Day 46: Body parts

Now that I’m sure my understanding of physical proportions is improving I’m trying to put it all together in my mind.

First off for this blog I’ll say that the Fontaine method of sorting out proportions, although it worked very well as a guide for sussing out the female figure, I found it difficult to get to grips with the changes required to make it male. I’m not sure whether that was down to the author not explaining it clearly enough or to me still being a bit dense in these matters.

Regardless I started looking for another source and found one in Clayton Barton’s Figure Drawing Foundations course. This one provided a clearer guide and my understanding took a big leap forward.

As you can see from the doodles below The previous course was confusing me. And I was NOT getting it at all.

It was driving me mental and the more I drew the more disheartened I got.

So I took a step back from it to get my thoughts in order. I realised that even though i had understood the dimensions of everything, it was the fact I wasn’t really paying attention - in my mind - to what legs and arms, etc actually looked like. So I concentrated on that for a couple of days. Mostly on legs as I felt they were the bits I was most consistently getting wrong. I thought if I kept in mind what a leg actually looked like and how it was constructed in the real world it would help me depict it in a more believable way.

I realised during the course of the scribbling that my mental image of legs bore absolutely no relation in any way to what legs actually looked like.

i was drawing them firstly like this:

Which is just wrong! And then like this:

Which you might think is closer but is actually worse! And then I moved on to this:

Which is getting there. But in the end legs look more like this:

Which still is really counter-intuitive to draw but that makes much more sense once it’s attached to the rest of the body.

I practiced my drawings from then on based on that shape and then worked a bit on the upper body and the muscles in the arm and shoulder.

Once I knew how the major muscles and bones were positioned I used the proportion rules to draw this, which is a huge leap forward from where I was a day or two ago.

Still a hell of a long way to go but I’ve restored my confidence for now!

(One day I’ll have to learn to draw feet and hands properly)