawing a square like this, you know, get good at drawing a square, circle and an oval. And then from there you might take it further and say, Okay, what if I convert that square to presume or queue Blake shape like this? What if I take this oval and I put another oval over here? And then what if I take this circle here, put a really small circle back there, and I connect them. So by doing that, you're basically establishing perspective. And really it doesn't have to be perspective because you could have a form to one-year characters, right? And the character's form, it's going to taper down. So that's not necessarily perspective. But it could be, you know, you could do the same thing like this. And if it gets really small, then it could resemble the form of form going receding into space. But the main thing is that you practice these shapes over and over again, where they become second nature. So it becomes easier for you to say, okay woman, have a head and perspective. And I wanted to look up. So I'm going to see at the bottom of the bottom of the head that Chen under the jaw, even though you would have to obviously draw this thorough, couple different ways to really pinpoint that. But it gives you that starting point of perspective. And you say, okay, well, if that's where the head is and maybe the torso, as, you know, bow here somewhere. And I'm probably didn't need to be a little bit further up closer to the head that be pretty long neck there. So let's fix that real quick. Rather the head was too big for the proportions anyways. So we're looking up, you know what, let's bring that back. Let's have a look, looking out further. We're looking up at the character. So when you see the bottom of that and needs to get hidden by that other shape or form. Do that. And then to the pelvis, we want there to be a different orientation. So let's bring that back this way. Some believe that there's any number of ways that we could align these, that arrange these. And plus I want you to think too that you don't have to make these all clean and nice. Like I'm sure some of you are looking at this and saying wall, so these lines are really nice and clean. And others might be thinking, wow, he's a bit messy. Neither is right or wrong, it's not. The point is, this is exploratory, the design-related. And design means I want you to think about something. So for instance, when you go to draw something, right? If you're like this, you're committing to an idea. Those are all committed lines. This is searching lines, okay? And the reason why I'm saying that early on in this course is because for a while we wanna do some searching. We want to do some designing. And because of that, we're going to do a lot more of this. And letting some of those lines sit where they fall, where they may is part of the process. Okay, if it's part of that sketching and designing an exploration of the forums and even the line, the line energy. So just think about that because there's a very different way that you draw. Once you've got enough of this and place. And then you go on there to refine it, then you're a lot more committed to your line making. What I want you to do is practice drawing these and all sorts of ways. Don't be too critical of yourself. Let your hand is kind of glide across the page or digital surface, whatever you use on and just have fun with it. But draw a lot of these lots of cylinders, lots of prism white shapes. And then also practice even drawing behind some of the others. And I see that naturally occurs as I run out of space here. But that's important. Like you want this, the sense of depth, and you get that by overlapping these shapes in these forums. So you're kind of mimicking perspective. You're trying to create depth on an otherwise flat surface, a 2D image. And you're just trying to do things like, you know, pinpoint, maybe center to these cylinders. You can crisscross the corners and cube like personal, more rectangular prism. And you can find center. And all those things are, are advantageous to do when you start to create characters. Because once you do this and you go to overlay anatomy and different things to it. We're gonna, I'm gonna show you how we combine this with gesture drawing an anatomy. But it becomes a lot easier to align the pectoral muscles when you have all these guides in place. Just jumping in there and drawing them and loving the chips fall where they may. So again, practice this quite a bit. Overlapping shapes, lots of cubes, lots of cylinders, even practice just simple ovals and spheres. So for instance, you might, if you draw like a sphere here and you practice drawing an axis or something like that through it. So you can do stuff like that. All of this as good food for thought for what we'll be doing later. How it's actually a bit much so, so really. And privacy is just the one like that. Because circles are circles. You're going to use spheres and ovals, but, um, but yeah, circle on a sphere, it's pretty hard to tell him I should do something, you know, something like this at least. So yeah, try this out, fill up the page, have fun with it. Relax, don't be critical. It's not like I'm obviously trying to put any of these in a specific spot. I'm just trying to practice the shapes themselves, whatever comes to mind is fine. And then just explore some ideas with this. And if nothing else, you'll warm up your hand and your eye coordination for the next step. So with that, let's move on to our next lesson. 3. Drawing the 3 Main Masses: Alright, so for this exercise, I want to now take what we've practiced and I want to talk about the three main masses, but using the sterile metric approach to construct them. So for instance, with the first example here, I will, I'll start with a spine. So what the spine, I'll place that this those are a representation of a spine. Okay. So on that I will place this form for the head. This form, the bit of tilt for the upper torso. And then this one for the pelvis. And proportions are a little off, but I can adjust those pretty easily. So just like that are the three main masses of the body, the head, the torso, and the pelvis, upper torso. So basically, if I was given here now and softer races, so if you're working traditionally vicious manger, kneaded eraser. And I could softer racists back. And I can adjust a sudden, say, well, I need a bit more mass for the upper torso. Maybe I need a little bit more tilt on the Hippolytus. So they're all kind of 2 similarly aligned, right? Which is really common thing to do. So to make this larger, I'm going to bring this edge out. Just like that. I can create a little bit more mass and volume to that form. Right ahead, I kinda like that, kinda looks almost like a noble looking off in the distance. And I tried to imagine the character even at this stage of the word. Now next back here somewhere and we're just using a smaller cylinder for the attachment. Like I said, I wanted to twist the the pelvis a little bit more because it seems to evenly oriented with the upper torso. So what we wanna do is just bring that over like this. Change that perspective a bit. Maybe a bit too much, we'll see. I think that's fine. I think it's going to be a little bit. Now you know what, I think that's fine. So just like that. And here's where the spine would connect, something like that. So just like that, we've made some edits and we maneuvered these, you know, these prisms is sterile metric approach of the three main masses. And that's really the benefit or one of the main benefits. You can see that fewer to think prospectively about this, kinda almost all converge back in a bit of continuity. And that's the concept even though we didn't draw any perspective lines. And I find it better to do it this way because if you put too many perspective lines in place, it's very easy to become too strict and too rigid with the design of the body. Where this is a very much a rigid approach in the sense that we are designing this with some pretty really solid construction forms. But our solid forms basically, but at the same time, you can twist and contort them. You can soft erase like we did change the size, change the perspective of beach. And you really want to just connect them with this little line at first, even though it looks a bit silly, but it's kinda of representing it. The stage is you want to explore twisting and turning and pensions. So because the body has that ability, we're also going to talk about the bean like shape approach and technique and why that's so important and can be helpful as well. But, so the next part, Let's just take something with a bit more of a downward view. And you know what, actually I'm going to go back home starting with the head. I want to show you in this example to start with the torso. So a lot of artists will recommend starting with the upper torso first because it's the biggest mass of the body. So it's kind of helpful to work kinda big to small, just like a, a painter would write, would start with the biggest block of color and forms and shapes and all that and build upon it. So let's take and say that this is where our upper torso, as we've got the pelvis at a bit of tilt, but also a little bit of a shift away from same orientation as the torso. So those excuses bit of lean, write it like this. And I'm doing that intentionally because I don't want this to be stacked blocks. Okay? And so let's take the head and let's tilt this way and give it a little bit of a downward tilt in comparison to the upper torso. And the reason why is because generally for not Joe, I was spine is always curved, kinda like this. Right. So it comes up here, touches to the head, torso, pelvis, There's this noticeable band right there, right. So I have to think about that. Even as it relates to these these prison life forms. So soft erase this. Now. Let me increase the size that I wrote quote, intend to about there. So you see, we've got a little bit more of a downward perspective. So I was doing a couple of things here at once. I was thinking about the perspective like this, right? Even though you can see the pelvis is out of that, but that's what I wanted for a bit of posturing. And I'm also thinking about a little bit of this perspective, right? So, but doing all that without drying to draw perspective lines, again, it's a bit challenging at first, but it's very, it's very freeing once you get used to it. And it really allows you to draw more complex scenes more easily, in my opinion. Because again, it's not just working out the perspective. It's also helping you with proportions. And it's also helping you with alignment of anatomy. So when you start to draw on your anatomy over something like this, you've got, it's really easy to find center in. You can free up your thought process and just focus on the anatomy because you have like a lot of this worked out. You have this base form. Think of it like a ball of clay that you're now going to cut into and chisel into something else. Yes, so this is a very important exercise. Okay, so I want to try another one, and I'm going to drop in just some quick guidelines here, just to show you that you can really couple lots of ideas together. So I'm calling those perspective lines even though they're pretty, uh, pretty crooked there. But what I wanna do to start with the torso again, and I want this to fall into this pretty dramatic perspective. Something like this. Remember when in doubt, just make some lines. So a big part of getting good at art, it just thinking on your feet and being creative through something that might not be as good as you hoped, right? So when in doubt just gets drawn, you get to make some marks and then get good at shifting it into something that looks better. Now lots of artists do it. It's one of the reasons why you can look at people that you'd be amazed when you see some of the artists Meyer, if you see the beginning stages or work, sometimes it's pretty, it's a pretty eye-opening experience. One of the neat things about going to art shows and watching people draw woman start pretty crudely. It's just their ability to refine it is just stunning. So just like this, we've got an up-shot going. And really, there's a bit of a mistake going on here. It's not horrible. I could fix it as I render through it. But what I did is I didn't really show enough of the band to the torso coming forward. So again, it kind of slants back, almost picture like her, you know, our belly comes out and then comes down like this. Right. And, you know, not everybody's got a big belly obviously, but I just picture that with the posture. And I always think about the character again, like I illustrated a little while ago, like a side view of the spine. And then if you were to draw this from the side view, and sometimes I will draw these little diagrams and just leave them there. As I do more advanced illustration that seems to help me. But because of that, I feel like I needed to bring this forward a bit more until it this back a little bit more. And really kind of push that dramatization of that perspective. Let me erase this back. A little soft racism, clean it up one more time. But just like the previous exercise, draw lots. These, you know, get in five or 10 different poses. Look it. Poses that you like whether or not it's from my comic fantasy are something dramatic or a movie or just a photo, whatever, whatever you want. But then just practice analyzing that pose in the converting it to this that a lot of times that will help you bridge the gap. If you can't just do this from imagination yet and figure out a pause and make your own. Just means you need to look at life and other things that inspire you a bit more. But then transfer it into these methods that I'm going to show you. Because really what I'm trying to give you as the building blocks of what will get you out of a corner. So when you're trying to draw a character, and it's like sometimes you just draw it and it comes out beautifully and those are great days. Other times it's a little more of an uphill battle, and that's where these fundamental principles will really help you. So again, this is going to help you with perspective. It's going to help you with placing your anatomy and pinpointing things like center becomes a lot easier with these forms. So practices often. And with that, let's head over to our next lesson. 4. Drawing Arms with Basic Forms: Okay, so now let's do some examples with the same techniques. Let's put a sphere here, cylinder here. We're going to bring this out towards camera. I'll towards our viewer. And so that's really the power of the particular method for arms and legs is, as you can definitely convey a sense of depth rather quickly. This bit larger. We can start to envision how the form might come in front of the upper arm, what might taper down into the wrist? I actually, I'd like to do a bit of a diagram like this for that area. And then for the upper arm. Really play around with how far it goes behind the perform. A lot of times we're pretty close and what we just show too much of any given area and something looks off, you just have to kind of pinpoint where that is. And really the shoulder, It's hard to really represent the shoulder with a big circle like this because it's not really that obviously it's more triangular. That's why it's called a deltoid, but then it actually comes over and down around like that more. So we'll get into that as we get into the anatomy. But but again, just kind of pay attention to it because you can position these wrapping lines. Get a sense for that, hamulus sense that form. That. And as far as attaching the hand, so here we're going to put a fist here. We could put a box of thumb comes out, comes up and over. The knuckles, get a little taller with the middle knuckle. They roll back this way. And the fingers point into the palm. At the pinky and the ring finger, middle finger. Just have those roll back like this. All right. Generally the middle fingers or the role is that they are these two fingers, the middle finger and the ring finger. Line up to the middle of the poem is just little Saunders Ryan. Tricky part is getting them to curve N and to the hand. So the tighter you squeeze your hand, the more of these start to pinch inward like that. But you have to know you gotta pay attention to that. So this actually looks too stiff and robotic. But this is our mannequin. So get rid of some of these construction lines. And then we go. So there we have, you know, an arm poles and stuff, right? But you start to play around with this first you get the understanding of how to construct this with these basic forms. And then you start to go, well, generally when somebody makes this kind of expression, don't tilt their hands a bit more. They pull the hand inward towards, towards themselves a little bit more. Isn't that more of that gesture of it, the expression that you might see. And then you just keep making iterative changes to an Alice thumb. Looks a little funny, bring that back a bit. Bring this finger over. On the other thing is the subtleties of, you know, when it's going away from our view, we start to loose a little bit of the sides, the side view of a particular area. So I can see that with this finger, I bet a bit more and it'll look a bit better. I would probably want to add this view of a bottom not holes. And is also a curve that occurs here and here. So you get some of that noise and that's going to make it look a bit more organic. And so on and so forth. So again, you just keep adjusting until you get something that looks a bit better. So let's bring that over. So let's try another one where we have the arm maybe coming out towards camera bit but then back towards the body. So I'll start with the shoulder again. I'm bringing the upper arm out towards us. Get a bit of that perspective working. I'll place the elbow ball here. And then I will bring the form back towards the body and the hand. I will just bend it downward. So this is another thing I'll do with hands, all the figures almost like stick man fingers. And I'll give the gesture going. And let's clean this up. Although his fingers and with just two segments. And then the third, also paying attention to the curvature that you get here. The fingers. I kind of feel like I'm forcing the thumb in there, but like you would see that at this angle. And again, skinnier cylinder for the wrist. Larger cylinder. That is asymmetrical, always from the one side to the other. Shoulder needs to be bigger or the representation of a shoulder? I don't remember. Shoulders are generally pretty large and powerful muscles. You have to strike to the rest of the arm. Okay. And there we go. So there's a couple representations right there. And we'll do some more, but it's basically just repetition, you know, try to envision. Again all of these different poses. Look at popular poses that you like and then convert them into this method of drawing hand. Yeah, you'll, you'll catalog them in your library a bit easier. So let's stop here, head over to the next lesson and continue on. 5. Drawing the Legs Breakdown: Now we're going to do some examples of the leg. And this is probably a good opportunity to show you something that really applies to arms and legs. Equally is that if you draw these primitive forms stacked two evenly, and it will just look very boring. Okay? So even though this can get you started and still give you a sense of form in depth on the page. It just to evenly stacked. Even the proportion seem odd at this point, this area probably needs to be longer, but that's really not what's really negatively impacting this as much as just the fact that they're just too even. So. You can still start this way based on the fact, based on the idea that you're going to change it. But what I like to do is actually try to avoid it even in the beginning. So even when I'm using my primitive forms, I will draw it up a bit more like this. So what this allows me to do is to get a better sense of an organic feeling to these otherwise stiff shapes. So that's really the purpose of incorporating the stage bit. So we're basically taking the primitive forms and then adding just a little bit of that organic feeling to them. So really what I'm trying to pinpoint here, as I do this is that this has a bit of curve. So I'm kind of jumping pass a primitives a little bit. And this is relatively strain by comparison to the outer edge. And so if we carry on with that, software is back. So when you go to draw an actual leg, again, you're gonna get the curvature from the outside. They also had a little leg is not, not the same as antiviral leg. Starts thicker to the top. And bowls N word here. And you get that calf muscle jetting out like that here inside ankle, which is higher. And I won't detail this too far because we're going to get into this more specifically and I don't want to rush rush you through the other areas. But what I want you to think about is that even in that primitive state, that first starting point, you can start to age herself in the process. So if you, if you're too strict in your approach on the first example, then it might affect where you end up on your final example. So trying to think organically as you move forward through this processes is a big deal. Now, next, we're going to get into gesture drawing, and that also plays a big role. And then we're also going to talk about rhythms and one of the rhythms of the leg that I find really helpful. Actually, I'll draw this with a red to make it easier for you to see what I'm talking about here is a rhythm that goes right through the leg like this. And so we'll talk about that with the anatomy in that. But basically that long S curve is very helpful so that you don't draw legs too straight up and down. And really so you don't draw the anatomy and the portions of the legs stacked like stacked blocks. And again, that's why I think it's really important when I explain these techniques that yes, we can start with the sterile metric and basic primitive shapes approach. It helps in a lot of things, perspective and alignment portions like I mentioned before. But it can be negative if you stick to it to wholeheartedly. And I've seen that with a lot of young artists where they learn this first method and then they kind of, they don't break away from it at the proper times. And then they end up with overly stiff characters. So again, these rhythms are important. Again, pay attention to the fact that the leg curves here, curves here. It's relatively straight. It's not straight, but lot straighter by comparison on the inner part, portion of the leg, the medial side. And then if you also notice, you get a bit of a diamond like shape right here, where you have a very elongated curve on the other side. So it's paying attention to those differences. And this occurs in the arms and legs. It's very noticeable once you start to spot it that the sides are different than the outside. So again, I just wanted to share that part with you. So now let's do some examples of the leg. But I want to slowly start to integrate this other way of thinking as we do this so that you don't stay too stiff. And the approach. Okay, so for our next example, let's do a bent leg. And I'm just going to throw in a basic guide. So I said we are going to get into gestures next. And this is where you really start to utilize some of these things to figure out the placement of the cylinders. So for instance, we bring this layer, I'll, you know, the knees going to be in here somewhere. Maybe we need to extend the distance here. Drop in the other cylinder. We taper it down because we know it's gets a lot thinner to the ankle. And we'll put some kind of blocky form of the foot and place some waveband. And then based upon the way the person is leaning with their weight, pelvis is going to be back here somewhere. So let's just do the leg for now. So basically, again, it's one of those areas of the body where this in particular is something that I almost instinctively want to pull reference from. By reference, I mean, think of already mentioned that it can be photos, it can be photos you take of yourself. I actually recommend that highly because you're not searching endlessly for a specific pose. So to me it makes a lot more sense. I have a camera on a tripod set up. Now, obviously I don't fit the narrative for every character I want to draw, but I can at least get the pose. And I've gotten good enough at looking through it as a bit of a reference point, but not a nothing I can stick to wholeheartedly too. And I've also gotten good with my imagination where I can do a lot of adjusting on the fly and get closer and closer to something I need to see. And that's really the part that I stress the moles because you really don't want to be stuck having to pull reference all the time. It's, it's, it's great. But then you want to also develop your own ability to use your imagination in your body, your memory. So as we have these cylinders in place and again, we wouldn't know until we fully went through it with the anatomy whether or not this was something we liked for the pose. To me, I feel like it is salvageable, but then I can also turn this, you know, I don't have to leave it right here where I can adjust these cylinders. A lot easier than I can adjust drawing leg anatomy. And then also remember that you have wrapping lines. So wrapping lines are basically just, I actually tend to think of these more as 3D grids. Pleased to do 3D animation. So designing 3D shapes. You see these grids all through your objects where your prisms in that. So basically you can think in terms of that. And what this really does, just like the overall cylinders do, is it really helps you to see the direction that your forms are going in. And you can Chris noon or you can do center points. You can do multiple little ovals in the middle and you start to get a very dimensional feeling to all of us. So I really recommend doing this. I do this quite a bit in my illustrations. I almost always draw a center line to each area of the illustration as I'm sketching through it. Especially if I start to run into a bit of a stumbling block. The center line just seemed to help me quite a lot. So yeah, you can do this. Another technique as well is two, add in some, some sort of value. So a lot of times I will do this to think more dimensionally about my work. So I might take a different brush and this could be a marker. If you're working traditionally, I will just block in a bit of value, so this is obviously too dark, but then what I'll do, I'll just like I would use a marker. So tone this way back because I just want that little bit of value and we'll be doing studies obviously where we create value studies. So again, I'm just introducing some of these concepts to you because at this point, I want you to think more dimensionally about these areas of the body. And then we're going to combine the ideas. We're going to combine the primitive shape drives the gesture drawings, the anatomy and the rendering, all that stuff coupled together. But this really this part I just find to be helpful. So when I get into the anatomy, I'll add in this value right through the anatomy and kinda just faking it a little bit right there to show you what I mean. But I'll do that all through the design. And it helps me to feel like I'm looking at something that's occupying 3D space, just like adding a shadow to the ground plane. Immediately it makes it feel like there's some depth and dimension there a little bit more than, than there was before I did that. So again, these are all just techniques to get your brain going to get, to get these ideas expressed. Let's go ahead and do some more versions of this. But I think it's a very helpful thing to practice and hopefully it gets you a better sense of drawing the light from different views. I don't want to just give you one view here. So with that, let's stop here and head over to our next lesson. 6. Drawing the Legs with Basic Forms : All right, so for this example, we'll draw some legs kinda coming towards camera just a little bit. And so I'll start with a basic idea of the leg. And again, I'm going to show you other techniques for showing the bends of the leg, the rhythms. So this is one that I like to use and I use this on arms and legs. And yet I'll show you these in more detail. But we're going to have this coming out towards us, the foot coming out at a bit of an angle and meeting to the ground plane and the other leg back here. And kind of get a little bit, maybe a little bit hidden by this layer, at least down to the side. So again, this is almost like a sense of gesture, but it's really, I call this more of a rhythm of the way that the anatomy goes. So i'll, I'll jump a lot of times, right? And do, doing these. So for legs, it's an outward band if we're looking straight onto the leg up and then around the side, something like that. If you're looking at the side of the leg, it's more like this. Again, I'm explain these in more detail. So they're a little bit tricky by themselves. And then the arm is actually, it's almost like the side of the deltoid up till on the front of the bicep, up down the length of the forearm. And I use that one, a lie. I use that even more. It's especially helpful for defining a quick representation of the arm. So like I said, when we get into talking more about the rhythms of the body, I'll show you those because they're very helpful. It's just like the S hook of the leg. It's it's also helpful because you'll see when we fill this leg and we can check the work with it. So just like this, we've got a starting point for the leg. Now we want to drop in our cylinders and I want this leg to come out towards us. So I'm going to draw a cylinder, or we would see the opening of the bottom plane of that cylinder, open. The face. That's kinda sliced off right there. Circle for the knee even though the knees not circular obviously, but we'll just put that in as a placeholder and then another cylinder. And remember what I said about getting the bend of the ligand there. And I'm just going to jump right into the inner portion of the leg. Typically that's referred to as the medial side, is going to have that little bit of a diamond and there. And then this actually would be again an open face. So you can kind of shadow this to show that you are seeing the bottom open face of that. Remember the opposite of that would be because it's kinda confusing to look at. If you just put an oval here, you could say, well, this is actually a leg going away from our view. And this is the back edge behind it. Okay, So there's a couple ways to look at that. So that's why I like to shade them differently. So for me now this means it's coming out towards us. Perfect. One of the areas that makes it confusing is right here. This would have to be more like this. Even though again, we know the knee is not just a ball and it's not really going to cover like that. But again, we're, at this point, we're really trying to just convey a sense of depth and get this working. And then as far as the foot, the inside ankles higher, hosts had ankles lower, especially if this angle is as the foot raises up towards us, I would imagine this gets more noticeable. But just keep in mind there is that tilt their whole lot of talk more about that as we go into the rhythms again. And we're just going to taper that outward. And then round down the bottom of the foot a little bit. Hello matt, over something like that when I get into all the toes and everything right now, but we just want to get the legs working. So just like that, we've got light coming out towards us. Now back here, we have to figure out the orientation of the other leg. Now one thing to keep in mind is when the leg comes out towards us, you see this noticeable curve at the top, okay? And that helps us to realize this form is coming out towards us. The other leg is going to take more of a downward bend. The same area is now going to be a downward bend. You'll see this really evidently on the clothing and the way that the wrinkles occur. Okay, so that's just something to think about, but you're even going to represent that with your primitive forms because it kinda gets all that going. So now we bring this cylinder down pretty close. Sometimes even meeting dependent on the character. You know, if they're thicker legs, lot of times this area right here will fill on quicker, right. So if they're thinner or might be a little bit more separation that legs, if they're heavier, they're going to, their legs are going to come together more. We'll talk about fat deposits as well. So that's another thing that you have to keep in mind when constructing these different characters. And then a downward view of the knee. So again, if you were to see through this, the opening to this cylinder would be like that. We don't want that. We want just the downward view of the knees somewhere in here, uses as a place holder. The bottom portion of the leg calf area will have this recede back. And I think I'm just going to have that covered. And then we'll probably just see the other foot pack here. Something like that. It's almost like, you know, not a straight on Sprint, more like a jog, light run, something like bam. And so now get rid of some of these construction lines because we're a bit confusing now that we have these primitive forms in place. And again, we can use our wrapping lines or 3D perspective lines in a sense, I think that's another way to look at them. You can do as many as old as you like. I really just like a nice center line and then a center overall to the height of the segment of the leg. Same thing with the flood. You can bring that center line right out. I also like to get a little plane change right here because you're going to have to either the shoe or the toes. You're going to see a little bit of that. And again, center line, center line. Now this gets a little confusing because even though I'm putting an oval and each one of these areas, I'm looking at these differently. So what I can do is I can darken the front edge of this oval and the front edge of this oval. And hopefully that gives you a better idea, could even dark and the part where it crosses the front. Hopefully it gives you a better idea and representation of the fact that these are oriented differently, right? And that's, that's the goal of this illustration. So I don't want to confuse you or you don't want to confuse yourself either by putting in unnecessary reference points. So again, little bit darker on the front, heavy dark on the cross section. And that should give you a better idea of this being the front and this oval on the, on this leg being up and the other one facing down. Center line to the flood. And it feels like it's little slanted. Probably going to be a little bit of lean. I'm actually going to just pull that over. But because we, another thing we need to talk about is balance, we'll get into that with gesture and with rhythms, but also balance of the body, the distribution away. So there's so many things to cover. But again, that's why this is such a complex topic. But it's so worth it. It's so worth spending all this time developing these ideas and then getting this under control. And you gotta remember to these right here are great reference points. You can save these and you can draw any type of character over this. I, for awhile there and I need to get back to it. I would take these diagrams that I would create and I would pull some are Alma our table so that I had different poses at any given time, ready to go. And you'd be amazed, even if it's not the polls, you needed that very moment. Something about looking at them in that way alleviates other poses from different angles. You just get better and better at turning this in your mind. And so yeah, it's great for the visual library again. So we'll stop here, head over to the next lesson and continue on. So with that, let's move forward. 7. Drawing the Full Figure with Primitive Forms: Okay, so now we're going to draw the entire figure using these primitive forms. And what I want you to do is practice looking through this and thinking a little bit gesturally about the body. Even though we're using some pretty solid forms and basic shapes. Again, the main thing we want to consider here is the difference in orientation from the head, the torso to the pelvis. And then we'll attach the lens with cylinders. You can taper those N word as you see me doing here, it gives a better sense and feeling of there being an arm or leg in place. And then attach the hand with a wedge like shape. And just some smaller cylinders or a gestural hand poles, that's fine. The main thing here isn't that you try to get something that looks exactly like a person, but really that you think a little bit more abstract about the body. So in this one I'm starting off with more of a stick person just establishing the overall lengths of the forums and then jumping into the primitives. So even though I'm drawing a pretty solid, rigid character here, I'm trying to implement a sense and a feeling of an idea, bit of narrative really. This characters had a bad day and they're kind of leaned over and slumped over. So a bit of posturing. And so that's one of the things I really like about this exercise, is since we're thinking abstractly about the body, it makes it easier to draw. But then also worse, still wanting to implement some of the, you know, the body language that you've seen in people. So what I recommend that you do here is take visual cues from, you could be sitting in a coffee shop looking at people around you and drawing them in this way. Or you could be watching one of your favorite movies and then pausing a certain shot that you think is on inspiring. But then draw it in this very primitive basic way. And what's neat about that process is a teaches you about simplification of things that we generally perceive is just too complex. And I really liked that about doing this type of study because the human body is complex and it can be very intimidating to draw. But if you learn to itemize it and simplify it in this way, it can really help you out. It can save you not only from things that you don't feel confident drawing right now, it can save you from those bad days when you've been drawing while for months and then all sudden, you feel like you're just not drawing as well the fundamentals in the simplification process that I, that I find in this type of study really helps with that. So just be aware of that, that we all have our bad days and there's times that we need to get back to the basics. And I definitely feel like this is a perfect example of that. So I'm cleaning this up for you just so that you have better art files, but you don't really need to do that. In fact, I would recommend that instead of you trying to clean up the work and make it nice. So I'm trying to do here for your visual guides that I would just log in more pulses. So instead of doing four, I'd rather see that you do 10 or even 20. Again, you can leave the lines a little bit more sketched out. That's fine. I just mainly want to see variation in the posing of a character. So I want you to really envision what these characters might be doing as you're drawing these out and really delve into that story of it. So even though you're just drawing these primitive versions of the body, I want you to think about what are the characters doing? What are they saying? What are they wearing? What setting or than give yourself some food for thought. Even though you're not going to implement that into the drawing, you'd be amazed at what it does for your creativity and allows you to start going a bit further with it. So for instance, if you think about the character here with their hand up and know their arm back and are walking forward. There's a difference of expression if the head is tilted downward or the head is tilted upward. If the head is tilted slightly away from the body versus with the body, right? All these little subtle differences. We'll make a difference and what's going on in the scene and the body language of the character. And it's easy to just tell you to draw that, you know, draw head tilted this way, draw a head tilted downward. But it's more important that you actually think about the why. So why is their head down? Why is it tilted away from the body? Are they trying to look confidently away for what reason? So again, giving yourself this food for thought, even though you're doing these very primitive abstract versions, can be a great way to supercharge your creativity. I definitely do that with every drawing that I do. I try to think as much about what's going on in that scene, and that helps me develop ideas and spark new ideas as well. Now I'd like you to take the time to draw at least 10 of these poses. Tried different camera angles, different scenarios. Really push yourself and your imagination to do as much as you can with as much variation as you can. I would love to see the work and more classes on the way we'll approach constructing the anatomy around puzzles like this. So I hope you'll join me for those as well. As always, good luck with your art and I'll talk to you soon.