Level 1 Armature

The best way to learn to draw the human figure is to start as simple as possible. Forget about tracing contours. Forget about shadows and values. Forget about skin and bones and facial features. What you need to do is boil the figure down to its essence, something so simple that it can be drawn quickly, something so clear that there's no question about what it represents.

When people who don't know how to draw want to sketch a person, they often end up with a stick figure. That's about as simple as you can get. The problem with the standard stick figure is that it doesn't possess the information on which to base a drawing. However, with a couple of additions and modifications, you can turn a simple stick figure into a foundation for a drawing.

If you take a stick figure and add some shoulders and hips, you get something that looks a lot more like a human than the usual stick figure. If you also add in some hands and feet and some bends at the elbows and knees, some volume to the head and keep all the parts roughly in proportion to a real person, you'll end up with something that's both easy to draw and recognizable as a human. In art, this simplified figure is called an armature.

Learning to draw an armature is a great place to start in figure drawing because you don't have to worry about making it look like the person you're drawing. Once you take away all the details, what you're left with is a diagram of how someone is posed. By reducing the figure to this simple representation, you gain the power to analyze and exaggerate poses you see and invent poses you imagine.

One important note about drawing the armature: This is not gesture drawing. Gesture drawings are a better way to build a drawing because they show both the pose and the proportion of your figure (like an armature does) but also give your drawing a rhythm and flow. The armature is a more concrete, rigid system that hones your sense of proportion and is an easy and clear way to build a pose. Gesture drawing is discussed later in this chapter. For now, stick with the armature as a way to help you see beyond the surface of your subject.

Demonstration

Armature

1 Draw the Head

The first step in drawing an armature is to draw an oval for the head. I start with the head because it establishes the proportion for the rest of the body. Pay particular attention to the angle at which the head tips to the left or right.

When you draw your oval, you don't need to go around and around. Just draw an ellipse in single lines once around or so. It helps to practice drawing circles of various sizes and elongations until you can draw a simple oval shape consistently.

2 Draw the Face Map

Now, you must define how the head is tipping forward or backward. You have to think of your shape as a sphere and not a flat circle. A sphere has three dimensions, where as a circle has only two. I know the page is flat and your circle only has two dimensions, but you can make it appear to have depth simply by wrapping a line around the sphere's equator.

To see how this works in real life, wrap a rubber band around a ball or draw a line around the middle of a balloon. As you tip the ball or balloon away from you, the curve of the line appears to arch upward; if you tip it forward, the arch will appear to dip downward.

This line around the middle of the oval represents the eye line. The chin will fall at the bottom of the oval. The bottom of the nose is halfway in between the eye and the chin. The mouth is halfway between the nose line and the chin. You can add those lines if you want to show the direction and tilt of the head.

3 Add the Neck

You will want to add a line for the neck. This line generally represents the spine. Don't worry about anatomy yet; just have the line start at the back of the sphere opposite the face.

The neck bends and twists to a large degree, so be sure to give it some curvature. Even when a person is looking straight forward, you can see the natural curvature of the neck in profile.

Exercise

Stop here and practice ovals and spheres. Once you can draw them consistently, draw the centerline around the sphere. Then add the indicators for the chin, nose and mouth. Finally, add a neck line.

4 Draw the Torso

The next step is to work down the body to the feet. Draw a line that represents the torso. Like the neck, this line follows the general motion of the spine, but you're not trying to draw the curves of the spine itself. Don't worry about the outer curve of the spine at the rib cage or the inner curve at the waist. You're trying to capture the general movement of the torso down to the hips.

5 Add the Hips

On the armature, the hips are represented by a straight line that is at a 90-degree angle from the base of the spine. This makes it easy to figure out how to draw the hip line. Once you've drawn the torso line, the hip line will be perpendicular to it.

Facing forward, the hips are wider than the head, but as the body turns to the side, this line foreshortens and could be as small as a single point.

6 Draw the Legs

The legs should be about as long as the head, neck and torso combined (assuming the body isn't foreshortened), bending at the middle for the knee.

Add a simple line to indicate the direction of the feet and to anchor your figure on the ground.

7 Draw the Shoulders and Arms

Each shoulder moves independently, so they aren't represented by a straight line like the hips are. When the shoulders are shrugged or rotated forward, the shoulder line should reflect this with a curved line. The shoulder line connects to the torso at a right angle, similar to the hips, but it curves up, down, forward or back as it moves away from the body, according to the pose.

Add the arms and hand in a similar fashion to the legs and feet, only a little shorter.

Proportions

Once you're comfortable posing an armature, you'll need to start paying attention to getting the proportion correct. Every person is a little bit different. Some people have long legs and a short torso. Other people might have long arms or wide shoulders or a squat head, so you have a lot of leeway in drawing these things.

That said, the classical proportion of an adult is roughly seven and a half heads tall. The top of the head to the pubic area is four heads high. The legs are about three-and-a-half head lengths tall, but many people stretch them to a more statuesque four heads.

These proportions only matter when the figure is standing straight. As soon as a limb or the torso moves forward or backward, the foreshortened perspective makes the proportion seem shorter. If you're drawing from life, the easiest way to measure distances is to visually measure the height of the head using your pencil at arm's length. Then use that measurement to plot out the rest of the body. Eventually you'll develop a sense of how much the proportions change when...