Drawing Human Figure

In my previous article about Drawing human face, I explain ways to sketch and correct the proportions of heads. Now, I am going to tell a little explanation of how to draw human.  Figure drawing is one of the most difficult subjects in art. Human being has standard proportion and we all know that. Slight mistakes in sketching face, hands or legs will easily tell that the drawing has drawbacks. I have been practicing drawing human figure for years yet I still feel that I need more practice to improve my drawing skills. I like drawing women. Women are natural beauty that we can explore from every angle of drawings using dry media such as pencil, charcoal or wet media such as oil and watercolor.

 For example, when drawing face, I prefer to start from thin line sketches that depict the face of a girl before I color the face with Derwent watercolor pencil. The quality of a drawing does not always have to be the same as the quality of a photograph. Artist has other ways to deliver the natural beauty of a girl in the form of lines of pencils on paper.

When drawing human figures in groups, first, I need to identify the vocal points of the subjects that I want to draw or paint. Then I will only make sketches of them based on basic shapes (rectangle, circle, oval). When the distance and proportion of the basic shapes have been obtained and corrected the next step will be drawing the shapes of human figures within the basic shapes that I have outlined.

You might not understand my explanation. Well, if you really are serious in studying figure drawing, I suggest that you read a book entitled: Advanced Drawing Skills - A Course in Artistic Excellence.
Inside the book, it says that when we see a subject that we want to draw, a beautiful girl lying on her bed, we must ask to ourselves, "what we see?" As drawing artist, we must see a rectangle, a cirle, a triangle or oval. That should be the answer, not a sleeping beauty. So, what we draw is the basic shapes. When the basic shapes have been traced, we can easily draw the beautiful girl sleeping on her bed with perfect proportion. Before you read the book that I mentioned above, I recommend that you read The Fundamentals of Drawing by the same author Barrington Barber.

I hope that this simple explanation will be able to encourage you to explore the fascinating world of figure drawing and explore the beauty of human figure.by Charles Roring

 Also read: Drawing Dolphins