Drawing the human body
There are two key things you need to know that will help you start drawing better humans!
1) Proportions - 7.5 heads make up a body
2) Building blocks - You can draw any body with blocks and cylinders!
Practical proportions that are actually useful!
For a normal sized adult just stick with a simple 7.5 head breakdown of the human body (or close to this).
However big the head is, the body will be another 6.5 of these (excluding kids who have much bigger heads).
It is a rule of thumb and easy to remember.
Practice with matchstick figures
You can practice the dimensions of a body using match stick figures of the human skeleton which will give you an understanding of the structure and how the limbs can move about.
The building blocks
Now lets turn your matchstick figure's into building blocks.
By simplifying the body into blocks and cylinders you build up in your mind the figure as a three dimensional object.
Using these kind of building blocks can make a complicated and difficult pose easy to understand and will let you draw like an artist
Now put them on as page and using the same proportion rule of thumb from earlier try to place the blocks into a body.
Now do this as light as you can on a piece of paper and draw over the outline clothes!
To add a face a hair see the post about drawing faces and adding hair.
Here are a few sketches I did using the lessons above and Lockdown related...enjoy!
Your still here....wow....thanks for reading my post ...for this I give you this gift.... "a glimpse into art history"...
History of artists studying proportions..
During the renaissance human anatomy became the subject of detailed investigations and artist became involved in a search for significant mathematical relationships between the sizes of various parts of the body.
- William Rimmer posed that torso length = thigh length = shin length.
- Then some other dude said you could split every body into 31 noses!
- The Roman architect Vitruvius wrote early in the 1st century A.D. that “nature fashioned the well formed human figure so that the face from the chin to the roots of your hair is a 10th part of the whole body”, he also said “the navel was the center of the body.”
- It is this Theory that is shown by Leonardo da Vinci’s famous illustration.
