Figure and anatomy

What changes in your work. The figure starts from movement, not from the contour: first the line of action and the relationship of the pelvis to the shoulder girdle, then the plumb line from the pit of the neck, which has to land on the supporting leg. You begin to check human proportions by relationships rather than with a ruler: how many heads fit down to the pubic bone, where the middle of the figure falls, how high the elbow ends up relative to the waist. Foreshortening stops being a reason to put the sheet away, because what shortens is volume, not line.

It breaks most often at the junction. The torso gets drawn as one piece, although the rib cage and the pelvis are two independent volumes joined by a mobile lower back, and almost all of the figure’s movement lives in that gap. The pelvis gets drawn as a flat trapezoid, so the legs grow out of a skirt instead of out of joints. The muscles are then sewn onto the wrong frame: in the lessons on the muscles of the back you can see that the latissimus does not run sideways from the armpit but goes down to the lower back, and it is its edge that defines the silhouette from behind. That is why the skeleton is taken apart before the musculature and not after it.

A newcomer would sensibly go like this: “Drawing the skeleton”, then “Drawing the skeleton from the back”, then “Construction drawing of the female figure” or “Drawing the male figure from the front”, whichever you prefer. After that take the joints one at a time, starting with the pelvis and the torso, because mistakes there cost the most. Leave the two-hour long studies until the frame stops falling apart.

The section does not promise that afterwards you will draw the human figure from imagination. This is artistic anatomy, not medical anatomy. Latin names are not memorized here; what gets taken apart is what comes up under the skin and changes form with movement. Video does not replace drawing from life either, although the reference packs are shot with live models and read as volume rather than as the flat lighting of a stock photo.