What are the fundamentals of human figure drawing? How to improve in each of them?

Question

I'm trying to break down what skills I need to develop to draw a realistic human figure.At the moment I got: 1. **Gesture** I have no good idea on how to exercise this, I mean, I have no good way to know if I'm doing gestures correctly and if I'm improving. 2. **Finding Forms** That is, drawing the figure using spheres, boxes and other volumes. Easy to self test, You just have to look to the drawings and see if they somehow match the original subject. 3. **Perspective** Starting to read and exercise this book http://www.amazon.co.uk/Perspective-Made-Easy-Dover-Instruction/dp/0486404730/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1340813163&sr=1-1 4. **Values** Again, I don't know a good way on how to improve this skill 5. **Anatomy** How can you know you're improving your anatomy? Am I missing any fundamental? Please give in your answer specific exercices on how to improve any of this skills.

Answer 1

Hey there!

It sounds like you’re already gathering some really useful fundamental knowledge! My formal arts education was heavily based around the figure, and in my experience the best way to start learning to draw the figure is through learning basic anatomical proportions and yes, capturing gestures. Even though every body is different, most human figures tend to follow the same rules of proportions and scaling using the size of the head as a basic unit of measure. For example, the average male figure is about 8 heads tall, whereas a female figure might be closer to 7 or 7.5 heads tall. Learning to measure your figures through one standard and observable unit of measure is really helpful in making sure your proportions are correct.

Gesture can mean a lot of things in visual art, but what it typically boils down to is the general “essence” or “quick movement” of a shape or form. It’s not a fully rendered drawing, but rather a quick sketch capturing the movement or key components of a form. Over time you’ll develop your own style of gesture drawing, but an easy one to start out with is the “Disney” method of gesture drawing—to represent the head of a figure, quickly draw a circle or oval. Then, paying attention to what the rest of the body is doing (is it twisting, bending, curving?), draw one line extending down from the head shape, following the movement of the body. This body represents the movement of the spine. Once you get good at capturing spinal movement, you can then begin to add more features, like the hip and shoulder lines. If the spine bends to the right, do the shoulders and hips stay parallel, or to they tilt to accommodate the weight of the body (hint: they tilt!). When you add the hip and shoulder lines, make sure you are measuring how many “heads” down they are from the bottom of the chin! After hips and shoulders, maybe you’ll want to start adding more lines to represent the arms and legs, and then after that, you can begin to build the contours of the body around the gestural “skeleton” that you’ve drawn.

This is all just the foundations of figure drawing, but the best place to begin to avoid getting overwhelmed. I would also really recommend getting a figure drawing book. This is one I recommend: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1631590650/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=conartemp-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=1631590650&linkId=e4c1b3c822e80bbd6e7a15b9bdb08339

Figure drawing is such an amazing method of artmaking, it’s great that you’re making efforts to learn by yourself! Hope this helped, and best of luck!