How to Start Figure Drawing

Series Summary

Art is decided upon by the critics. You can make a painting, draw a charcoal likeness, or arrange a urinal in a museum display as beautifully as possible, but unless your work makes someone think— unless your work reaches others and causes them to find pleasure gazing or reflecting upon it, then it is not art. So, it is in the audience that the painting becomes “art,” and the true artist is not offended by this. What were once religious cave paintings used to appease the gods are now art. What was once a medieval suit of armor used for protection and combat is now art. What was once a spiritual song used to bring peace of mind during captivity is now art. See, it is in the reception of a creation that “art” is born. Otherwise, it is mere stuff.

In this free video series, expert Craig Browder teaches you how to draw the human body to scale. Figure drawing is as old as art itself, and capturing the subtle curves of the human body is the greatest artistic achievement. You will learn how to draw the arms, legs, torso, muscles, and other features of the human body to scale. Craig will show you how to use a grid to draw to scale and how to flesh out the basic circles and shapes that make up the human figure.

Video Transcript

"Hi this is Craig for Expert Village again. The next segment is how to draw the human body in proportion and scale. The universal scale is what I'll be talking about. It's the seven or eight and a half heads scale. I'll get into it and I'll describe the whole thing about how to use your basic first sketch of a head, of just a simple circle. And using that to base your entire sketch of the human body and I'll talk about muscles a little bit and how they work and how you would sketch them real loosely. This is more of an underlay, it's nothing that's finished. It's more of just to get started, this is how to practice, this is simply for practice and for like doing underlay?s so when you want to draw something that's more finished looking you can use this as a reference or like use that for underneath that skin and basically just trace over it. For this type of stuff it's very difficult at times so it's good to actually go out to maybe a bookstore and get maybe references. I recommend this book: How to Draw Marvel Comics. It's very old school, it's by Stanley, if you know who he is. He's the originator. It's very old but it's got everything you need to know. There's not a better one out there. Go with the original on it. So that's the section and let's get started. So the section is how to draw the human body in scale or relative scale. So there's multiple theories on how to draw the human body. Any advice I can give you is, if you really want to get into this stuff, take a live drawing class. You can go to them for free, but basically how we're going to start, we're going to start with the basics. I'm not going to get into drawing the face or the fingers or the feet. That's a whole separate, whole other thing. So basically we're going to start with a human head. Remember I was telling in some of my earlier sessions, talking about practicing your oval shapes? So your oval shape is basically a head tilted straight up. So I'm going to, basically, how you build a body is you draw a head and then you use the head to keep your body in scale. So let's just draw a head, just a regular oval right there, OK. And usually how the scaling works, it's, the body is eight and half heads tall. That's kind of your average. Other people will tell you that it's six, but depending on what you want to draw, if you want to draw more like hero looking people, more comic book looking, it'll give you more of a bigger is better look."