The Art & Science of Figure Drawing: Complete Figure Demo

1. Trailer: [MUSIC] Hi. I'm Brent Eviston, the creator of The Art and Science of Drawing series. In my new course, you'll be led step-by-step through the entire figure drawing process in my first full length figure drawing demonstration, as I create a detailed figure drawing from start to finish. You'll see me begin with a dynamic gesture drawing, before fleshing out the figure using descriptive contours. Next, you'll see me render the forms of the body in dramatic light and shadow. Finally, you'll see me draw all of the subtle details that make a figure drawing truly sink. In my original Art and Science of Drawing series, I taught drawing fundamentals. In this full length figure drawing demonstration, you'll see me put those tools and techniques into action to create a finished figure drawing. In addition to the tools and techniques you'll see me demonstrate, you'll also learn how to make creative and expressive decisions in your figure drawings. You'll learn how to address the space around the figure, and you'll learn how to know when your drawing is finished. In this demonstration you'll see every single mark and stroke, as I lead you step-by-step through my entire figure drawing process. Throughout this process, I'll be narrating every single decision I make, so you'll know exactly what I'm drawing, how I'm drawing it, and why I made my decisions. In this course, I've included a high-resolution photograph of the exact same pose I'll be drawing. Come join me for my first full length figure drawing demonstration. You're welcome to draw along, or just watch and be inspired. I hope to see you there. [MUSIC] 2. Introduction: Hi, I'm Brent Eviston, the creator of the Art and Science of Drawing series. I've gotten numerous requests from my students to do a full-length figure drawing demonstration. This is where I take a photo of a pose and show my entire process stroke by stroke, start to finish. This demonstration will allow you to see exactly how I use the tools and techniques that I teach in my Art and Science of Drawing series, as well as my Art and Science of Figure Drawing series. Now, in addition to learning about how I apply these tools and techniques, you'll also be introduced to new concepts. You'll see how I make creative decisions in my artwork, how I deal with mistakes and missteps, and how I use expressive and descriptive line quality to convey what I think is interesting about the pose. I'll also share how I think about finishing a drawing and give you some ideas about how you can create compelling figure drawings of your own. It's important that you understand that in this demonstration, I'm assuming you already have very strong fundamental drawing skills. I'm assuming you've already gone through the original Art and Science of Drawing series and the Art and Science of Figure Drawing series. I'm assuming you already have experience with the tools and techniques taught in those earlier courses. Of course, you're welcome to watch this demonstration, even if you're an absolute beginner. But if you want to follow along and create your own figure drawings. It's important that you have the fundamental prerequisites. I'm including a high-resolution photograph of the pose that I will be drawing from. This way you can refer back to it as you watch the demonstration. Of course, you can draw from it. You can create your own interpretation of the pose you'll see me working on. If you're not sure whether you're ready to follow along with this demonstration, try it out. If you find out that you need more prerequisite knowledge and skills, you're always welcome to go back to the original Art and Science of Drawing series and develop the skills you need. This demonstration is divided up into 10 different videos. Each video shows one stage of the figure drawing process. This way, you'll easily be able to refer back to the parts of the demonstration that are most important for you. Before we get started, let's talk about materials and setup. As you will soon see, I will be standing and drawing at an easel. In fact, you can see my setup right behind me. I'll have my paper clipped to a drawing board and taped at the bottom so the edges don't rise up. My reference photo will be on an iPad that is just to the left of my drawing paper. I keep the reference photo on my left because I'm right-handed, and that way my arm doesn't block the reference photo as I'm drawing. If you're left-handed, you may want your reference photo on your right side. The materials you'll see me use in this demonstration are pretty simple. I'll be drawing with a Lyra Rembrandt Polycolor pencil. I'll be drawing using a dark red color, but you're welcome to use whatever color works for you. Just remember, you want it to be dark and not too bright a color. That way the viewer will read your marks as shadow in value, not as color. I tend to just sharpen my pencils using an electric pencil sharpener, but you're welcome to use whatever pencil sharpener works for you. I'll be drawing on a piece of 19 by 25-inch Canson Mi-Teintes paper. This is by far the most common drawing paper I use when I want to finish work. That paper will be clipped to my drawing board using just basic kitchen clips. I really like these plastic or silicone kitchen clips because they're not as harsh as metal clips. I've taped the bottom two corners of the paper with artist's tape. It's important to use artist's tape because it's archival and it's designed to not to tear the paper as you remove the tape. In this demonstration, you'll see me use a few different types of erasers. You'll see me use a kneaded eraser, which is a gummy eraser that you can shape and you can lift off pigment instead of just scrubbing the paper. You'll also see me use a vinyl eraser when I want to take off a lot of pigment at one time. A vinyl eraser is a blunt tool that will allow you to scrub pigment off of the surface of the paper. Finally, you'll see me use an electric eraser. I use electric erasers when I have detailed erasing to do. In particular, electric erasers are great for lifting out small highlights. Finally, you'll see me use a drafting brush to clear away any debris left from the erasers. Here's the setup I use along with my materials. You're welcome to use whatever materials and setup work for you. That's it. Those are all of the materials you'll see me use in this demonstration. If you're going to be drawing with me, then gather your materials, get set up, and let's begin drawing. 3. Gesture: My first goal is going to be to draw a dynamic gesture drawing that captures the entirety of the pose. For that, we're going to start off with a primary action line. One thing I often do is pantomime my primary action line first. I think I'm going to want to start it from the top of the head, run down the front of the face, down the front of the torso, and then down the front of the leg, and then curve down to the foot. A path that runs like this. That seems to me to be the primary action. It's the line that's going to pull as many of the parts of the body together as I can. I'm going to start up top, run a line down the front of the face, down the front of the torso, down the leg. Then it's going to change direction, and head down toward the foot, something like this. Again, this is an incredibly light soft line. By drawing the primary action line, you can see that I've also established the size of the figure on the page. I know the top of the head is going to be somewhere around here and the bottom of the foot is going to be somewhere around here. Now this, of course, may change slightly as the drawing progresses, but it gives me a general idea. Now I need to start to flesh out the figure a little more. I'm going to begin by drawing a line that establishes the angle between the two shoulders. The shoulder on the right is higher than the shoulder on the left. Now I'm going to try and capture the basic shape of the torso. I usually start with the shape of the ribcage. I'm actually going to start the rib-cage from the neck because we know that the opening for the neck is at the top of the rib cage. I'm going to pull it down to this area of the ribcage we can see jutting out. Again, I'm going to be doing this very lightly. You can see I'm making an indication here where the ribcage juts out. [NOISE] I'm going to do the top of the ribcage over here, come down the stomach then through the legs back up the other side, capturing the glutes, then down the back here. Again, incredibly light soft lines. Remember I want to keep it as simple as possible as well because I don't know that this is correct yet. In drawing the basic shape for the torso, I have this jutting out area of the ribcage. I want to know where this apex is, where the upper section of the torso comes and meets the lower section and creates that angle there. I can see it's below this section here. I'm going to place it about right here, draw a line up. This represents the back, and then I can go back down toward the glutes. This may be a little slender, I'm not sure yet. Actually, it looks like I may need to pull the stomach out a little more here. One thing you'll notice is that this drawing starts to solidify. I can start using darker and darker lines. The goal here is that when I come back to this part of the drawing, I can tell which part of the drawing is more correct by how dark the line is. This lighter line here was my first attempt at this abdominal area, but this line was my second attempt, it's slightly darker. Now I don't have to commit that to memory I have a visual reminder of which is the more correct line. This is the area of the ribcage that's jetting out. Now I want to place the suprasternal notch. Now it's a little early to do much measuring, but I want to make sure I get the placement correct. I'm going to take an angle side from the edge of the front of the rib-cage to the suprasternal notch. I'm going to bring that back to my drawing, so I'm getting it's somewhere around there and I can triangulate it. I'm going to use angle siding to triangulate its locations. Now I'm going to go over here and locate the apex, where the apex is where the upper part of the torso meets the lower section. I'm going to get that angle. I transfer that to my drawing, where those two meet is going to give me the location of my suprasternal notch. Now, just a reminder here I have covered angle siding in-depth in my measuring and proportion course in the original art and science of drawing series. If this is unfamiliar to you, I highly recommend revisiting that course. Now I can pull the clavicle out here. I have the very beginning of my torso. Now I want to add the legs. I'm going to flesh out the leg a little. Again, at this stage I'm just going to draw a single line to represent the leg. I know I want to simplify the leg into a single line at this stage. I tend to like to use lines that are convex or at the front of forearms. You can see I can run this line down here, down the front of the leg, which is also convex down to around the knee, and then change direction down toward the foot. Now again, this isn't measured yet, it's just an indication. To get the front leg I know it needs to project somewhere around here and to get a sense of that, I'm going to go back to this apex once again and just get a sense of what that angle is between where the leg starts in that apex. Now we have something like this, again, incredibly simple at this stage. Once again, I want to reiterate the reason it's so simple is because I don't know if I'm going to keep it here. I want to make sure it's incredibly easy to move. I'm going to run a line down here for the arm. Again, going back to this apex, I want to get a sense of where the elbow is in relationship to it. I'm going to say it's roughly about there, and I curve that back down here. There is the line for the arm and again, I'm running it on the outside edge that is also convex, same for the forearm, the outside edge that is also convex. For the other arm, I'm going to just indicate the shoulder slightly here just with a curve. But then I'm going to run my gesture line down the underside of this arm toward the elbow, then up the underside of the forearm toward the hand. I'm just going to give a very subtle indication of the direction of the hand. Hopefully this starts to give you a sense of the pose. It's incredibly simple right now, but it is capturing the essence of this pose. I can add an indication of the feet. I think that's way too long over here, so I'm going to actually pull the foot up quite a bit. One thing that I always like to be very clear about is, the drawing is all about revision. Once you see that something is misplaced, change it. You can say, put the foot way down here when in actuality needed to be moved up. But I think it may need to be moved up a little more than that later on. But for now, we're just going to leave it. I'll move it up a little bit. Again we'll measure that in a bit. Right now I'm just trying to get a basic sense of the proportions. I know the foot on our left, it's a little lower than the foot on our right. I've captured that relationship and again, incredibly simple. Once again, I want to go back to this area. You can see I've used this visual shorthand again. My initial attempt to the foot is down here, it's drawn very lightly. My second attempt, which is the more correct attempt, is drawn slightly darker. Now I don't have to keep that in my mind. I can forget about that, move on to the rest of the drawing. But when I return back to this area, I know which of my attempts is more correct because one is darker. One question you might ask is, why don't I erase it? Well, I may end up erasing it, I may not, but I tend to draw with as little erasing as possible. I actually think that all of these extra lines add some visual excitement later on in the drawing. They almost give the sense of motion. I don't like to put them in synthetically later on. Having them occur naturally at these early stages of the drawing is a really great way to include more visual interest. Now I'm going to give just a subtle indication of the head. Just the basic shape of the head, and just a very simple placement there. Again, all I've done for the head is drawn a line at the front of the face. It's very simple, no detail around the back of the cranium and then just a single line indicating the jaw. But you can see that little bit of information already communicates the head tilted back and away from us. At this stage, even though we've only been drawing for a few minutes, I've already captured the basics of the pose in its entirety, so now I can start to refine it. 4. Measuring: I don't want to add any more detail until I've made sure that these basic elements are in proportion and properly placed. To do that, I'm going to employ a technique called angles citing. To start off with angle citing, I need to select a point that I'm going to lock in place. Now, I can choose whatever point I want. I'm going to claim that this suprasternal notch right here, I'm going to lock this in place and take all of my other measurements in relationship to that suprasternal notch. For example, let's say I want to know where the knees are in relationship to the suprasternal notch and to each other. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take my pencil and I'm going to place it so that it runs in between the suprasternal notch and that knee in my reference photo. I'm going to transfer that angle back over to my drawing to see where they intersect. It looks like I got lucky here. When I take the angle between the suprasternal notch and the knee from the reference photo and bring that angle back to my drawing, you can see that the angle runs down from the suprasternal notch and hits right where I hoped it did. I got a little lucky there, but this is placed correctly. I got that in the right spot. Now, I know that somewhere along this line is the knee. It actually corresponds quite nicely to my initial gesture. I'm going to now proclaim that this is in the right place. Now, I have two correct points. I have my suprasternal notch, and I just got to choose that point and proclaim that it was correct because it's the first point. Now, I know the location of the knee is here. I know this because I captured the angle between these two points from the reference photo, I transferred it over and that's where it hit. It corresponded to my drawing. I'm going to lock this knee in place. Now, I want to know the location of the other knee. What I can do is, I can go back to my reference photo, so I can get the angle from the suprasternal notch down to that knee on our right. I transfer it over to the drawing very carefully. My pencil isn't long enough, so I'm going to have to place a pencil and slowly move the pencil in the direction I need it to go. I'm getting that knee is placed here. I initially placed my knee here but now I know it's over toward the left, just slightly over here. But of course, this is only one piece of information I need. Now, I know somewhere along this angle is the location of the knee, but where is it? Is it up here? Is it down here? To figure that out, I need to go back over to the first knee and triangulate the position of the second knee. I'm going to go back over to my reference photo. I'm going to get the angle between the two knees on my pencil. I'm going to slowly transfer it to my drawing. It's going to be a little lower here. That's going to be the location of the knee. I've used angle citing to triangulate the location of the points. The first point, I just got to proclaim was correct. The second I took the angle from the reference photo, transferred up to my drawing, and it corresponded with my gesture. I got to lock this into place. For the location of the knee, I triangulated it between these two points. This is where I got the location of the knee. This was my first attempt. This was my second attempt based just on this angle. When I triangulated it, I had to move this down slightly to about there. Now, if you really want to be safe, you can double and triple-check all of these measurements. To be honest, if you're starting off, that is exactly what I would recommend doing just to make sure that these are accurate. If you're newer to angle citing, the likelihood that your angles are off is very high until you really refine this skill. Now, I have three accurate points; I have the suprasternal notch, I have the knee on our left, and the knee on our right. Now, using these three points I can locate any other point I want to on the figure. For example, if I want to know the location of the ankle down here, I can go back to my reference photo, get the angle between the knee and the ankle, slowly move it over to my drawing. I'm getting it somewhere along here. If we want to know the length of this section, we can switch over to proportional measuring. I'm going to go back to my reference photo. I'm going to put the top of my pencil right at the knee and my thumb at the location of the ankle that will give me a length. I'm going to compare that length from the knee up to the leg. I'm getting here to there. I've used proportional measuring to figure out what that is. If you're trying to follow along with my drawing, it's important for you to note that I am measuring the points that makes sense to me. These points may not make sense to you or your gesture drawing may have points that you feel are more important to measure than knees. Remember, this isn't a step-by-step approach to how to draw this pose, I'm figuring this out as I'm going along. I'm reacting to my drawing and its needs. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to use angle citing to figure out some additional points. I'll probably angle-cite this ankle. I'll probably use these two points to triangulate its location. I will likely angle sight the location of the elbows. I'm going to take a few minutes to do that. Again, I'm going to go back to my reference photo. What I want to do is get the angle from the knee over to the ankle. I'm going to take that from my reference photo. Very carefully, I pull it back over to my drawing. I'm getting that the location of the ankle is somewhere around here. I'm just going to lightly indicate it, now I need to go to this knee and I'm going to go to my reference photo and get the angle between the knee and the ankle. I think it should be pulled out over here. I'm going to move it slightly to the left. But I'm still going to keep it on this angle, on this line here. Now, I'm not drawing this line and just imagining it. Again, I'm going to indicate the location of that ankle and that of course would pull the foot a little further forward. I'm just going to make that quick adjustment here. You can see my initial gesture drawing actually got pretty close to the pose. Now, I actually like to do as little measuring as possible in a drawing. I think measuring is important. I don't love to do it. I'm always looking for that moment I can get back to just drawing more freely and more intuitively. But hopefully, this has given you a sense of how to start a gesture drawing, how to capture the dynamics of a pose, and how to rein it in using measuring. This is how I start most of my figure drawings. I start off with a simple but dynamic gesture drawing that focuses on unifying the figure. You'll note that you can still read that initial primary action line. Now the drawing has evolved slightly, but you can still see how powerful that movement is throughout the pose. Once I got a simple gesture, I used angle sighting to rein it in, to make sure it was in proportion. I will say that there are a lot of measuring techniques out there. Angle sighting is the one that I use probably 90 percent of the time. It's the toughest to learn but I find it the most useful in figure drawing and in any form of drawing. My benchmark for a successful gesture drawing is whether or not I can hand it off to somebody and they can take the pose without looking at the reference photo or the model. If I handed this off to somebody, I do think they could take this pose. They may not get the exact position of the hand. But I think if you gave this simple drawing off to a random stranger who had never seen the pose, they would be able to understand what the model is doing and likely be able to take the pose themselves. That's the goal of good gesture drawing. I also know that the gesture drawing is in proportion because I used angle sighting to measure some key points. Though I haven't measured everything, I may take a few more measurements, but I think this is a great start to this drawing. It's simple, it's dynamic, it's accurate, and it's something that we can build the rest of the drawing off of, and that is what we need from this initial gesture drawing phase. Before I move on to the volume and structure phase of the drawing, there are a couple of things I want to do. First, I want to make sure I have a center line. Starting here at the suprasternal notch, there is going to be a line that runs down the sternum between the breasts and down toward the naval should be about right here. It'll run down through between the legs. I'm just going to indicate that center line. Now the center line is going to help the torso appear three-dimensional. Here you can see that central line really helps sell the illusion that the torso is turning toward the left. Right now it's just an incredibly light and simple center line. The other thing I want to make sure I do before I move on is to locate all of the joints. I already have the knees and the ankles, but now I want the elbows and wrists. To do that, of course, I'm going to go back to some of our original points and see if I can triangulate the location of the elbow on our right. I'm going to go to the knee on our left and get the angle from the knee on our left to the elbow on our right. I'm going to take this from the reference photo and carefully move it over to my drawing. It looks like it is right on, so that's great. I know it is placed properly on this line, but now I need to make sure that it isn't needs to be moved left or right. I'm going to do that by triangulating the location of this point using now the suprasternal notch. I'm going to go back to the reference photo, get the angle from the suprasternal notch, that elbow, let me capture it on my pencil and then carefully move it over to the drawing. I'm getting that the location of the elbow needs to be moved down just slightly. Here was my initial attempt and here is my measured attempt. I'm going to double-check that just to make sure. Double and triple checking your measurements is always a good idea. Yeah. I'm going to move it just up slightly to about there. Now I need to read this line here. I'm just going to make it slightly darker. You can see here is my first attempt at the outer edge of the arm. Here's my second attempt which is slightly darker. Now I want to locate this elbow. Again, I'm going to triangulate it using two points. I'm going to go from the knee to the elbow. I'm going to go to my reference photo, capture the ankle on my pencil between the knee and our left and the elbow on our left. Going to slowly transferred over to my drawing. Great. This is right on that line. Once again, it looks like my initial attempt worked out well, but I need to see if it needs to be moved up and down. I'm going to get the angle between the suprasternal notch and that elbow from my reference photo. Let me capture it on my pencil. Slowly move it over to the drawing. Perfect. That is right on. It looks like I properly placed the location of that elbow. Now let's move to the wrists. Now, I don't see the wrist on our right. That's fine, I can leave that be for now. I want to get the location of the wrist on our left. Again, I'm feeling pretty comfortable with it. It looks normal, it looks natural. I'm not interested in putting in more measuring that I need to hear. One thing that's really important to note is that I want a dynamic figure drawing and I am happy to sacrifice some accuracy for dynamism. I don't mind if a pose is a little exaggerated. Remember if it's exaggerated, it's not going to be accurate. I want something that looks a little more extreme on the paper than it looks in the reference photo. Often in the drawing, if I like the way something looks, it looks in proportion and it looks dynamic and interesting to me, I often will choose just not to measure it, and that's fine. At this stage, hopefully, you can see we have a dynamic but simple gesture drawing that captures the pose in its entirety. After first just attempting to do the gesture drawing using my eyes and my intuition, I then reined in with some angle sighting, I located the joints. All of the limbs have been simplified into basic lines. Again, at this point they don't have any width or volume and that's fine. I've got the basic shape for the torso that does have some shape and some width to it. I've drawn the central line to imply just a hint of volume. It looks believable, it looks dynamic, and I have enough information to start fleshing out the figure. Let's now move on to the volume in structure phase of the drawing. 5. Adding Width: I'm going to take my simple gesture drawing and flesh it out. I'm going to begin to add width and volume to the drawing. The first thing I need to do is add some basic width. Right now, the limbs are just individual lines. There's no width. We have a single line for the upper section of the arm, a single line for the forearm, and again, that pattern is repeated throughout this drawing none of these limbs have any volume yet. What I need to begin to do is add volume. Usually I'd like to start with the bigger forms first, so I'm just going to make my first attempts at adding some volume to this leg on our left. Now that I'm looking, I think this line might need to be moved up a little bit. It's not quite as thick as I think it needs to be. Now this is very important for you to see as much effort as I put into the beginning gesture parts of the process, I'm still going to make changes. I almost always find little things along the way that I could change. I'm going to make a second attempt at this part of the body, but I've angle cited the knee, so I know that's in the right place, so I'm going to move this line up a little bit. But I still know that it needs to come into contact with that knee there. This is looking a little closer to what I see in the reference photo. Again, I'm drawing this very lightly, so this may need to change later on as well. Now I'm going to add some width to this leg here. Again, I'm just going to start off in an incredibly light soft line. These types of lines that I'm drawing right now, they are not intended to be descriptive contours. Later on in the drawing, I'm going to come and draw a much more descriptive contour right over these basic lines. Now, depending on my mood, depending on my confidence level, at times, I skip this stage of doing these light lines, and I just get right to drawing more descriptive contour lines. But here in this demo, I want to show you the full process, so if you feel like you need to add these light soft lines first, you can. If you're not quite feeling confident that you know where things are in your drawing. You can always add these light soft lines just to give a hint of some basic width and indications of volume before you move into drawing more descriptive contours. You can already see these few lines that we've added are really helping to bring this drawing to life. I'm starting off extremely lightly and just gauging the width and the proportions to make sure that it looks natural. Does this arm look too thin? Does it look too wide? I think this should be lowered a little bit here, so hopefully you can see how powerful it is to just add some width to these limbs, the figure really starts to fill out. I'm going to add an indication of the neck, and at the top of the neck, I'm going to add a cylinder. I'm going to add an ellipse here to give the impression that this neck is around it as it attaches to the base of the skull. At this stage, I would like you to note that even just adding these simple indications of width already started to stiffen up our gesture drawing that is very common. The reason this happens is because these simplified lines that we're using to add width are not very dynamic or interesting. That's why it's important that later on when we actually draw the descriptive contours, that we bring back a sense of energy and dynamism to the drawing. Now I want to make sure that the drawing is in proportion before I add any descriptive contours, so this is my last chance to check to make sure that everything is at the right size and at the right place before I draw darker lines that are harder to erase. I'm feeling mostly comfortable with this, I might make a few quick and subtle changes here. But again, for the most part, I'm feeling pretty good about this drawing, the proportions and how it's laid out, so I'm feeling pretty ready to begin, to start to flesh it out. Now once again, I want to remind you that I am drawing darker here than I normally would if I were drawing alone in my studio. The reason, of course is so you can see this, but if I were drawing on my own, this would be much lighter. It's important for you to note that none of the lines that you're seeing on the page right now are intended to be seen by a viewer. All of these lines are here to help me draw the lines that I eventually want to be seen by a viewer. These lines are merely a guide. Their serving as the foundation over which I'm going to draw the lines that I do intend to be seen by a viewer. 6. Descriptive Contours: I'm going to begin drawing using descriptive line quality. There are a few things I need to keep in mind. First is that I want to use my lines to communicate to the viewer what the model might feel like to the touch. For example, areas where we see the skeleton coming to the surface, areas like joints, the knee where we see the patella come to the surface, or the area where we see the medial end of the clavicle come to the surface, elbows, ankles, all of these areas have bone coming to the surface. If we were to knock on these areas, we would hear a hard thud. That's because there's hard bone right underneath the surface. To communicate hardness, I can use dark angular lines. But there are other areas of the figure that would be softer to the touch. A thigh would feel soft, a breast would feel soft, and we want to be able to communicate that softness in our drawing. To communicate softness, I'm going to use softer, thicker lines, not dark hard edged lines. These aren't the only two types of lines we can use, but it's a great starting point. It gives us a contrast between hard and soft. I also want to think about communicating space in the drawing. The parts of the model that are closer, I'm probably going to use darker more prominent lines. For the parts of the model that are further away, I may use softer lighter lines. Let's go ahead and begin. I tend to like to start with the torso because the torso is the central part of the figure, the core part of the figure from which all of the other parts extend out from. I'm going to start here where we can see the stomach come up and come in front of the ribcage. Now that I'm looking at the drawing, I think I want to move this jetting part of the ribcage up just a little bit. Now that's an area where we have hard bone coming to the surface. I'm going to use a harder line right there, harder darker line, and I'm going to soften that line we have for the stomach coming in front of it. I'm going to use a soft line to communicate the bulging out of the flesh right here of the stomach. It's important to know that I'm not simply tracing over the lines I've already drawn. Again, those are just guides, but I can deviate from them at this point to communicate other information. I don't just want to commit to using outer contours. I'm going to be using inner contours as well. For example, I'm going to use a light soft lines to communicate the center line dropping down from the navel in a very light, very soft line communicating the flesh underneath the belly here. I'm going to come over here to the other side and I'm going to draw the overlap where we can see the external obliques curving out and then overlapping just slightly the area of the upper part of the torso. For the upper part of the torso we can see a line dropping down from roughly the armpit. It's going to be curved here. We need to soften it now because it's going to be in shadow later on. I don't necessarily want to pull that forward. Here I'm going to create a line for the buttocks that actually comes in front of the line for the external obliques here, and as that comes down I'm going to soften that line as it curves around the buttocks there. Here starting at the knee, I'm going to make this line just a little harder and more angular. But as we can see, the muscle for the thigh coming in front of it, I'm going to use slightly softer edged line. I'm going to create a softer line as it comes up. Now with the overlaps, I tend to like to add a little bit of emphasis. I'm going to add just a hint of emphasis here as we can see the muscles for the leg starting to connect with the area for the pelvis. Now I don't want to give the sense that every single line I'm drawing has a really specific function. Much of the time, I just want to create varied line work so viewers don't get bored. There's not always a rhyme or reason. A part of this is just intuitive. What line do I think might look interesting in the area that I'm drawing? Here again, we have the knees. I'm going to create a darker harder edged line for the patella, and that line is going to soften a bit as it goes into the muscles for the leg. As I'm constructing the joint of the knee again, I'm going to use darker harder lines. This allows me to get a little more detail as well. Right here underneath the back of the knee, we have the tendon that's going behind the knee, and I'm going to draw that with a slightly darker, harder line that again is going to soften as it heads toward the fleshy part of the muscles. Again, you're going to see me go through a similar process all over the figure. Now if you're not sure what line you want, you can always start with a lighter softer line and later on shift to darker harder lines later. It's important to remember that dark hard lines are hard to erase. If you're unsure about something, it can be safer to stick with the lighter, softer lines first. Now, I can make changes at any point of the drawing. One thing I'm seeing is I think the torso is looking a little too thick, so I may just come in here and pull in that contour just a bit to get the torso to be a little more slender. This is a good time too that I can start to add the details that I've missed so far. Let's place the breasts. The breasts, of course should be very soft, so we don't want to add a line here unless we want to bring emphasis. Here we have the breast on our left and again, right now it's a pretty light soft line. You can see the breast on our right is slightly above the breast on our left. Again, I'm just going to use a light soft line. Here at this point, I'm returning back to gestural lines. They're light, they're soft, they're long, they're fluid. Here we can see the breast disappearing into the armpit. I want to use my kneaded eraser here to knock back that other contour. It's a little too dark now, it's finding it distracting, so I'm just going to knock that back a bit. We also want to work with the interior contour. I'm going to use some very light soft lines. Here we can see the ellipse at the top of the pelvis, and that's going to move down toward the anterior superior iliac spine which we can see about right here. I'm going to note that. We can also see the anterior inferior iliac spine here. It's moving toward the connection of the leg. Now we can see the figure has start to come to life. 7. Dividing Light From Shadow: Now, what I like to do every contour in the drawing before I do any shading. It's about this stage where I may start to indicate some light and shadow. Remember, when we're dealing with light and shadow, the first thing we want to do is find the line of termination where light ends and shadow begins. The very first pass is almost a gestural pass of light and shadow. We're going to draw a line where the light ends and shadow begins. We're going to simplify it. Once again, at this stage, we're almost going back to gesture drawing. Instead of drawing these shadows here where the ribs come in, I'm just going to draw the angle where they start. Again using light soft lines to do a simple indication of light and shadow. Before I go any further here, I'm just going to fill this in with a light wash of value. Again, this way I don't have to remember what that line is. See this shadow curve into the pelvis here, come down. Again, I'm probably not going to try and capture every detail here. I'm just going to do a general shadow shape here. Now, here at the leg things get interesting. We can see the buttocks shadow here. But then we can see this whole leg starting to drop into shadow. You can see it's darkest down here by the knee and it gets lighter as it goes up. Here there's not a really clear dividing line. What I might do here is go down to the leg and just lay in some basic value here. I think I'm just going to start a little light, laying some value and as I approach the knee, get a little bit darker as we go down. I'm going to take one more pass at that, again, just adding a little more value, barely any at the top and as we get closer to the knee, making it darker. Now, this whole area is going to fall into dark shadow. I don't need a whole lot of detail there. In fact, I think I can push that back a little bit. I don't want to emphasize that area. I don't mind if I'm going out of the lines a little bit. That's okay. I'll probably end up making that part of the drawing a little hazy anyway. It's one of the less visible parts in the reference photo. For the leg on our left, we can actually see a very clear line of termination as the leg turns away from the light. Again, I'm just going to do a simple version right at the line of termination here. Now, I'm going to add detail. Once I have the line of termination, I'm going to lay in a light wash of value. Again for the leg down here, I'll let this get a little hazy for now. This whole area of the forearm is in shadow. Again, I'm going to just give a little more information at the hand, but then I'm going to draw this whole area of the forearm into shadow. You can see a line of termination on the upper section of the arm, something like this. Again, this is like gesture drawing. I'm going back to the beginning of the process where I'm using light soft fluid strokes, but instead of drawing parts of the body, I'm mapping out where the shadow shapes are, just the broad shadow shapes. This is a simplified version of the shadows that I'll eventually be giving more detail to. At this stage you're going to see me move back and forth between drawing with descriptive line quality to create an interesting set of contours and working with the shadows. I know in many of my courses you've seen me divide this up more cleanly where I start with a gesture, then I do volume, then I do a line quality, and only then do I do light and shadow. But in reality, when I'm drawing on my own in the studio, I tend to have a much more gray area between these stages. 8. Developing the Drawing as a Whole: At this stage I'm going to move around the whole drawing and start to develop it. One area that I haven't worked on too much is the head. I'm going to start to flesh out the head just a little more at the neck. The overlap here underneath the jaw. The head is looking a little big to me right now, so I'm going to shrink it in size just a little bit. Not much, just a bit. Just going to get the top off of it here. I'm going to be a little more specific with the jaw. Those little indications that we just made went pretty far toward describing the head in more detail. I'm going to put some hair on the figure and again, nothing detailed at this stage, just enough to get a sense of it. The hairline at the back here follows the ellipse at the top of the cylinder for the neck, remember we have this ellipse curving here showing the cylinder of the neck and the hairline mimics that pretty closely. We have the hair going up and around the ear. I'm going to add some value to the hair just a little bit. The hair isn't technically in shadow, part of it is, this back part is in shadow, but all of it is dark so I'm going to add some value to the whole thing, even though only half of it is in shadow. But I can go in and create a darker section of hair, make that slightly darker to show the shadow on the back of the head. I'm going to start to look for any area of the drawing that is currently undeveloped and I'm going to start to develop it. Here I want to give some attention to the biceps of the leg as they come up and merge with the buttocks. Again, I'm not being terribly specific here, but I do want to add some dimension to this leg. One note is that you don't always need to develop every contour. For example, you can see on this leg, I want this leg to go back in space a little so I'm going to leave this edge pretty soft, hazy, and undetailed. In the reference photo you can see that we actually have quite a bit of light there. One thing we can do to help imply light is actually knock back that contour for that leg even further. I haven't done too much to address the arm over here, so I'm going to add a slightly darker, more angular line to get the elbow, the bone coming to the surface, I'm going to add some curved lines, get some of the anatomy in the forearm here. It's important to note that this demo is not about anatomy. It's not that I'm not using any anatomical knowledge, but again, what I'm primarily using are my observation skills. I'm looking at the figure to see what information I can see with my eyes. I think you'll be amazed how much information you can capture just by using your eyes alone. For example, in the back of the arm here, if we look at the contour of the reference photo, we can see a slight bulge right at the upper section. I'm going to draw that bulge just slightly before it goes and heads down toward the elbow. Little pieces of information like that, really make the drawing starts to come alive. Now that I'm looking, I think that line needs to be dropped down a little. When I make a mistake and I draw a line that's dark and hard that I need to erase, I tend to switch to my electric eraser. Electric erasers do a great job at erasing just the area we want, but not much else. It's a really focused erasing. Kneaded erasers are great for some things, but they can be a little crude, and the same thing for rubber or vinyl erasers. After I erase, I'm going to use my brush to wipe off any excess eraser shavings here. You never want to brush with your hand because that can smear the drawing. I'm going to move this line down just a little bit. I'm going to try again, and again I want to capture the bulge in the arm before it flattens out and heads toward the elbow. Going to show the breast overlapping that area here. The armpit, which of course is created by the pectoral muscle that's disappearing into the arm here. While we're here, I may add a few subtle details. I can actually see this muscle coming in right here, that's flexing the shadow underneath the bicep here. Again, at this stage I'm not thinking too specifically about what muscles they are. I'm using my observation skills to add some detail. This is one reason I try and be selective when I talk about anatomy with students. Because again, I've done a lot of anatomy study, but when I'm drawing, I rely much more on observation than anatomical knowledge. One thing I've done here as well as you can see that I've drawn in a light core shadow. It's not detailed, but I've drawn it slightly darker than our basic shadow value that I've been laying in so far and you can see just the addition of that core shadow in this area really brings this part of the drawing alive. Now, you'll often hear me say that we want to start off simply and slowly move toward detail and although I try and follow that, it's very easy to get caught up in details. They're very seductive. I noticed myself getting caught up in the details too. Then I try and pull back a little bit and go back to the big information. Here you can see the contour of the deltoid coming up, the contour for the bicep that's going to flatten out before it hits the elbow there. 9. Core Shadows & Cast Shadows: In terms of light and shadow, I've drawn in the line of termination where light ends and shadow begins. It's a very simple line of termination. On the shadow side, I've laid in a light wash of value. Now that wash of value will be my reflected light value. Although it is in shadow, it's not going to be our darkest shadow. Over that, I'm going to draw the core shadow. Now by drawing in the core shadow, it really brings the light and shadow to life. Watch what happens when I start to darken the core shadow into differentiated from the reflected light value of the shadow. Of course, we also have the darkest shadow value, which is for the cast shadow. For example, right here under the breast, we can see the breast is casting a shadow onto the torso. Now, when I'm drawing a cast shadow, that's one of the few times you'll actually see me switch over to the tripod grip. The reason I use the tripod grip for my cast shadow value is because I'm really bearing down on the tip. If I'm bearing down too hard on the side of the pencil, the pencil can break. We also have a cast shadow in the armpit here where all light is blocked. We have the arm itself casting a shadow onto the rest of the torso here. One thing I'm seeing is I need to move this contour back out a little bit, so I'm going to do that here. I'm going to use my kneaded eraser to knock back that other contour line. This is all going to be in shadow anyway, so it would probably have not been too visible. We have some of our darkest values here. Now, it can be good to add in some cast shadow values sooner rather than later just so we can establish some of the darker values in the drawing. [NOISE] Now I'm going to start to follow the line of termination down, and start to draw in a more detailed core shadow. I'm also going to detail out the line of termination more. For example, here we can see the shadow underneath the rib. We can see another shadow underneath the rib here drops down. [NOISE] Students are often concerned that if they draw a line of termination that's too simple that they won't be able to go back and capture these more detailed shadows. You can see here I haven't done any erasing on the line of termination, I've just drawn right over it. You can see that this information now is starting to come out. That simplified line of termination was not a problem. [NOISE] You can see a hint of a core shadow here. Again, at this stage, I can start to add more of the subtle details. Not getting too detailed yet, but I'm just starting to hint at the complexity that we're building toward. [NOISE] One thing that really helps me with my shading process is thinking about drawing as a transparent medium similar to watercolor. What I mean by that is we can see through each new layer we place over the drawing. This is why it works for me to draw the line of termination, and then lay in the reflected light value because I can draw the core shadow value right over that, but I can still see what's behind the core shadow value. I'm not covering anything up. I add some value here. We can see a slight core shadow here. Let me work on this arm for a bit. Again, you can see I'm moving around the drawing. I'm not just sticking in one spot. One big mistake that beginners often make is starting with one area of the drawing and just detailing that, and then slowly moving across the drawing detailing along the way. But I like to bring the drawing up to a similar level of completion at each stage of the drawing. No one part gets finished before any of the other parts. Here we have the deltoid curving. We can see some nice scalloped edges with the core shadow here. Pull out this way and then it comes underneath here. Now, right when we get to the elbow, you can actually see that the core shadow edge, which is softer up above, really hardens up. Now, part of that is because it's a smaller detail and the core shadow is going to actually be more slender, but that works with our method of using darker, harder-edged lines to communicate where bone comes to the surface. Again, you can see this in the actual reference photo that that line of termination at the elbow is much harder in sharper than it is at the rest of the core shadow in the arm above. I may have hit that a little too hard in my zeal to communicate that to you. I may keep that. I may knock it back a little later. We'll see. [NOISE] Because the arm is diving behind the fig here and going into the background, I may want to knock that back. One technique I will often use is I may add some value here, but I will probably have it be pretty hazy. [NOISE] I don't want to add too much information there at this stage. I want to communicate the buttocks really coming up in front there. That means I can draw a harder, darker line here. One thing that often will happen as you develop your shading is your contour lines will become less visible. Now, this is very normal. Sometimes you'll want the contour lines to fade into the shadows. Other times you may want to emphasize them more. It's really a personal preference. Again, I don't want to make it seem like every decision I'm making has a really clear goal with it. Sometimes I'm just looking for interesting mark-making. [NOISE] Again, I want to stress that I am not finishing any area of the drawing. Going around at this stage, I'm starting to detail the core shadow to differentiate it from the reflected light value. I'm doing that all over the drawing, not just in one area. The drawing develops as a whole in its entirety. No one part becomes too developed. [NOISE] Now I don't want this drawing to focus too much on the feet, but I do want the feet to have more information than they currently have. [NOISE] I'm going to add just a little more information here. [NOISE] I certainly don't want the emphasis to be on the feet, so probably just add some subtle value here in the back. [NOISE] But again, I don't want to draw too much attention. It's important to note the more finished parts of the drawing are going to pull more attention to that part of the body. If you don't want to put too much attention on a particular part of the body, then you don't want to bring it to a high level of completion. You don't want to put a lot of detail there. You only want to put detail in areas where you really want to draw attention to. I'm going to draw the navel. It gets a little more emphasis there. Now, you'll notice that I'm really only working on the shadow side of the line of termination, I have not yet drawn the darker areas that are on the lit side. You'll notice that right now I'm really only working on the shadow side of the line of termination. There are darker areas that are on the lit side, but I'm not dealing with those yet. I did emphasize the navel. I want it to look a little more natural. While I'm doing that, I should probably add the nipples as well. One very common mistake that beginners often make when drawing the nipples is they will draw dark lines around the areolas. This is something you tend to want to avoid. Remember the nipple is pigmented so you don't want a dark hard line around it. You don't want to get too detailed with it either. Again, we're focusing more on placement than on anything else here. Even the nipple will cast a slight shadow over the areola next to it. You can see I've drawn the nipple itself just a little darker as it casts a shadow over the areola. At this stage, the drawing is really starting to come to life. We've moved the drawing from a simple gesture to a very simple volumetric drawing, but now it's really gaining complexity. One of the reasons that I spent so much time at the beginning of the drawing, making sure that it's in proportion, making sure that the position and pose are correct is because now that I'm adding detail, I don't have to worry about whether or not the drawing is in proportion. I can simply focus on shading in detail confident that I put all of the work in at the front end to make sure that the drawing is in proportion and believable. 10. Drawing in the Light: Now, we're going to enter the final stage of the drawing. I'm going to shift my attention over to the lit side of the line of termination. I'm going to begin to add the mid tones that are going to describe all of the subtle details on the lit side of the line of termination. This includes areas like the ribs here or where the stomach starts to turn away from the light. Now, it's important to remember that these areas are not in shadow, they're just not being hit with light as directly as the brightest parts of the figure. Now, the brightest parts of the figure, I'm going to leave purely white. They're going to be the color of the paper. But everything else needs a little bit of value. As I'm adding in the mid tones, the center light, the high lights, this means that everything is on the table. So far I've been limiting myself to stages but now I can draw freely and draw anything I see. I can draw contours, I can draw shadows, I can draw mid-tones, and I can start to draw the most subtle details we see. But while doing so I risk losing the gesture that we've worked so hard to develop at the beginning of the drawing as well as the clear, lightened shadow patterns that I worked hard to develop in the previous stage. I want to continually reinforce both the gesture and the lightened shadow patterns. You're going to see me do that quite a bit. To begin this part of the process, I'm going to start to add the details of the torso. Now, I'm using the side of my pencil to make incredibly light, soft areas of subtle value. One thing I want to make sure I capture is the shape of the ribcage as well as the thoracic arch. It's these subtle details that are going to bring the drawing to life. Again, I'm going to work very subtly. Now, it's important to note that I can always go back in and add more value later, but I try and avoid erasing too much value. Once light and shadow has been laid in and particularly if they're very dark or very subtle, then erasing them properly and not disturbing other parts of the drawing becomes very difficult. I'm going to move very slowly here. Again, I'm just going to add very subtle pieces of information and slowly build a very delicate touch here. Here we see where the flesh underneath the stomach begins to turn away from the light. Again, we just have a little bit of value here. Notice that I'm making these curved marks to indicate the curvature of this part of the stomach. It's a subtle technique but I do feel that it can register in the eyes of the viewer even if it's on a subconscious level. In this sense, I feel like I'm sculpting the figure. Similarly, I want to add the slight value that's occurring in-between the external oblique muscle and the abdominals. I'm actually going to trace that area using the side of my pencil. Again, I'm moving incredibly subtly here. I'm going to add a little value and I'm going to use slightly curved strokes to do that. Now, one value I want to make sure to add as well is the center light. Remember the center light is going to start at the line of termination and gets slightly lighter as we approach the light source. So we can see it very clearly right here. We can see this darker area right here that gets lighter as we go toward the light source. To do that, I'm going to lay in a broad wash of value and get lighter as I go towards the light source, which is of course, on our upper left. I'm going to do something similar here with the stomach. Again, using these curved lines, getting slightly lighter as we move toward the light source. One thing that happens as I'm drawing is I notice new information all the time. I can now see a little more clearly the center line that's running in-between the abdominals and then up between the ribs, in-between the breasts where it disappears. One of the best indications of the center light that we have in this drawing is in this leg. You can see it gets dark here, but then we can see it gradually gets lighter as it approaches the light source. [BACKGROUND] Now, this area near the knee also needs to be quite a bit darker. I've gone over this a number of times but once again, I'm going to add another layer of value, darken this area, and slowly get lighter as I move upward. Now, one thing I love about adding in center lights is that we can pull highlights out of them. Let me show you what I mean here. Now that I have the center light drawn-in, and I'm actually going to give it one more pass. Can you see it getting darker here and getting lighter as we move toward the light source? What I can do now is come back in with my eraser and start to pull out areas that I want to be lighter. You can see right up here, it's getting lighter and also right below. I'm going to use my eraser to pull out just a little bit of value. I'm not bringing it all the way up to the white of the paper, I'm just lifting some of that value out. Also, right here at the front of the leg, you can see some value here as well. I'm just going to pull that out just a little. You can see I've just pulled out a little bit of light here. Now I'm going to add just a little bit of value underneath. Again, this is very subtle information that I'm working with at this point. My pencil is just barely grazing the paper. Here we have another indication of the center light as we move from the line of termination up toward the light source. Now I can get a little more detailed with the line of termination over here and add some of the texture that we see in the body as the flesh compresses. This is something that happens when the muscles are working hard underneath. They can cinch the flesh together to create some interesting textures. We want to capture those in the drawing. Now it's really up to you how far you want to push these types of textures and information. Now here's a really beautiful area here where we can actually see a bit of a core shadow running right down here toward the knee and anything to the right of that is quite a bit darker. Again, I'm going to go over this and darken this even more. Hopefully now you can really start to see how these more subtle details start to inform the drawing. Now, one controversial technique that I often use, I don't even know if I can call it a technique and I get a lot of questions about this from students. They asked if my hand ever touches the paper as I'm drawing. The answer is yes quite frequently. The reason that I don't tell students about this more often is because it's not a particularly good habit, generally speaking. My hand does tend to smear some pigment around. In fact, if I show you my hand, you can actually see the red of the pencil here. Now, typically this is not considered a very good habit and I don't like to teach it to students. However, the reason that I allow my hand to brush across the page is because I actually like getting a Cloud of pigment. As my hand passes over the drawing, it's soften some of the shadows in an unplanned way. It adds some unexpected qualities to the drawing, and it also actually pulls pigment into the lit side. I think all of this texture adds visual interest in the drawing. Again, generally speaking, this is not a great habit to have, but I lean into it. I like the overall impact that it gives my drawings and I can go back and erase out of that as well. There's something I like about leaving a bit of DNA on the page where I actually have my flesh in contact with the paper. Now, this only really works with a pencil like the Lyra Rembrandt probably colored pencil because it doesn't smear that much. It just adds a subtle patina over the whole drawing that I really like the quality of. This technique would absolutely not work with charcoal. If you tried this with charcoal it will just ruin the drawing and smear things everywhere. But this is one of the reasons I like this pencil. But again, now that I've shared that with you, I want to make very clear that this isn't the right way to draw. This as a personal style of mine, it's a technique that I have developed. I can imagine many instructors hearing me say that who would shake their head disapprovingly because we're not supposed to let her hands drag across the surface of the drawing and smear pigment. But as I often say, this is what makes drawing an art not merely a science. We're allowed to break the rules, we're allowed allowed start to experiment to see what effects we like in our drawing, even if most people would consider them wrong or in bad form. If you've ever wondered about that, yes. I let my hand drag across the page. No, it's not a particularly good habit and I shouldn't pass it onto my students. But I have leaned into it and it's become part of a signature of my work. I'm going to add the center light in for the abdominals here. Again, I'm going to lay in value and get lighter as I move toward the light source. One thing that you should note here is that the lit areas of the figure are not merely left white. There's actually quite a bit of value in here. But you'll notice the more value I add to the lit side, the less dramatic the shadows become. I'm going to take a moment and I'm going to reinstate our strong light and shadow patterns. I'm going to darken the shadow area here. I can also go back in and darken the core shadow. Every time I darken the core shadow, I want to look for any subtle details that I may have missed. I don't always find them, but every time I make a pass over this core shadow, at least I want to look, see if there's anything there I could do differently. Any new information I can add. Now, I'm going to go back to the armpit and darken this cast shadow. You can see I've switched back over to the tripod grip. Also the cast shadow underneath the breast. Again, this is one of the very few times you'll see me really using the tripod grip because I'm bearing down on the tip of the pencil. If I don't use the tripod grip there, I can break the pencil. I'm going to come back down here and again, darken the core shadow a little more and I'm going to add a little bit more texture to this part of the leg as I do it. Really going to amplify that core shadow here, really pull it down in value. I want to remind you of this idea we talked about before. The drawing is a transparent medium, very similar to watercolor. We can see all of the information through the layers, all the way back to our very first marks on the page. Here I am darkening the core shadow on this section of the leg, then I'm going to darken the reflected light here as well. Now I'm going to add a center light to this leg and we can really see a crystal-clear center light on this part of the leg. You can see it starts darker right here at the line of termination, and it gets considerably lighter as we move up toward the light source. Again, I'm going to start darker and slowly get lighter as we approach the light source. You can see here on the upper thigh we have a highlight. Now again, I'm not going to try and leave out that highlight in my drawing yet. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go back in with my eraser and pull it out. That way I can get a nice even central light as I move up toward the light source. Same thing here at the knee. We can actually see a very nice highlight right here. But again, I'm not going to worry about that yet. I'm going to go ahead and draw in the center light and I'm going to pull out that highlight later on. It's really up to you how far you should take detail in your drawing. You get to decide how much detail you want to include, which brings up an important topic here, we need to decide what we really want to focus on in this drawing and what we're going to consider finished. Though as I've mentioned before, I really don't like drawings that have the same level of finish everywhere. I like to leave areas unfinished, but I like to do it selectively. I want to decide what the most interesting parts of the drawing are to me and showcase them for the viewers. I think this leg, I want to let that go back in space. I'm not going to add a lot of detail to this leg back here. I'll probably add more than is currently there, but I'm not going to do a really finished and detailed drawing of this leg. I think I want to pull this knee forward. I really like the bone structure in this knee. I'm probably going to add more detail to this knee to pull it forward. The area that I'm including the most detail is here in the torso. I'm going to do more with the head, but I don't think I'm going to finish it that much. I do need to address the hand. I haven't addressed the hand too much yet. Let's work on this area of the drawing. One thing I'm noticing here, this is subtle, but you can see that I have the line for the knee going up and to the left. But in actuality I think it's a little closer to vertical. Now, this is really important to note here that you may see things you want to change even at the end of the drawing and that's fine. As I mentioned before, everything is on the table at this point. If you see a mistake that you made or a piece of information that you want to change, don't be shy about it. It's totally fine. As you know, I worked hard at the beginning of the drawing to try to get everything in proportion and workout all the contours. But sometimes we notice things later on, that's fine. Despite our best attempts, we're sometimes going to need to change information even this late in the drawing. I'm going to start to add the subtle value on the knee. Right now I'm drawing a subtle area of value underneath the patella where it turns away from the light. Here we can see the nose of the tibia overlapping the contour for the lower section of the leg. You see a really nice indication of center light here. We get darker down here and it gets lighter as we travel up toward the light source. Actually see the muscle here just slightly curving. 11. Subtle Details: It's time to really start thinking about what it means for this drawing to be finished. Now, remember, finished does not mean that every part of the drawing is brought to the same level of completion. We can choose areas of focus. Now I've talked about pulling this leg back, letting it fade into the distance as it goes back, and pulling this knee forward. I've talked about adding more detail in this section of the torso. I've talked about adding more detail in the torso that will bring more attention to it. Now one thing we haven't yet talked about too much is what I like to call the air around the drawing. Now, a finished figure drawing that's on a pristine white surface tends to look strange. It looks like it's floating. I want to make sure that I'm adding more to this drawing. I want to bring some liveliness around the figure. Now, there are a lot of ways to do this, and the two that I like to focus on the most are based on value and gesture. Let me start with value. If you take a look at the reference photo, you can see that right here next to the breast and the ribcage, and the stomach, the background is darker. Now, this is one of the ways that we can see those parts of the body so clearly. In the drawing, we can actually start to add some value to this side of the drawing. That means when we have the light bouncing off the flesh, it will be accentuated by the darkness next to it. Now I've just started to lay in a little bit of value here, but already you can start to see that effect occurring. This is before I've even pulled out the highlights. Same thing here with the leg. Eventually, I'm going to pull out these highlights and this value next to it is going to make the leg really pop. In fact, before I go much further, I'm actually going to pull out the highlights on the leg just to make sure we can really see that impact. I'm using my kneaded eraser and I'm going to dab here to start to pull up some of the value of the leg that we drew when we added the center light. You don't just want to scrub this value out initially because it can smear the pigments. I'm going to start by gently dabbing. Now, this dabbing can also start to give this area of the body some texture. Now once I have some of the value removed, you'll see that there's still some of the pigment from the pencil on there. I can come in with my electric eraser and start to pull out even more value. At this point, I'm essentially drawing with my eraser. We can also pull up the highlight down here, closer to the knee. I can even cross hatch with that eraser just a little bit so I can again add some texture. Now I'm going to use my brush to brush away the shavings. You can start to see that highlight pulled out. I'm going to go over this area again and pull out even more pigment. Once again, I'm going to bring my brush back. Here once again, you can see I'm not just getting the information, I wanted one pass, I'm doing multiple passes. That's a very common with drawing. That it help pull this leg even more forward, I am going to emphasize this contour. Now I'm going to add even more value to this area here. I'm going to bring my kneaded eraser over. I'm going to pull out some value along the edge of the stomach here, as well as on the breast. Once I have some of that value pulled out, I'm going to come back with my electric eraser, and Pull out even more value. In particular, I'm pulling value from the upper left section of these areas of the body. This is of course because these are the areas that are facing the light source. Now, this may seem subtle to you, but I think this has really changed the drawing considerably. We can see these sections of the body really starting to pop out in ways that they weren't before. I'm going to emphasize the contour underneath some of these rounded forms just to make sure that we really offset the white. Now I think this really starts to make a difference. We also talked about emphasizing the gesture using the error around the figure. Now, this is a very different type of drawing around the figure. Remember we have this beautiful S curve for the primary action line. Now if I want to emphasize that, I may go back and actually put some lines here in the drawing that start to pull that out. I often will even mimic some of the contours in the air around the drawing just to give a sense of motion. Now again, this is very subtle. But I'm doing some lines that give a sense of rising and falling here. Now another thing I can do if I want to pull this leg back into space, and I want to increase the feeling of the air around the drawing, I'm actually going to use some shading lines and add value to this whole area here. Now again, I want my drawings to feel dynamic and energetic. I don't want them to simply be static on the page here. I like to put these extra lines in that really start to show that this drawing is more than a mirror copy of reality. I like to put lines in that emphasized gesture that imply movement. It make it feel a little electric. Now, this may not be your style, and that's fine. Of course, you are not required to add this type of information to your drawings, but I think it makes a drawing much more interesting. Now I can also add cast shadows, but I really want to make sure that the drawing is properly placed. But perhaps right here under the heel, I can start to add cast shadows. Right underneath here, I'm going to add some value. I'm going to have this value wash. You'll notice I made these lines fairly quickly. I'm essentially hatching with this side of my pencil and those lines folded right into these lines over here on the right. I'm going to add some value above the arm. Again, that's going to help set the arm off. I'm going to let these lines travel upward. You can see here I'm actually drawing right over the head and the face. That's fine. Again, I can lift these lines out later on. Now to be clear, I don't have a complete plan of what I'm doing with these lines, this is more intuitive. This feels right to me. I may knock some of these lines back later, I may not. I will likely add more. But again, I don't want the drawing just to be a figure on a plain white back. I want to start to add more visual information. Now this is also one of the reasons I don't mind some of that cloudiness that occurs as I move my hand across the paper and the pigment smears. For me this is part of finishing a drawing. It's making all of these little decisions that aren't just inside the contour of the figure, but all the way around the figure. You can notice these value lines that I've added in, they follow the gesture. I've started them up here on the head and they imply that swooping here. I've pulled them down around the edge of the body here. They follow that S curve downward toward the foot. In fact, the shape of value that's occurring almost has the same kind of curvature up and then around. Now again, this is completely subjective. This is not the right way to do this drawing, it's just how I'm handling it, because I want to make it a little more interesting than a figure on a blank white surface. Again, everything is on the table here. You'll see me starting to add some subtle detail, you'll see me drawing more anatomical information, you'll see me add value, you'll see me reinforce gesture. At this stage of the drawing I feel like I can draw much more freely. I'm erasing out highlights, but I'm always trying to keep in mind the overall gesture of the figure, and the overall light and shadow patterns. I don't want to lose that information. Now one thing that happens as I am continuing to draw, is these areas that I've lifted the highlights out, I will occasionally go back over and my hand will smear little more pigment over them. That's fine. I can always go back and lift them out. I tend to go through a final period where I lift out value as the very last step of the drawing. Every time I lift out value with an eraser and then accidentally smear it back in, and then lift out more, it adds texture and visual interest to the drawing. I'm going to draw the center light here in the arm, but instead of just isolating, get in between the contours, you can see that I'm actually going to pull it out past the arm. Again, this just adds some extra bit of visual interest to the drawing. Right now it almost has a bit of a windswept to look to it. Again, I'll probably knock that back at some point, but I think it's interesting for now. Here I'm going to go back in and reinstate the core shadow, to keep that really clear division of lights and darks. Remember, the core shadow edge, you want to keep that a little soft. You don't want that to be a really hard line. Going to reinforce this contour here. I'm going to use some nice dark lines here to do that. One thing you might notice is how quickly I draw these contours. Not interested in getting highly accurate contours so much as I am getting dynamic contours, and that often comes from speed. Remember, I am more than happy to sacrifice some accuracy for dynamism. We have some beautiful highlights here in the shoulders, but of course in order to pull those highlights out I need some value to do that. That's where drawing in that center light becomes so important. I'm going to go back in with my eraser. I'm going to pull out some subtle highlights here in the upper arm, deltoid is. One thing you can do is shape the eraser. If you have small areas to pull out you can actually shape your kneaded eraser into a tip. Again, dab it just to pull out some information. One thing you can do as you're watching this video is see if you can go back a bit and take a look at what these look like without the subtle bits of information that I'm adding. Then come back here so you can see the full effect of what this subtle information does for the drawing. I'm seeing these very subtle folds here, where the pectoral muscle comes in. Add those into the drawing. Can see some value here in the chest, and this triangle shape, just a little bit. I'm going to add that in subtly. Can actually see little bits of information where the pectoral muscles come off of the sternum. I think I may have drawn those a little too dark, so I'm going to bring in my kneaded eraser and lift those out just a little bit. Not much, just a little bit. Add in a little more value, just to shape some of these elements. [BACKGROUND] I'm going to come back in here and lift out just a few other areas of light. Again, at this point, I'm essentially using my electric eraser to draw with light. I can hatch, I can draw lines with it. You want to be careful while you're doing this, because as the eraser shavings build up it can make it a little difficult to see exactly what you're doing. So go gently, and then remove the eraser shavings. Again, these little changes are subtle, but hopefully, you can see the drawing is really taking on a dramatic life of its own at this point. This occurs when we start to add all of these subtle little details that pull out the anatomy. Anatomy study is very important, but it's not the only way to get this information down. You can go a long way just using your observational skills. 12. Finishing Touches: At this stage, we're really closing in on the end of this drawing, but there's still a couple of areas I need to address, in particular, the hand and the head. Let's spend some time with the hand. Now, I don't want the hand to be the focus, but we still need to address it. It still need some detail. I'm going to begin by just getting the basic shape of the hand. We can see the middle finger projecting out this way. You need to make a decision on just how much detail and information that you want to give with something like the hand. Now, I don't really want the hand to be a focal point, but I also don't want it to be so devoid of information that it looks strange in comparison with the rest of the drawing. You can see here I started off just with a basic line on the back of the hand, but after I drew that, I came back and added the knuckles for each finger. I'm just going to indicate the pointer finger here and I'm going to indicate the thumb coming out from behind, pinky here. Then the hand is in a bit of a strange position, which is one of the reasons why I don't want to call a lot of attention to it. But even this small amount of information starts to make the hand more readable. It makes more sense now. I'm going to leave the hand like this for a little bit because I'm not entirely sure how I want to finish it yet. I'm going to move over to the head. I'm going to add a little more detail here. The cheek, the eye here, the hair coming in here. I really like this strong jaw line here, so I'm going to emphasize this a little more. Some value coming in under the chin here, and that's going to help emphasize the neck coming in. I'm going to add a little value to the back of the ear, shadow here, and I'm going to add some value to the hair. But one thing I want to do is add some detail to the back of the hair line here. We can actually see the moment where the hair turns away from the light, we actually get a line of termination. On the shadow side of the head, I'm going to flip my pencil around. Again, I'm going to be using very dark lines made with a tip of the pencil. Now, in the reference photo, this looks like a pretty flat value, but I want to add just a little bit of texture back here, so I'm going to be using some individuals strokes. I'm going to add some texture to the hair here. Now, again, I'm not trying to replicate every lightened shadow shape that I'm seeing in the hair, but I just want to get a general idea of what's going on with the hair. Make sure that I leave the ear outlined. Right now, the hair is looking a little shaggy, but that's okay. I'll flip my pencil over and I'm going to add some value to the hair overall to unify it a little more. I also want to add some value to the back of the neck as it's turning away from the light, and I'm going to draw just some indications of some of the muscles in the neck. Here is the area of the sternocleidomastoid, the muscle that runs from the sternum to behind the jaw line to the platysma there, I believe. Again, not a lot of information, just enough to indicate what's going on. I'm going to emphasize the lateral end of the clavicle here, and the trapezius muscle as it runs up toward the neck. While I'm here, I'm going to show a little bit of shadow underneath the clavicle, just to make sure the clavicle stands out just a little more. Again, I'm not going to complete the head out. I don't think I'm going to take it much further than this. But one of the things I like to do in a drawing is take it to some level of completion, but then move to a different part of the drawing and come back to it to see what I really want to do with it. Getting some distance from something you've drawn and coming back to it with fresh eyes is a very powerful way to figure out where you want to take it. Is it done? What does it need to be finished? Now, let's go back to the hand. I know I want to emphasize the index finger here. Right underneath the index finger, we have the middle finger projecting out. Indicate that subtly here. We have the ring finger, and again, I don't want to get too caught up drawing individual fingers, but this is starting to come out here. I'm going to give a little more detail to the palm area of the hand, and that's going to help the hand read a little better. Again, this hand is in a bit of an awkward position. This may be enough. I'm not entirely happy with how the hand is reading yet, but again, I might want to get a bit of distance and come back to it. I do want to add some additional value in this arm. I'm going to come back and re-emphasize the core shadow. I'm going to add a little more width to the underside of the arm. I think it's getting a little thin there, and I'm going to add some value on the underside of the forearm here, at the tendons for the flexors on the underside of the forearm here and here. Let me take my electric eraser, come back and pull out some of the highlights here. This one on the bicep. I'm going to do some hatching here, and I'm also going to use my kneaded eraser to soften that edge. One thing you can see here with the electric eraser, we get a harder shadow edge, and that's not necessarily what we want. Just soften that edge here. I'm going to use the electric eraser again for a nice highlight coming down the pectoral muscle. One thing I often do at this stage is just go around the drawing and see what kinds of details I may have missed, and there's a lot of opportunity for subtlety at this point. I'm feeling that this drawing is very close to being finished. At this stage in the demonstration, you have seen me draw nearly every single line and stroke in this drawing. I've really tried to give you a sense of how this process looks, start to finish. You've seen me make mistakes. You've seen me correct them. You've seen me go over different parts of the body numerous times. You've seen the real process that I go through. At this stage, I'm going to get a break from this drawing. I'm going to take a few days, get away from it, and then I'm going to come back to it to see what it seems to need. Getting a break from a drawing is one of the most powerful ways you can make distinctions on what it needs to be finished. I'm going to stop it here. I'm going to put the drawing somewhere up in my studio and I'm going to pass by it every day, numerous times, and every time I do that, I'll have an opportunity to look at it and ask myself, what more does this drawing need to be finished? Now, the changes I will make will probably be very subtle, but there will be some additions and some changes. By the very end of this video, you will see the final version of this drawing. But before you do, ask yourself, what would you want to do to this drawing to finish it? What do you think it needs? What do you think is missing? Are there any aspects of this drawing that you think are maybe even to develop that you would want to knock back to some degree? Remember, this is what makes drawing an art, not just a science. It's time to step back, get some distance. I will see you back here for the final look at the finished drawing. 13. Conclusion: Now you've seen me do this demonstration, stroke by stroke. You've seen about 95 percent of the strokes that I've put into this drawing. I've tried to edit out as little as possible. So hopefully this has given you an idea of what the real drawing process looks like from start to finish. After the camera turned off, as you know, I took some time away from the drawing. This allows me to view it with fresh eyes and to get a better sense of how to finish the drawing. Now, let's take a look at the finished drawing. One thing I always want students to keep in mind is that when we draw, we are organizing pigment on a flat surface. If done with care and precision, we can create the illusion of a living figure. By leaving areas of the drawing unfinished, we allow the viewer to participate in creating that illusion. The viewer must work with the drawing to create the illusion of muscle, flesh, bone, and life. A photorealistic drawing, although impressive, closes the viewer out. The viewer becomes a mere bystander. But a drawing that leaves parts of the figure unfinished, implied rather than stated, invites the viewer to be a collaborator in the drawing process. Now this drawing is actually quite a bit more finished than most of my figure drawings, but I wanted to give you a sense of how to create more finished work. One thing I'd like you to notice is that this drawing has amplified the curves of the contours. My goal here is not merely to replicate what I see, but to create something that seems more interesting, energetic, and dynamic than reality. You can also see this strategy in the mid tones on the lit side of the figure, where I have drawn the subtle shifts in value with more contrast than they actually appear in the reference photo. Once again, I am using reality as a starting point, but adding more drama and dynamism to the drawing. Now let's shift our attention to the lines and marks around the figure. What I like to refer to as the air around the figure. Notice how these lines and marks add a sense of energy and vibrancy to the drawing. We don't want to create figures that float in a void of white. Notice how the marks for the cast shadow of the figure merge with the more atmospheric lines surrounding the figure. It can be a challenge to know when a drawing is truly finished. It's important to remember that drawing is a form of communication. A drawing of the figure is a way to connect with a viewer, to share with them what we think is most compelling about a pose. Once you've shared with your viewer what you think is fascinating, interesting, or compelling, the drawing can be finished. You're not required to share every detail about the figure with your viewers. But this is how I think about drawing. The important thing is for you to figure out what's important to you in your figure drawings and what finished means to you. Now that you've seen this process and you've seen the finished drawing, One thing I encourage you to do is ask yourself, what would you have done differently? What do you like about my interpretation? What would you do if you had it your way? Where would you put the areas of focus? What would you have wanted more expressive or less expressive? In addition to being a science, figure drawing is also an expressive and creative art form. There's a lot of room for interpretation, expression, and creativity, in figure drawing. Now that you've seen me go through this process, I want you to draw your own interpretation of this pose. Get your materials, get set up, and use this reference photo to do your own drawing. Remember, your goal is not to copy my drawing stroke for stroke, your goal is to take the processes that you've learned to create your own interpretation. You want to start off with a dynamic and expressive gesture drawing. Then you want to measure that gesture drawing to make sure that its proportions are believable. Next, you want to flesh out the drawing using descriptive line quality while prioritizing volume. Finally, you want to render the light and shadow on the figure. Now I'd love to see your drawing. If you're taking this course on a platform that allows you to submit your work, please do. I'm happy to take a look at it. As always, thank you so much for spending your valuable time with me. It is an absolute honor and privilege to be able to share my knowledge and experience with you. Thank you. Well, I'm excited for you to get drawing, and I hope to see you in other courses.