Introduction

Below are the experiences that shaped how I came to understand drawing the figure.

Cadaver Drawing

I had the opportunity to visit the Philadelphia Medical College and sketch the cadavers. Ten people were invited. As the doctor explained the history of the cadavers and the etiquette we should follow, he began to unzip the bag. I wanted to ask to see the hand — a few years earlier I had severed the tendons in my right hand in Paris, and it took close to a year to regain function. Before I had the chance, another student asked, “Can I see where the appendix is?” Everyone wanted to see the thing that had given them trouble. To understand it. Drawing can be a medium for thought and understanding. We were all invited back a second day to sketch.

On the second day I was the only person to return. I couldn’t believe the others were going to miss this quintessential da Vinci experience. The doctor said, “I have some computer work to do. Do you mind if I just leave you here?” Over the next two days what resonated was how useful an understanding of anatomy is — how it lets you replicate the forms of the figure and see how the parts fit and relate to the whole. Drawing the human figure can be overwhelming, because it asks for a foundation of drawing skill and specific anatomical knowledge at the same time. After this experience I began to study anatomy, and that study has greatly improved my figure drawings. Here are some of the drawings I made in that cold and odorous room.

Sculpture

The Fleisher Art Memorial in Philadelphia has been around since 1898 and has an inspired community of artists, offering classes that run from very reasonable to free. I learned some of my best figure drawing lessons there by not drawing at all, but sculpting the figure. Moving around the model to catch the likeness in 360°, I began to understand the insertion points and to see them as a series of convexities rather than concavities. A fixed point of view is useful in drawing, but it should be thought of as a place to return to after gathering information about the form.

Fleisher also has a casting room, where I cast several pieces including this self-portrait.

Drawing the Terra Cotta Warriors

In China I went to Xi’an to see the Terra Cotta Warriors. By the time I arrived I was exhausted from navigating the bus stops, and even though I knew this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, I just wasn’t appreciating it. I was giving them the Chevy Chase treatment. Fortunately I had my sketchbook. By willing myself to start drawing I began to slow down and really look at the individual faces, and to think that they had been individuals like me. I found some empathy for the models, and I began to notice the postures of the different figures and the subtle differences among them. The drawings were below most standards of excellence, or even adequacy, and they no longer exist. I wish I had kept them — not because they were good, but because the goal was never to make a drawing to be admired. It was to strengthen my observation and better understand what I was seeing.

École des Beaux-Arts

The École des Beaux-Arts established a systematic approach to representing the figure realistically. The approach was formulaic, from the prescribed subject matter of Greek mythology to the structure of competing and presenting finished work. The lessons learned over centuries are evident throughout the school’s history, and if your goal is to represent the figure as realistically as possible, there was nowhere better to study. But the more I looked at these works — technically astonishing as they are — the more the formula began to overwhelm the experience, and I found myself wanting artists who approached the figure with different goals, like Picasso and Giacometti. There are viable alternative goals for artists working with the figure, though it’s worth remembering that most of the artists we know for expression and abstraction were first schooled in the fundamentals, with a firm grasp of anatomical structure and the history of figure drawing.

Syllabus

Individualized instruction in increasingly complex formal and expressive problems in drawing.

Materials

Newsprint drawing pad, 24 × 36 in. · Conte crayon #3 · Charcoal

Required reading

Suggested reading

Course objectives

• Represent the figure in two-dimensional drawings
• Develop volumetric emphasis with light and shade
• Develop a knowledge and use of contour studies
• Develop an understanding of gestural drawing
• Develop the positive and negative areas of a drawing
• Develop the use of perspective and foreshortening
• Develop a feeling for true anatomical structure
• Develop an understanding of modeling techniques

Studio Schedule

The studio schedule may change to accommodate demonstrations, critiques, and the needs of the model. As the course progresses, poses gradually become longer, so that students move from capturing gesture and movement to constructing, observing, revising, and developing sustained figure drawings. For longer drawings the model takes regular breaks and then returns to the same pose.

Proportions of the Human Figure

Many artists and schools have tried to establish ideal proportions for drawing the figure, despite how much individuals vary. Knowing these systems helps in two ways: pre-established proportions can be used to fit the figure to the page, and a proportional model gives you a standard to compare against the figure you’re drawing — or to accommodate the figure to, if that’s the goal.

The Skeleton

Think of it as the scaffolding.

The skeleton is the structure everything else hangs from. Like the frame of a building, it establishes height, proportion, direction, and where things can bend. When drawing the figure, imagine that structure underneath the surface. Ask where the rigid pieces are, where the hinges are, and how the weight is being supported. The skeleton helps you see through the body rather than simply drawing its outside edge.

The Muscles

Think of them as overlapping straps, ropes and cushions stretched over the scaffolding.

Muscles do not fill the body evenly. They pull from one place to another, wrapping around bones and overlapping one another. Some feel like straps, some like cables, some like flattened sheets, others like soft cushions. Instead of memorizing every anatomical name, look for what each muscle seems to be doing. What is it connecting? Which direction is it pulling? What simple object does its shape remind you of?

The Torso

Think of it as two containers connected by a flexible column.

Imagine the rib cage as an egg or barrel and the pelvis as a bowl. The spine connects them but does not lock them together — each container can tilt, turn, or lean in a different direction. Before drawing the outside contour of the torso, find these two masses. Which way is the rib cage turning? Which way is the pelvis tipping? What is happening in the space between them? This makes the torso feel constructed rather than outlined.

The Hand

Think of it as punctuation at the end of the arm.

The hand can finish the gesture like a period, point like an exclamation mark, curl into a question, or quietly continue the movement of the arm. Structurally, start with the block: the palm is a flexible block with fingers growing out of one end. The fingers are not five separate sticks — think of them as a fan that can open, close, curl, and overlap. Their individual differences come later.

The Foot

Think of it as a wedge that becomes a bridge.

From the outside, the foot acts like a wedge carrying the weight of the leg forward onto the ground. Underneath, it behaves more like a bridge: one side bears against the ground while the inside rises into an arch. Think first about where the weight enters through the ankle, where the foot contacts the floor, and where it lifts away. The toes grow out of that larger structure rather than being added as five little shapes.

Contours

Think of it as the edge where the form turns away from you.

An outline is the shape a figure cuts against the background. A contour is something else, and the difference is the whole lesson. An outline traces a silhouette. A contour reports what a surface is doing in space — rising over a shoulder, dropping into a hollow, wrapping around a thigh and disappearing. The two lines often land in the same place on the page, but they come from opposite kinds of looking, and a drawing made of outlines stays flat no matter how accurate it is.

Draw slowly. Move the pencil at the speed your eye moves across the form, not faster. Let the line thicken where the form turns sharply toward you and thin where it turns gently, because a line that varies is already describing volume before any shading happens.

Cross-contours run across the form rather than along its edge, like the contour lines on a topographic map. They are not meant to be kept in the finished drawing. They are a way of proving to yourself that you know which direction a surface is facing.

Planar Drawing and Cubism

Think of it as the figure built out of boxes.

Luca Cambiaso was drawing figures as stacks of cubes in the 1500s, three centuries before Cubism. That is worth sitting with, because it tells you what the device is actually for. Reducing an arm to a box was never about breaking the figure apart. It was about holding it together. A box has faces, and a face points in a direction, and once you know which direction a surface faces you know how light will fall on it. Planar drawing is what makes shading a decision rather than a guess.

Squint at the figure and look for the largest plane changes first — the front of the thigh against its side, the top of the shoulder against its front. Draw those as flat facets, even where the real form is round. You can soften them afterward. Rounding a form you have understood is easy; finding structure inside a form you have already smoothed is not.

When the Cubists took up the same vocabulary they used it for the opposite purpose: not to fix a form in space but to show several views of it at once. Same device, reversed intention.

Composition: How Are You Using the Page?

Think of the page as part of the drawing, not the place where the drawing happens.

Where the figure sits on the sheet is a decision, and it gets made whether or not you make it deliberately. A figure centered with even margins reads as neutral, and often a little inert. The same figure set high on the page gains weight beneath it. Cropped at the edge, it implies a world continuing past the paper. None of these is correct. But arriving at one by accident is different from choosing it.

Ask two questions before the first mark. How much of the page will the figure occupy? And what is the empty space doing? The shapes between the limbs and around the body are as drawable as the body itself, and comparing those shapes against the model is one of the fastest ways to catch an error in proportion — easier, often, than measuring the figure directly, because you have no expectations about what a gap between an arm and a rib cage should look like.

The drawings below are worth studying for placement alone. Look at where each artist let the figure meet the edge of the sheet, and what they left empty.