Human Figure Drawing & Painting

Comment

Comment by CALBUR on October 1, 2009 at 1:50am

Drawing by memory.
Draw very soft lines that will be the guideline for the rest of the draw. Draw tubes, circles, cylinders that indicate the hips, shoulders, head, arms, and hands. When your illustration is ready to add details like clothes, be sure to remember the figure underneath. Give a look to your illustration and adjust anything that doesn't look right. Add shadows, grays and whites. Check the small sketch to see how I started to do this draw.

Comment by mary ann wroblewski on June 26, 2009 at 8:58pm

Thisi was tried some time ago when I was teaching myself to do the human body. I made it too dramatic and am notsure if the belly bottom was in theright spot. all comments are welcomed.

Comment by C J on June 24, 2009 at 6:41pm

Hello Des, one suggestion on the portrait the women would like you to do, no matter what she says she see's herself thru her eyes. Make it complimentary. Men don't seem to care that much but women ...that is a whole different ball game and as an artist you need to know that.
CJ

Comment by Stephen on May 24, 2009 at 12:23am

What can it hurt. $3.99 shouldn't break the bank. I have lot's of different instruction books on drawing. Every once in a while when i'm thinking about a certain way i want to draw something i'll look back in one of them to see if i can pick up on something. Never hurts to have some books around.

Comment by Des Howell on May 24, 2009 at 12:20am

Comment by RickA 4 hours ago I just saw a book, marked down to $3.99 at Borders. It breaks down the human form into equations. Basically mathematical proportions of what a body should be.

Different cultures and times have various ideas about "ideal" proportions of the human body. Just think about the way the Chinese formerly bound women's feet or the tribes that stretch women's necks.

All the figures of the Ancient Egyptians were drawn in exactly the same proportions. The Ancient Greeks, on the other hand, almost caricatured the human body to depict the heroic proportions of their Gods. For example, the groove running down the backbone is much deeper than what would be considered normal in modern medicine.

Have a look at some of the figures painted when women wore corsets that pinched in their waists and pushed up their bosums. Some artists drew nudes that followed this fashion. Others deliberately painted "uncorsetted" nudes.

The people who produce the book RickA found probably used measurements taken using thousand of figures of similarly aged people and then averaged them out. Who did they measure? Did they use faces and figures of White American photograpic models? Did they include those 19th century collections of mugshots of French criminals that aimed to prove there was a distinct "criminal class"?.Did they include Eskimos or people from Rwanda? (We have quite a few Rwandans living in my home town and they are beautiful tall slim people.)

Even the notion that our ideals are averaged out from our experiences is an assumption. Some psychologists think that our ideas are weighted in favour of special cases. Ask someone to name a fruit, for example, and most Western people say "apple".

Nevertheless, the most easily recognised portraits of individuals are those which slightly "caricature" them, emphasising the differences between their features and the "average" (whatever that is). For example, if a person had wide set eyes you might make them slightly more wide set. So to have a concept about ideal proportions could be useful for comparison.

The lady who has commissioned me to do a tasteful draped nude portrait of her, however, certainly has some ideas about the way she would like to look proportion-wise in the painting. It will be an interesting challenge to balance what I see with what she wants.

Comment by RickA on May 23, 2009 at 6:44pm

I just saw a book, marked down to $3.99 at Borders. It breaks down the human form into equations. Basically mathematical proportions of what a body should be.
Sounds decent, but how many of us really fit into the "perfect body"? Yes it does give a good description of the musculature of the body, but no one really has that perfect musculature.

We are all a result of our lifestyles, and I only know a very few men and no women who fit these "perfect" equations.

So what does one do, buy a book that details the perfect person or just keep drawing what we actually see?

Comment by Flash Gordon on March 27, 2009 at 3:54am

Thank you CJ and Pandora for your encouragement

Comment by Flash Gordon on March 27, 2009 at 3:48am

Des, Are you saying i should only concetrate on the primary figure and what about the background???

its a common bath supposed to be in a roman/greek era.

Comment by C J on March 26, 2009 at 3:32am

Flash, she is coming along just fine.

Comment by C J on March 26, 2009 at 3:29am

Pandora, this is very good.
CJ

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• …
• 5
• Next ›
• Page