Figure Drawing Guide

A HANDBOOK ON
Figure Drawing 101
BY KOKONO MATSUKAWA
DLROW EHT NI SENILPICSID TSEDRAH EHT FO ENO FO SCISAB EHT OT EDIUG YSAE EHT


TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 01 Chapter 02 Chapter 03 Chapter 04
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01 GESTURE
Gesture refers to the movement between things and is not entirely limited to figure drawing. It can be applied to anything that has movement to it, such as waves, cloth, and even landscape drawings.
Detailed anatomy without gesture will look stiff and lifeless, and practicing gesture first will allow you to get used to looking at the human body in a more fluid way, and help you understand how it works. Remember that gesture is how something “feels”, rather than how you think it should look.
Gesture is not the contour of the figure, but the essence, or movement of the
figure.
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senil laminim htiw repap no tnemevom gnirutpaC


How to Draw Gesture
Key concepts to remember when drawing gesture are the CSI lines, line of action, tension of the lines, and asymmetry.
CSI lines refers to the types of lines you use while doing gesture drawings. Having anything more complicated then that will follow contour instead of distilling it down to it’s base movements like we are supposed to
The Line of Action refers to the overall direction that the figure flows in, and these can be simplified to CSI curves as well


Another concept that can help you draw gesture efficiently is the concept of relaxed and tense lines, or the amount of tension that you lines have. Using long and flowy lines indicates relaxation while sharp and jagged lines indicate action and tension. Make sure to use lines with a lot of tension in them when muscles are working or there is weight on a particular part of the body


1.
Examples of How to Draw
There are no particulrar rules or steps to take with gesture drawings, but the important thing is to find the main line of action/flow, and then add onto there by figuring out the rhythms of the gesture using the lines mentioned in the previous pages. Below is an example of a 30 second sketch
The head is always a nice landmark to start with
3.
4.
2.
As is the
curvature of the spine
Deciding the main flow of the body before the other parts is pretty important
And done!


How to Practice + Examples
The best thing that you can do when practicing gesture is limiting the time that you have to focus on detail. This forces you to draw the bare minimum, and is a common exercise in art school, called quick sketch. Often, a model poses for 30 seconds to 10 minutes, and then switches poses, but you can use online websites such as the Line of Action which gives you photos of models in timed intervals. 30 seconds are recommended for gesture at first, to help you focus on gesture over details and once you master capturing the flow of movement, you can move onto more detailed 2 minute sketches.
30 Second Sketches
Bridgeman's 50 My Own Practice Figure Drawings


2 Minute Sketch Comparison of Different Styles
A 2 minute sketch by me. It is simplified and more focused on following the flow of muscles and using edges to emphasize weight
A 2 minute sketch by Dorothy Buck, Art Students League. The sketch has a loose outline and uses repetition of lines to emphasize movement.
There are many different ways to draw gesture, and there is no "right way" to do so and is important that you find the style that fits you best.


02
THE THREE MAIN MASSES
What are the three main masses?
The three main masses of the body are the head, the ribcage, and the pelvis. The spine is what connects all the three main masses, but just by drawing the direction of the masses, we can generally tell what the figure is doing.
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namuh eht fo senil noitca dna tnemevom
niam eht pu ekam taht sessam ehT


Important Concepts
The center of gravity explains where the weight is distributed across the main masses. Although you don't need to draw them each time, it can be helpful when creating figures from imagination to help you figure out how each mass should be
arranged.
As you can see in the examples above, the three masses do not have to be arranged in a straight line for it to look balanced. The ribcages and the pelvis counterbalance each other, as seen by the green arrows on the last picture. They must be counter eachother's weights like a scale to follow the alignment of the center of gravity.
If this balance is kept, it will not look unnatural and always look balanced.


How to Draw the Three Masses
The head can be simplified into a circle shape as a substitute for the skull. Adding a jaw to the skull is optional.
At first, the rib cage can just be drawn as an oval when starting to figure out where the main masses are, but as your figure drawing develops, you will probably want more detail on the shape of the structure to add dimension to your drawings.
The first thing to do is to draw the oval shape, and to add onto that, you must find the center line of the ribcage, or the sternum. Remember that it only goes roughly halfway down the ribcage, and that it will split into the thoracic arch from there. After drawing the center line, you can draw the top plane of the ribcage, and then cut out the bottom to make it rib cage shaped.


The pelvis can be simplified into a bucket shape when drawing. It can be quite hard to draw the bucket shape at first, so try to draw the top plane of the bucket shape first, and then draw the center line down from there, to point to the direction the pelvis is facing. From there, you can use the center line as guiding lines for the side of the pelvis,
and then draw the bottom once the sides are done.
If it it still too hard to draw the ribcage, then keep it to step 2 or replace it with another shape such as a cuboid.
Connecting these two forms with a short line should suffice for now. Looking at real life figures and photos can help you figure out the length between the ribcage and
the pelvis.
Here, the ribcage and pelvis have
been drawn as a cuboid to make sense of dimensions and the line connecting them(drawn in green) is the spine


How to Practice
The best way to practice is to first become familiar with these shapes to be able to apply them to figure. From there, you can look at real life figures and try to figure out where the three masses and line of action lies.
For additional practice, you can try tracing pictures of models and figuring out where their spines and main masses are, as this can help you see what "real" figures look like
Another thing that is helpful to do is to experiment with all the methods mentioned in previous pages such as drawing them as ovals, cuiboids, and their anatomically correct shapes


03 THE LIMBS
The limbs are the arms and the legs of the human body, and describe extremities that are not connected directly to the flow of the spine like the main masses in the chapter before. The limbs can contribute to the gesture of a body, but are not usually the main “flow”.
You can see here that the main flow of the upper
body is already decided by the
three masses, but that the C curve that the
arms create adds smaller rhythms to the body as well.
sessam niam eerht eht fo
erutseg dna mhtyhr eht ot dda nac taht ydob eht fo trap laitnesse rehtona era sbmil eht


How to Draw the Limbs
Each of the limbs can be divided into two parts, with the elbow as a connective although you don’t really need to draw joints just yet. They can be simplified into cylinders without bothering yourself with the complex shapes of the muscles and bones, as they will ultimately confuse you this early in this stage, since we are only looking at the overall function of the human body now.
How to Practice
You can use the same method you used for drawing pelvis when drawing arms, since they are both cylindrical shapes. The best things you can do to practice are to start drawing the limbs with the three main masses now, and to practice drawing what you imagine the positions of the arms will be like from real life drawings. You can also try tracing, and see how that can help your prespective.




04 FORESHORETENING
As you may have already realized through your practice, having cylinders as a shape for arms and legs makes putting things into perspective much easier than if it were detailed shapes, but it can still be quite challenging to put them into perspective and make them look "right". When shapes are put in perspective, it can look as if shapes are getting bigger or smaller. This effect is called "foreshortening".
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It might be easy to draw cylinders in perspective for you, but it might be hard to figure out the exact "size" of things when drawing in perspective. Here is where
the orbit method comes in.
From there, if you draw any straight line coming from the starting point and mark where the joints would be, you can draw the arm in any perspective you would like.
The way that the orbit method works is that you find the starting point(cloured in green) for, say an arm this time, and from there, you find what the "normal" arm length would look like. After drawing that, you can draw an orbit from each of the joints(excluding the starting point), as pictured in red below.


How to Practice
It's always good to just draw the points "in orbit" as a way to practice what it could look like, and once you become familiar with the concept, you can go on to putting it on figures. Once you're comfortable enough with that, you can try to do some sketches of models and put their figures into perspective.


CLOSING
This book is nothing more than a simple introductino to figure drawing, and everybody has their own approaches to the art. My way of drawing figures is one of many, and not one you have to follow exactly if it does not match your style, however, I hope that this book has been at least somewhat insightful in your beginning journey to figure
drawing.
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