Your First Figure Drawing: Draw A Pose With No Experience Needed

1. Welcome!: Artists, are you interested in learning figure drawing? Drawing me in this class where we create a sketch together step by step. This class is beginner friendly because it requires no prior knowledge or practice, which means even if you've never created a figure sketch before, you can definitely take this course. I'm Victoria and I'm an artist and teacher here on Skillshare. I spend most of my time drawing realistic subjects such as humans, animals, and landscapes, and of course, I also love to draw figures. What of the technique that I show you today, you will be able to create all figure pross no matter how complicated. The first lesson, we start with the head. We begin by estimating the size of it and simplify the head by using basic shapes to outline it. Next, we move onto the torso. First, we compare where the shoulders begin relative to the head. Then we estimate the remaining torso details. In the third lesson, we move on to the legs. This is my favorite lesson because I really like the technique we use to create the legs. First, we draw a line through the middle of the upper and lower legs. Starting with a line helps us estimate the poles and length of the legs. Then all we do is create the outlines around the legs. Finally, using the same technique, we create the arms and finish off by going over our entire sketch and darkening the lines we want to bring out. Each section of the class takes about 10 minutes to complete. The entire process will be broken down into smaller, manageable steps, and I will guide you from the first line down to the very last. I am beyond excited to share this technique with you. I use this method for all of my figured drawings, so I hope you will find it useful as well. I cannot wait for you to doing inoay's class, so let's get started and create some art together. 2. Head: Hi students, I am so happy that you decided to join me in this class. I'm very excited that you're here. I hope it's going to be fun and also useful for you. So let's get started. So I quickly would like to tell you a little bit about the materials. There's really not that much to it. All you need is a pencil and paper. I choose to just drove a color pencil. I'm not scared about erasing because when they draw, I just draw very lightly. And if I'm unhappy with a line, I just ignore it, and the ones that I'm happy with, I make them a little bit darker. And then I think it also looks a bit cooler when you use color pencils. So that's my pencil of choice, but feel free to use graphite, anything that you like reading. And then yes, paper and pencil, that's all. Now let's move on to drawing the head. Now, before we even start with the head, I would like to show you a few tricks. The first thing that I do whenever I draw any figure drawing is I decide how tall my figure will be. Let's say that I want the head of my subject to be here, and I want the legs, the bottom of the feet to be here. Now, the reason why I create these lines is for two things. The first one is that if we start drawing the head over here, by the time we get to the bottom of the feet, we could find that we just run out of room on the page. This just gives us a little bit of space just in case we go over. Now, also this line is if you don't met it, exactly, it's completely fine. But if you do go over it, then you have a little room for error over here. Then the second reason why I do this is because it helps me visualize my figure once I already have the height, the intended height in here. I can start to imagine what my figure will look like now that I've established the height. I like to describe this technique as a puzzle. I start off by drawing one thing, so I started off by drawing these lines, and I'm just going to assume that they are correct and I'm going to aim to make my figure this tool. Now that we have the height, we are going to use the height as a reference point for things going forward. Now this will make sense as we go through the technique, but I'm trying to explain it already at this stage. This is step one, s, two reasons, two reasons one because it gives us room fore and second reason. Um, is because it just helps us visualize the pose already within those lines. Now, the next thing that I do. Again, I also do this with every single figure drawing is I try to estimate exactly where the middle between these two would be. I say it would be about here. I hope this is right. I'm looking at the paper and angle, but from my perspective, it looks like it would be about here, so I'm going to make this line very, very light. Top of the head, bottom of the feet, and the middle. Yeah, we don't want this to be too dark because this is not going to be a part of the figure in the end, but we want to be able to see it. You might wonder why am I doing this? The reason why I'm doing this is because when you have a figure standing straight like this lady, of course, this doesn't apply if you're taking the picture from the top or if the person has their legs folded, if they're sitting in the chair, things like this, it doesn't apply. But when the figure is standing straight, this line tends to be on the hips. I am going to now find exactly where this line is on the reference photo. If we draw a line, we'll find that it's like at the bottom of the hips, which checks out in our situation as well. Now we know that between this line and this line, we're going to have to fit our torso and everything above the torso chest, head, and then right below this line is where the legs are going to go. Again, it just helps you break up the distance. Also another thing is that I feel like it's easier to estimate a distance that's shorter. For example, it's much easier for you to be able to see between here and here, how many inches that would be. That would be about 2 ". But if I draw a line from here all the way to the other side of the paper, Then you might still guess with some accuracy, but it's not going to be as precise as a shorter distance. This just makes it easier for us to measure everything to make sure that the proportions are exact or as exact as they can be when you're still eyeballing things. Now we can actually start drawing the head. Now, as I said, this is a puzzle. I'm going to ignore this last line for now. I'm just going to focus in between here and here. We're going to create everything between these two lines and then The legs once this is done. Now I'm going to try to think, where should the head be? Should the head be over here, should it be like this? I'm trying to find exactly where the position of the head should be. Between this line and this line, I try to imagine how many heads would I be able to fit between here and here. Again, this is us measuring the distances. Now, in a proportional body that's standing straight, as I said, not from the top, not sitting down, just like standing straight in a normal straight pose from a front angle. You're going to be able typically to fit about three, 3.5 heads between here and the hips. Of course, there's always a little bit room for error, so we still have to check. I think in this situation, we are going to be able to fit about 3.5, maybe even slightly over that, about 3.5 heads between here and here. Now we're going to draw a little fractions in between here and here, we're going to try to divide it into 3.5. I have one, two, 3.5. That seems about right. One, two, three, and a half. Maybe it's a little bit bigger than a half, but it's fine. Between here and here is going to be a head. Now that I have the height, I can also roughly estimate the width of the head. The head is going to be just again, we're estimating, it's not exactly going to be perfect, but it's going to be very, very close to the reference. Now that I've done the height, I can see the width of the face alone would be about this wide. Now that we have the width, we can just draw in the very simplified shape of the head. I can see her draw line is something like this. She looks like a doll, I made this image using AI because I didn't want to use a picture from the Internet, and she looks like a doll, so my apologies. But we won't be drawing the face anyway. I'm just simplifying the shape. I can see I can see two lines one down and then back up, and then a subtle line up. I'm trying to keep my lines light for now because when we go in with the details, we're going to make all of these little curves on a cheek bone on her draw line, we're going to make them a bit more precise. For now, we'll just keep everything light because we're still going to be going over this and those lines are guessing right now, they're not too accurate at this point. We've got one here, and then Now, in this class, we're not going to be drawing the facial features. It's tough to get very good facial features on the scale so small. We're just going to create lines just to show the viewer which direction the face is looking in. It's looking a little bit to the side like this. Also her eyes are about here and this you can immediately see now that I've got those two lines, the second line is right through the middle of her eyes. Now that we've got these two lines, it just immediately gives more information about the head. Something about this, I don't know, it's like a magic trick. So, here's our head. I know I'm looking crazy right now, but it's good enough. So now that we've got the rough shape, we can go ahead and be a little bit more precise with our line work. I guess add all the little curves we've missed. We are just tracing around the outlines of the head. So that's pretty much all we'll do for the head. We'll just draw the hair and then we'll move straight onto the Torso. So we'll do bit by bit. So hopefully, we'll learn gradually, and it won't be too overwhelming of a process. Now I'm just trying to see how wide is the hair. I'm looking for example, at the edge of her hair over here and the edge of her face. I'm just trying to gauge that again. It's like the hair is not so important because she can have puffer hair. But still, it's good practice. We'll try to get everything exactly as it is in the reference. And then we'll I guess we'll draw the rest of the hair later when we do the torso because her hair is falling over it and it's falling over the arms, so maybe we'll just finish of the hair in the end. But we just want to get the actual shape now. So the top of her hair over here. This is good enough for her head. How about we give her a neck to? I'm looking at where the neck comes out. Trying to look at the length of the neck to. It seems to be about here. So now the head is done, we are ready to move on to the. I will see you in a second. 3. Torso: Welcome back, we're ready to do the tool cell. Now we can begin by I think I actually might have made her neck a little bit too long. I'm just going to bring this arch up a tiny bit, and we can begin by just drawing the shoulders in. I'm not going to draw the arms. The arms will do at the end, but we'll draw the shape, just the top of the shoulders, and I'm trying to see how far out the shoulder goes. We'll complete it in a second. But so far I can see this is roughly the curve of her shoulder. Then on this side, it's more of a shadow, but It goes down like this. The first thing we can do is we need to know that the shoulders need to be in line. It looks like her shoulder on the right side, it's higher because she's got arm up on her hip, so the shoulder is going up a little bit. But if you draw a line, it would be something like this. On this line, she's going to have her co bone, so you can do a very faint line for that. Then we'll just finish of the curve of this shoulder. And we can complete her hair while we're at it. And then her hair is actually falling over her shoulder on this side. So just draw the shape of the shadow. It goes straight down. So now you're just looking at the angles, okay? Now, the next thing that I would like to do is draw the top of her sports bra. You can compare the angle of the sport spur to something. Find something that you can use as a reference point. For example, if we look at the collarbones, the top of her sport sp is in line. It's parallel to her collarbones. Of course, it covers, but if it was a straight line, it would be parallel. I'm trying to see how much space is there between the collar bones and this. We'll find a point. For example, I'm looking at her neck. It looks like her neck is a similar height between the bottom of her chin and the top of he collarbones. It looks like a similar distance to the top of the collar bones and the bottom of her sports bras, something like this. And then I'm just following the angle of her strap. This part is obstructed. But it's something like this. Her hair is pulling over it so we can't see. This is the top of her bra. Now I'm already seeing that this line that we made in the middle, it's going to be slightly off. It's good that we gave ourselves some space at the bottom, because I will personally definitely exceed that which happens a lot, that's. Now, it looks like the the height of he is about the same as between here and here again. It looks like you can divide it into one, two, and three. It's all about a similar distance, and also Her sports bra, you want to get the curvature g as well. Now I'm trying to see because drawing the angle and the height, we can already estimate that, but how do we know how far wide we have to go? I'm looking, for example, on this left side, we can see that where the bottom of her bra ends, it's more or less in line with this. If you had a straight line, imagine you have a grid over the image. Then this straight line would touch both this area and this area. I need to keep going until those two areas would be roughly in line. Would be one side, and then the other side will do the same thing. We're comparing this right side. It looks like maybe it would be in line with the top of a spaghetti strap. If you do a line going all the way down. Maybe a tiny bit to the right of that about here would be the other end of a top. Then we'll complete the shape. It's not exactly a straight line, it curves a tiny bit. Okay. Now I'll just draw this little piece of right underneath her arm pit, and then we'll leave the arms. We're not going to complete the arms just now, we'll leave those, but we'll just complete the rest of hers. Now I'm just looking at angles. So I can see almost like two lines on her stomach. One goes down just a tiny bit. And then it curves. It's very subtle how it curves. It goes down like this. And then we can connect. Her shorts. I'm trying to see because now her body kind of curves. She's got a bend at her back. And then so if I'm looking at this line on the top of her, I'm trying to see where the angle changes direction. So it's about here like this. Okay. Maybe I should have even gone a little bit further. The last thing we'll do is we'll draw her shorts. Now I'm trying to estimate how much distance is there between here and her crotch. It's definitely going to be taller than this distance here. Maybe it's actually similar to this distance. I'm going to try to take this and use it as a reference point. It looks like the crotch would end about here. It looks like it would be pretty parallel to this line here. Maybe like a tiny bit to the right of that because her body's turning. So like this. And then very simple line. Now, her hips go out, of course, so it's going to be a line like this. Basically, you're just trying to use as much as you can from what you've already done to compare everything else to it. You don't really need to understand anatomy to do this. What you just have to be good at is measuring things. Then for example, I measured where this should be, and then knowing this, I can start to visualize the rest of the hips. That's the technique. You sing as much as you can and then you're filling out the rest of the information. I'm looking roughly at the width of this. This is so small that I don't really need to compare it to anything. I can just eyeball it. Then it looks like the top of shorts right here at the bottom. It looks like on the reference point, like it's in the middle. Between here and here, if you were to draw a straight line, it would be in the middle. This right side, do you see what I mean, this point right here. It would be exactly in the middle. That's what I'm trying to get. Now I'm going to draw a line a curve rather. I think I drew the head too big right in the beginning, and it totally threw off this line here in the middle, but that's okay. As long as we're comparing everything to what we've already done, that's good. But this is still a great reference point to have nonetheless. This side. Now this part of shorts, if we draw a straight line, it's more or less in line with this point. This part of her shorts is a little bit higher than this, and I think this is going to be a tiny bit higher as well. But it's more or less in line. And then that curve looks a bit like a straight line, but there's a tiny curve going through it. Looks like this. Now we can complete the details. We can make some of our lines stronger once you're happy with how everything's looking. Because I'm also learning to draw little details, little bows. Okay. So now, this is all tools are done. So the next thing that we're going to do is throw all the legs, so I will see you in this and 4. Legs: So now we are ready to move on to the legs. My technique for legs is actually a very similar technique that we're going to be using for the arms. Essentially, what we do, it's very simple. We imagine that we can almost x ray the legs, so we look for the middle of the leg. The long bone in the thighs and then the long bone in the lower leg in the cuff. We'll do a little x ray and we'll just draw a line representing where that bone would be. Yes, ignore this line. I've definitely gone over my estimated figure bottom. But anyway, this is going to be about the height for the knee. You can see this is roughly the middle of the leg and the middle of the leg would be to the left of this area here. This is how you maintain your proportions, you just look back and you see if you had lines where those lines would reach. This would be this leg and then the right leg, knees are going to be similar. Maybe this leg is slightly bent and she's sticking out. The knee looks like it goes a tiny bit lower. And it's at an angle like this. Her legs are also parallel. They are slightly. This one goes slightly more to the right, just slightly there. We'll create those two lines and that's the top half of our legs, and then the bottom half, we'll leave a gap slightly for the knee. And you'll see where we're going with this in a second. Now, this lower leg, it starts to angle a little bit more in a different direction. It goes a little bit straight. It doesn't go entirely straight, but something like this, perhaps. Almost straight down, but not quite. However, this one, it angles even more towards the right. You see, it's not a continuous line. Sometimes the angles, even if a leg is straight, those angles may vary. You have to look for this carefully, and you're drawing this line just up to the angles. You see it's very good that we use this line here in the beginning because now I'm going to be approaching the edge of my paper, but we still have a bit of room, so that was good, even though it didn't work out and our figure didn't end here. We still have a tour of space. So you can now slightly see where her legs would be just looking at this. Now, it's very easy. All you have to do is just create the outlines around those bones, just the outlines of her legs. This is exactly in the middle. Now look, you're going to have the thigh. It's going to go, it's pretty curvy, all the way down until we get to above the knee. This is the gap for the knee. You can see goes down like this, and then this part of the leg, you can see the little curve. And then it curves back. Now, what you want to do with the legs is that in general, they narrow as they go down. Sometimes I see, people would have the leg thickness remain the same throughout, but that's not entirely accurate. You really want to make sure that you, you keep narrowing as you go down. That's of course not consistent because for example, here at the knees, it's a little bit slimmer than it would be at the calf muscle. Then we go down. Then there's straight line, quite, but almost Then we go back down. And you can see there's a nice curve here at the bottom of the leg. Then we have the We'll actually draw the feet in a second and draw the other leg. You can see this looks pretty accurate. Now we'll do this next one. Yes, her knee is bent, which means that this thigh is going to be slightly closer to the camera. That's why this leg appears a little bit longer. Keep that in mind. You don't have to start at the top and then keep going down. You can just help yourself. Maybe you want to create this bump above the knee first. Okay. And now the lower leg. We've got the name. And then it narrows a lot when it gets to the ankles. And that's the legs and now we'll quickly do the feet. For the feet, you can start off by blocking in the shape. You can see it first just goes down and then above that, you have the ankle. You almost have you almost have those two parallel lines over here, and then you have the heel. Then something like this. It starts off as a very simple shape, and then you don't need to draw the toes because that would be really tough to get accurately because that would drawing is in such a small scale. But you can just create those little bumps in there. And then you can go ahead and reinforce the leg, the lines you like. And then this other leg. This one's facing forward a bit more, so you can see both sides of the ankle. Angles are very tricky to get because they're very small bumps, so you don't want to make them look too crazy. We can see that this foot. It's again a very similar shape, but you can see it widens because we are looking at the foot from the front now. So you can maintain that angle goes down on the side, like this. Let me have foot and that's it. You can also just outline the big toe if you want, or you don't have to do anything. Then we will reinforce again the outlines that we are happy with. Maybe enhance some bumps here on the outlines if you haven't. You can also create some shadows on the knees, some simple lines to show some detail. And that's it. That's your legs done. I hope this was easy to follow, and now we will move on to the arms. 5. Arms: Now time for the arms, and the technique that we use for this is very similar to the technique that we used for the g. Again, we begin by x raying the arm. We look for the bone that would run right through the middle of the arm. For example, let's start with this one, this one is very, very close to her body. You just imagine that you're basically drawing a line right through the middle of her body. You can see that her elbow reaches maybe that alfway at the height of her stomach. I would say it goes to about here, and then her forearm begins here. You want to just save a very small gap at the elbow and you want to go down all the way to the wrist, which I guess is just beyond the shorts. There's two lines, and we can't see some of the shoulder because it's obstructed by the hair. We'll just go as far up as we can see, and then we'll do the same for this arm. Her arm is raised, she's resting on her hip, her elbow is going to be raised as well. Her elbow, if we imagine a line connecting the elbow to around her stomach, it would be somewhere about here, I suppose. This would be roughly the height of her elbow and how far out would it go? Maybe if you connect. If you create a straight line from this part of her leg all the way to the elbow. It would be about here. Maybe her elbow would go like this. And then it goes back down to her shorts. There's a x ray done, and that it's very simple, we just do what we did to wave the legs, so we just create the outlines. It's more or less a straight line going down. It has a small curve on it like this. And then her hair continues. I'll just finish off her hair over here because it's hard to imagine the arm without the hair on top of it. And for her hand, you just want to create a simple outline. Something similar to what we did with the feet. We don't need to draw the individual fingers, but just the shape. And then we have this u Mm. And then this had goes up slightly. And back down. And now we're just going to reinforce all the lines that we want to keep. Okay, so this is how you draw the figure. I hope you enjoyed. I hope this was an easy to follow, and I hope you're able to create it without using anatomy. Thank you for watching, and I will see you in the. 6. Final Project! : Congratulations on gettingthrough the lessons. Figure drawing is one of the more complicated subjects, so you should really be pleased with yourself. I really, really hope that this technique worked for you. If this was your first time trying figure drawing, have a go at creating other poses using different photo references, using the same technique that we learned today, and you will get better and better. If you did enjoy this class, I would really appreciate a positive review because this would help me get my class out there and find more students. I would really love to see a figure drawing, so please upload them as a class project, and I would love to give you feedback. If you are interested in taking this technique further, I have another figure drawing class where we did a seven figures in seven days challenge. We start with a very simple pose, and the figures slowly increase in difficulty as the challenge goes on. This class is great if you are trying to get better at figure drawing because you have something new to practice each day. That is all for me. I really cannot wait to see your art. Thank you so much for following along and happy creat.