THE HEAD

So, we’ve been talking mostly broad terms in the first couple of lessons when it comes to the
Body Parts, so lets start diving into some specifics now. The first place people look at when it
comes to figures, whether it’s a Michelangelo painting or a page from a comic book is the head,
so that’s where we’ll start. We’re got a bunch of choices we can make when it comes to the head
but no matter what shape we end up going with we always want to go back to the idea of Easy
to Draw but Identifiable to the Part we are Drawing. So, let’s just look for the simplest possible
options we have first, and then maybe look at some other possibilities later on. What matters
isn’t the shape or forms you go with, what matters is they give you the foundations to build on
top more complex structures and details.

You don’t have to draw the head first in your illustrations and sketching, but it’s a good place to
start if you’re a bit unsure of where to begin.

The first thing we have to know is that even though the head itself seems rigid we still have to
think about movement. So, we’re going to focus on our two step process that we’ve learned in
the first two lessons using Gesture and Construction.

So, if we defined Gesture as the Longest Curved then we have a bit of a problem with the front
of our head in that there’s not a Curve that’s obviously to see, so we’re going to go back to our
secondary definition of Gesture as the Long Axis Line, or the Fundamental Action line, and for
the front that line is the body’s natural centreline. And this will be the default Gesture for both the
front and back of the head and Torso. We’ve got that natural centreline from the nose all the way
down to the pelvis.

Now, the heads shape is probably an easy one to start with in terms following that Easy &
Identifiable rule. The Egg is a great place to start, however it needs some refinement. The head
flattens off at the side and at the chin, so we’ve really got something that is more like a capsule
structure.

The eyes sit roughly halfway, which gives the head a natural long and short access which is going
to be super useful when it comes to positioning. Head is about 5 eyes wide, so if you divide
the head up into 5 parts the eyes would sit in slots 2 and 4. The nose sits in the middle. The
bottom of the nose sits halfway between the eyes and chin, the bottom of the mouth sits halfway
between the nose and the chin. The distance between the nose and chin, if you measure that
area up, will give us the brow line. And our ears will sit between the brow line and the bottom of
the nose.
Of course, these are all just generalities, there are going to be differences based on age, sex and
ethnicity, women’s heads tend to be a little smaller, men usually have a more squarer jaw, but for
the purpose of what we are doing these are all the key landmarks we need right now. We’ll go into
more details about this when we cover the whole head.

Looking at the profile, we’ll notice that the head moves backwards, and the face curves down.
So, our head from the profile is really made up of two areas, the massive skull shape, and the
face. Therefore, we have two Gesture lines to start with. They are about equidistant in terms of
length so it doesn’t really matter which you start with in this instance, although the face tends to
be slight longer. Now the easiest shape I find is a rounded Box form, but you can use a couple
of Eggs to start with which are softer and might be better suited to a female or a young child, or
even a combination of egg and box structure. Generally, I would recommend starting with Boxier
structures first as it’s going to help us identifying the corners. The ear, which is the key landmark
of the profile, starts a little back from the centre, and tilts slightly back. If we measure a short and
long access line the ear start roughly in the middle. Another key landmark is the corner of the
head which starts about one-third in from the face. We can then use our landmarks from the front
to define the rest of the facial feature.

Now, if we look at the neck the best option for us to use is the Cylinder, so we’ve got a nice
easy Gesture line to work with. On the profile it would be the same only more of a squeezed in
Cylinder, more hour glass shaped. The one thing we need to understand about the Head right
now is that the Head leans forward. The Neck extends from the Torso, it’s never straight. So the
golden rule when it comes to positioning of the head - the head always leans forward. It doesn’t
matter what the photograph looks like or what position the life drawing model is in - draw the
head as if it’s leaning forward. If you draw it straight you’re going to stare at your image and not
know why the head looks like it’s stuck on, and one of the big problems beginner artist make is
they tend to draw the head as if it’s stuck on. So remember - the head always leans forward from
the Torso.
The neck tends to be slightly longer on female, for men, especially well built muscular figures, the
neck can be almost as wide as the head itself. With proportions, if you break the head into thirds,
the neck is on average about one third of the head in length.

For the back the easiest option I find to start with is a sphere for the skull, this is going to be one
of the few times a sphere structure is the best option for us. The skull is going to be closest to us,
the neck actually goes underneath the skull here, and it terminates at around the eye line. And the
neck will flare out to a hour glass shape, into the shoulders. And in front of all these structures is
the front of the face, but we’ll only get a little glimpse of it from this perspective. And of course
the ears sitting in the middle.

So these are the basic options, you can make many variations of this, they can be every more
sophisticated, but start experimenting and see what forms best work for you.

THE TORSO

Okay so the torso is next. Now we went over the torso a little bit in the previous lesson when
we were talking about bending and twisting our forms, and we came up with the concept of the
bean shape as a good foundation for our torso. We also said to ourselves we can break that bean
shape up into two separate parts itself. So we’ve got a choice as to which one we lean on, or it
may be an instance where you end up going back-and-forth between the two of them, depending
on what the pose is.

Now the bean shape is okay but I personally prefer to break it up into its individual parts, the
ribcage and the pelvis. What we really want to be thinking of is that these are two separate parts.
Even though they are connected with layers of skin and muscle we still want to think of them as
being independent of each other, in order for us to get those nice twisting, bending poses. So
whilst you don’t have to separate your bean shape into two separate pieces we have to have the
mindset that they are separate,

So let’s go over a couple of construction options here for our torso. You can use the bean shape
as it is but I personally like to break my torso up into its individual parts, the ribcage and the
pelvis, because I like to know what each of them are doing. If you are going to go with the bean
structure, I recommend doing it more as a cylinder shaped bean form because it’s less lumpy.

The structure I normal go for is normally an egg with a slightly flattened side for the ribcage
and something boxier for the pelvis, to me this gives the best approximation of the torso shape.
Another option is to do a broken cylinder or a box. Even though the torso is quite round giving it
a little bit of a corner is going to help positioning in the 3-D environment. A lot is going to depend
on the actual body frame of the person you’re drawing. For someone who is thinner a cylinder
shape might be the better option whilst someone who is quite large or quite athletic might be
better suited to the boxier structure. So these are some simple shapes for the Torso.

The choices are probably going to matter most when it comes to defining whether the person is
male or female. So, lets start looking at those now. Our Gesture in this case is the bodies natural
centreline.

We’re going to see some difference between the sexes, the anatomy is the same, but the sizes
are slightly different. A simple way to imagine the basic shapes of the sexes is the male torso
has a triangular shape pointing down, and female has a triangular shape pointing up. Men have
rib cages that are larger and pelvis’ that a narrower, and women have rib cages that are smaller
and pelvis’ that a wider. And for something like the Oblique muscles you want to make the area
flatter or slightly bulging for the male, and concaving for the female.

The thing we need to remember is the ribcage tilts backwards. It’s difficult to see on the front
view but we have to keep in mind the structure is going to be tilting away from us.

With the pelvis this is the most noticeable area of difference between men and women. It’s not
just a case of women’s hips being wider, their pelvis also tilt forward more than men. Both pelvis’
tilt forward, but for women it’s more pronounced. So because the two pelvis areas are not the
same we need to approach them slightly differently. The differences are far more noticeable on
the side than they are in the front view.

For the male I tend to stick to a more boxier structure. The hips aren’t as wide and the gluteal
area isn’t nearly as rounded so I find sticking to a more boxier form for the male pelvis a better
foundation to start with. And if the male is pretty lean and athletic you’ll find those Oblique
muscles stepping into this area.

For the female I tend to make things a little more rounded. Most women have that hourglass
shape figure and the best way to depict that is something that’s rounder. I prefer to use
something that is more along the lines of a miniskirt shape, or a rounded box shape. But we can
also do something that has more corners, something like a box where the sides flare out.

The back view is basically going to be the same as the front. We’ve got that natural centreline in
the spine as our Gesture, we’ve got the same bean shape or individual parts, the main difference,
at least from this perspective is the ribcage is going to be coming towards us and the pelvis is
going to tilt away from us. The top of the ribcage will bulge out and then tuck into the waist, and
then it bulges out again for the pelvis. The shoulder blades help create this ‘V’ shape, and sit
about in line with the nipples.
And for the sexes, the main difference is the female backside is going to drop a little lower and
of course wider. This is the area where women tend to collect their fat so it tends to drop lower,
while men tend to collect it on the sides. A more athletic women might however might not have
as much fat in this area, so it may look a little higher.

If we look at the profile we have to rethink our Gesture, we had a pretty simple foundation in the
front and back, now we have to tackle the profile differently. The ribcage pushes out forward and
down. It’s far more noticeable on a super muscular body-builder type. The figure then flattens a
little bit before curving again once it moves into the pelvis. The thing you’ll notice here, if I draw a
head in, is that the neck rises higher in the back than the front, and it connects roughly where the
eye line is.

I’m going to draw this as a female, so I’ll make the pelvis structure quite rounded and a little
longer. The male will be flatter. Legs will start around the midway point, we’ll get into those later
however. So from the profile, we’ve got our torso thrusting forward, flatting a little, then thrusting
backwards. A big stretch at the front, and big squash in the back, think of it like an accordion.
You can see that bean shape we talked about in Lesson 2 is far more obvious now, and this form
is going to exist in any profile or dynamic three-quarter pose.

So we’ve got a lot of options here when it comes to constructing our rib cage and our pelvis to
make them easy to draw yet recognisable, so it’s a good idea to test these all out and maybe
some other ones that you can think of and see which one works best for you. So let’s move on to
covering the arms.

THE ARMS

The first thing we need to know about the arms is that they are not connected to the Torso. If you
look at a skeleton structure underneath, you’ll see the arms a built in a way where they actually
float off the Torso. So when we draw the arms, we need to have it in the back or our mind that
they’re not connected to the ribcage, that they are loose and independent.
If we break down the structure of the arms the obvious place we can start with is the cylinder, or
alternatively, if we’re drawing some type of three-quarter or dynamic pose, we can use a boxier
structure to help define the position better. Now, if you recall in the previous lesson it was briefly
touch on that the arms don’t have a natural centreline, so what we’ve got going on one side of
the limb isn’t happening on the other.

This makes things a little trickier in getting our layout right, but all we have to do is adjust our
approach. We’re going to lean on our Gesture lines to help us. If we go back to Lesson 1 where
we talked about the Connecting Line, the best option for the arms is to look for the narrowest
points of the limbs, use this as a guide for the underlying Gesture lines, and then build our
cylinder or boxier structures around this. The Gesture starts from the shoulder, and swings away
from the body.

We briefly touched upon the positioning of the arm in Lesson 2. In it, we said from the front view
the arms at rest have a ‘C’ shaped Gesture that curves outwards from the body. And this is
going to apply to the back view also. In the profile view, the idea is the same. We’ll look for the
narrowest points to build our Gesture and Construction. The only difference is the arm in profile
view, will have a ‘C’ shape that curves towards the front of the figure. The three-quarter view will
land somewhere in between.

As for the muscles, it’s obviously going to depend on how athletic the person is, but the egg
forms are the best options to use here. We’re better off putting these on last than building our
arms with these first. You can certain do your arms that way, but I find they tend to end up
looking a too rounded. So, you’re better starting your foundations with either the cylinder or box
and then come over the top with the egg structures.

Now we’ve got an idea of what the arms are like at rest but what if we need to move or twist
them? Well, nothing changes too much if we’re just moving things up and down or to the side,
but if we want to twist the whole arm over we’ve got to have a slightly different approach. Luckily
there’s pretty neat short-cut to use and it’s our elbow. If our elbow is pointing down, the whole
arm is going to be curving up, and if our elbow is pointing up, our whole arm is going to be
curving down. So we have these opposing actions taking place. It won’t matter how compressed
or relaxed the arm is, that direction is going to be true for most of the time. If we can’t actually
see the elbow the same method applies, all we have to do is lessen the curve. The more we see
of the elbow, the more curved the arm gets, in other words, if we know roughly were the elbow is
positioned, we can adjust the arm curvature accordingly.

That’s the basic ideas for getting our arm foundations down, let’s move onto the legs.

THE LEGS

With the legs we need to start with our pelvis area. So whatever shape we’ve used to create our
pelvis is where we need start first. Now the legs work in a similar way to the arms but they need
to be approached a bit differently. The arms have a bit of an advantage in that they’ve got the
shoulder muscles which are a bit of an easier connection point to start with. With the legs, it’s
very easy to get a little bit lost when it comes to placing them on the pelvis. People as they’re
starting out will have a tendency to draw the legs further away from the hips which ends up
making things look disproportioned. So we’ll be looking for a nice smooth and balanced transition
from the hips into the legs.

The rule of thumb when it comes to placement is that the thigh connects roughly between one-
third and the half way point of the hips. So when we start to draw our gesture lines for the thigh
we want to draw them from this area at least.

The best structural option I’ve found for the legs is to do a cylinder which tapers in. You can
break the leg down into boxier structures similar to the arms but the legs have bigger curves and
bumps going on than what the arms have, and so I personally find it far easier to come at the
legs differently than what I do with the arms. If you are going to break it down into boxes I would
recommend making the boxes rounded.
In the last lesson we had a brief look at roughly what shape the legs are, and from the front, we
have these two big gesture lines that create this ‘B’ shape. The thigh gesture starts from the hip,
swings out and down into the knees, and then the knees swing out and down into the calves
and ankle. And this also going to be the same for the back, except our shapes and gestures are
going to be in reverse.

Now I said that the thigh starts at roughly the halfway point of the hip but if the figure is standing
at attention with its legs close together we can actually start our Gesture lines as high as the top
of the hip. It’s really only when the leg starts to bend that we need to place that initial gesture at
the midway point of the pelvis. And as I said the placement can be anywhere between one third
and the halfway point. And that’s going to be true for both the front and the back whether the leg
is coming towards you, going behind or moving to the side.
You can make the inside of the leg straighter at this stage but I prefer to still give it a curved
feeling, not nearly curved as the outside of the leg though, but curved none the less. Even
from the straight, front-on perspective it’s important to keep as much of the figure as curved as
possible.

So like the arm once we have our rough foundations in place we can come over the top again
with secondary construction parts, our egg forms, to start indicating the muscles of the legs. The
leg muscles can bulge a lot especially if the person is really athletic, so these are going to be the
best forms to use. We’ll get into more details about the leg muscles in a later lesson.

If we look at the profile, whatever shape we choose for our pelvis we’ve got an option as to where
we can start. We can start our Gesture with either the outside edge where the gluteus are, or the
from the inside where the hip is, and swing it down. So for the back, we find the edge and swing
down, from the front, we start roughly a fourth of the way from the edge, and swing down. Which
ever is easiest for you.

We’ve got the back of the thigh which doesn’t bulge as much as the front. And then we’ve got
the knee and shin flattening in contrast to the calf which is flaring out. And if you noticed the
shape this is making, it’s the shape of an S which is also what we talked about briefly in the
previous lesson. So we’ve got this very nice curved transition that happens from the hips all the
way down to the ankles, and you can just finish off the feet with a triangular shape. And notice if
you bend the leg these ideas still remain. Curved thighs and calves, less curves in the back and
the shin.

But also take note that we really haven’t had to add any additional structure to this. There’s a few
areas like the knee we could probably break down, but we’ve covered 95% of the leg more or
less. This perspective has the benefit of not needing as much work to be done to the leg because
the gesture has done most of the work.

So a couple of tapering cylinders that form a B shape for the front, and an ’S’ shape that forms in
the profile, it doesn’t ring true 100% of the time, but it will be true for most of the time. The three-
quarter view will be a lean towards one or the other depending on which side is facing towards
us.

And that covers our basic leg foundations.

FEET AND HANDS

With the hands and feet we’re dealing with body parts that are quite intricate, the fingers and the
toes can get quite tricky to get right, the feet less so because they’re not as articulate, but we’re
going to make it easier for ourselves at this stage by treating the fingers and toes as one shape.
Once we get this basic shape down, we can come back later on and develop the digits.

So lets look at the front of the feet first. Our first landmark is going to be our ankle bone and it’s
important to note from this perspective the inner part of the ankle is higher then the outer part.
What we’ll notice from this perspective, the inside area, the area of the foot where the big toe is
more or less a straight line. The outside area where the small toe is will fan out, about in line with
the calf muscle. This perspective can get quite tricky so the best option I find for this particular
structure is to use a flattened cylinder, the idea being to have it look like it’s going back in space.
And to indicate the toes, the want to essentially divide a little bit off the front, and the box it up a
little.

From the profile, we’re better off starting with a triangular shape. As you can see the heel sits
back from the ankle, the front fans down from the shin. And again, we want to square off the a
little bit off the end for the toes. The Heel can be rounded or more box like from this perspective.

The back of the foot is a little tricky because the heal is quite narrow compared to the front,
which can easily throw us off. So, the best option I find from this angle is to use a box for the
foundations of the heal as it’s closest to us, and then fan out the outside of the foot, and then
indicate a little of the inside with the straighter line.
Now with the hands, the front and back are going to be similar in structure. We can either
approach the palm and the back of the hand as a simple box shape for our foundations, or
alternatively, we can look at it as more of a flattened half-cylinder because the hand curves
around. I tend to lean towards the half-cylinder version but either one can work.

For the fingers the best thing to do at this stage is group them together, unless they are in a really
extreme pose, in which case you can group them depending on how close they are to each other.
When the fingers are relaxed they make a fan shape, so it’s easier for us to start with that first and
then work on the individual fingers later on. The thumb is structured a different way, it’s facing a
different way, and it has this wedge shape in between. You can either make this wedge boxier or
keep it rounded like what I’m doing. And that wedge shapes starts at the wrist, and is about a 45
degree angle. The middle finger is approximately the same length as the palm of the hand, so use
that as your measuring stick, and the thumb from the wedge is approximately two-thirds of the
middle finger.

From a side view the palm is more of box shape, and the fingers when relaxed will curve down.
Then we’ve got the wedge shape again and thumb, which this time is facing towards us, and is
pointing down at about 45 degrees. Keep in mind the thumb is now closer towards us, so it has
to overlap the fingers.

So that is the rough construction for the hands and feet. There will be a future lessons on both
that breaks the anatomy down more, but for now this is good layout to begin with on these
complex areas.

ASSIGNMENTS REFERENCES ARE IN A SEPARATE PDF DOCUMENT.