The Complete Guide to Drawing & Illustration

A Practical and Inspirational Course for Artists of All Abilities

Peter Gray

• Publisher: Arcturus
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781789502916
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunsttechniken

If you have always wanted to excel at drawing, then The Complete Guide to Drawing & Illustration is for you. All you need is a pencil, a bit of blank paper and the expert guidance you will find within these pages. This book is designed to systematically teach you the essentials of drawing and lays the groundwork for you to develop your own personal drawing style.• Hands-on course in drawing and illustration, suitable for beginners and improvers alike
• Practical, step-by-step, easy-to-follow exercises and demonstrations
• From simple object drawing, move on to tackle all aspects of our environment, people and animals
• Sketching and observation, materials and theory, tips and techniques - everything you need to know to create original artworks, cartoons and illustrations
• More than 1, 000 illustrations

THE HUMAN FIGURE

Drawing human bodies, or ‘figures’, as artists call them, requires a bit more technical understanding than heads and faces, which don’t have the complexity of structure, movement and gesture of the body as a whole.

There is a lot to take on, but it need not be too painful. The days of painstaking academic figure drawing have passed in favour of a more expressive and playful approach. Some preliminary explanations of the more important elements of theory cannot be avoided, but I’ve included only as much as you need to get started.

You may wonder why it is that artists seem obsessed with drawing nudes. There are very sound reasons: you will not get to understand how the motorcar works without lifting the bonnet and likewise, the artist must learn to draw the body, its knobbles, joints, muscles, sinews and fat, without the coverings of clothing. But we must look deeper still, beyond the skin and flesh to the skeleton, the key to proportion and articulation. Our investigation will be conducted from the inside out.

The skeleton

The skeleton provides the rigid framework for the musculature and it allows us to bend in the right places. Though the bones can’t be seen in a drawing of a person, the proportions and articulation of the skeleton govern every pose. A basic working knowledge of the skeleton is therefore essential for successful figure drawing.

Made up of dozens of bones, the skeleton is a confusion of sticks and knobbles. For advanced academic figure drawing it would be important to know the individual bones, but for most drawing purposes such detailed knowledge is not necessary.

This is the skeletal framework that artists employ as the basis for drawing figures. Here we see all the important information: the relative sizes of head, chest and hips (and the spaces in between), the lengths of the limbs and the major joints and points of flexibility. Hands and feet are treated as general masses.

As well as the proportions, the basic skeleton establishes a figure’s pose and posture. The skeleton on the left demonstrates a common misconception: that we stand bolt upright. Working from this model would result in a stiff and odd-looking figure.

This is a more natural posture. The differences are subtle, but important. The neck slopes forward, the back curves and the arms do not hang straight down, but are relaxed and supple. The vertical line in this diagram makes clear these divergences from the upright.

This fashion model’s pose and her high-heeled shoes exaggerate the natural curves and angles of the standing posture.

Seen from a three-quarter angle, the curve of the spine, the mass of the chest and hips and the general thrust of weight in the posture are clear in what is really little more than a stick man.

The musculature

Although the skeleton can be simplified for drawing, things are not quite so easy with muscles. They are responsible for the general contours of the body and so their relative shapes and sizes are more apparent under the skin’s surface. The drawings below will help you to make sense of the confusing undulations of the body. They will be particularly useful when you come to draw figures without a model.

This diagram of an athletic figure shows the outline of the body around the skeleton. The musculature is distributed unevenly, being heavier around the shoulders, chest and limbs than it is around the hips and extremi...