If you’ve ever taken art classes, you may wonder why I didn’t include information about the structure of the human body in my two life drawing lessons. Aren’t figure-drawing teachers supposed to start by describing the internal skeleton, segments and joints of the body, standard proportions of head, legs, eyes, arms, mouth?
For example, Rebecca Alzofon began her online figure drawing lessons with wonderful animations of a skeleton, followed by the three ovals of “Head, Ribcage, Pelvis,” the “Pivot points” inside joints, “Long bones,” and so on.
Drawing by Leonardo Da Vinci
The early, great champion of the anatomical approach to life drawing was of course Leonardo Da Vinci. Da Vinci, one of the greatest artists who ever lived, did minutely detailed dissections of human corpses along with eyewitness drawings of human anatomy.
But the Angle-Abstraction Game I described in my life drawing lessons, on the other hand, is all about angles and shapes. Isn’t that geometry, not human bone and flesh? Where is the brilliant Da Vinci in that?
There are different ways to approach drawing. I’ve linked to Alzofon here because I admire the care and thoroughness she devoted to her tutorial’s very detailed illustrations and text. If you want to try out the life-drawing method she represents, I recommend working through her multi-paged lessons. Her presentation is, I think, more helpful than some of the other briefer ones you can find online. Above all, I love her use of animation.
Da Vinci: Placement of features in the head
My own earliest drawing classes included anatomical information, standard proportions and focus on the body itself when drawing. I learned, for example, that the crotch is the halfway point in the length of the human body – which, by the way, is 6-7 heads. The nose ends halfway between the eyes and the bottom of the chin, and the mouth is one third down that same distance (you can see exactly this noted by Da Vinci in his drawing of the human head). The pelvis tilts and turns independently of the chest, as do the shoulders, and so on.
But for me personally, it wasn’t until I put all that aside and looked simply at shapes and angles carved into space that I suddenly began to draw fluidly and with assurance.
In current parlance, I began to draw from my right brain instead of my left. For me, that made all the difference.
But how could that be? Where did I get off disagreeing with Da Vinci?
Betty Edwards is the pre-eminent teacher of the “right-brained” approach to drawing, made famous through her book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I had actually begun using my angle-abstraction game more than a decade before her book came out. But the book explained to me why forgetting – or at least not focusing on – all that detailed information about the human body worked so well for me. Edwards made me feel it was OK to diverge from Da Vinci.
In a nutshell, Edwards explains that we often can’t draw because we’re blocked from seeing what’s right in front of us. What blocks us is our preconceived notions about what a human hand or leg or eye should look like. We struggle, trying to draw what we assume we’ll see – instead of seeing what’s actually there: how the specific hand in front of us looks, for example, when its fingers point straight at us.
With this in mind, it now seems to me that all the detailed information about the human body’s standard proportions might get smack in the way of our drawing well, rather than helping us draw better. “Standard proportions” provide more expectations of what we should see, rather than removing expectations so that we can see. This is especially true when the model isn’t standing upright, but is bent or folded in more complex poses, where “standard” proportions get lost in the twists and turns of the person’s limbs. And after all, it’s non-standard poses that express the body language of individual people whose personalities we want to capture along with their outward appearance.
Edwards’ great contribution to artists everywhere is that she teaches how to disengage our left brains while we draw, in order to enable us to see what’s actually there. One very important way of doing this is to focus on “negative space” – the space around the figure, rather than on the figure itself. Counter-intuitive though this may seem, focusing on the space around your subject is often the best way to capture your subject accurately. This is because looking at the unexpected negative “turns off” the left brain and allows the right brain to do what it’s good at – drawing.
Da Vinci: Muscles of the neck and arm
So all the focus on the body itself, and all the analysis of what’s going on inside it, for me at least, engages my analytic left brain and gets in the way of drawing. Conversely, the more I forget I’m even drawing muscles, hair, and bones, the better I get at drawing muscles, hair, and bones.
I will never know what it would be like to draw without first having my early foundation of information about the body. It’s very possible that this knowledge informs my drawing even though I never think about it consciously. I also think I happen to be the kind of visually-oriented person who is always sponging in information about everything I see, like how babies’ knuckles look like dimples and how my own knuckles look as I sit here typing. I think I may more quickly recognize and draw certain shapes because my mind is always noticing them in my everyday life. So I’m undoubtedly not a pure test case of drawing from abstractions rather than awareness of the body.
I encourage experimentation with all kinds of approaches to drawing. What works for me may not work for you. But I’d also encourage you to strongly consider the possibility that emptying your conscious mind of analytic focus on the body may be the best way to draw the body beautifully.
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