Drawings of the word life

What is life drawing and
why should I do it?

Figure drawing is drawing the human form. This could involve drawing a model from life, drawing from a photo reference or from imagination. The term ‘life drawing’ is often used interchangeably with figure drawing, though some people may narrow down the definition of life drawing to drawing models from life.

There are a variety of reasons you might like to pursue this wonderful art form, including:

Getting your materials ready

To start drawing figures, you don’t need anything fancy. Just some paper and a pencil will do to start with. Soft pencils are generally preferable to hard pencils as they’ll allow for stronger tones.

One thing that is important is that you keep your drawing surface perpendicular to your eyes. Having your paper flat on a desk means you’ll be viewing it from a skewed angle.

If you’d like some more specific material recommendations, here are a couple of good combinations for a beginner:

Charcoal pencil with smooth newsprint

A lot of figure drawing artists love a combination of a soft charcoal or pastel pencil on smooth newsprint. These pencils provide a wide range of tones and strengths of marks, especially on the smooth surface of newsprint. Using A3 or larger sheets is a good idea. As you progress, you can learn to sharpen your pencil with a razor blade and sandpaper to use it to even better effect.

A digital drawing tablet with art software

Digital drawing is also a good way option if you like the idea of it and there are many software options too. (We don’t currently have reviews or recommendations for tablets or software.)

Understanding The skills you will need

We can break down the art of drawing figures into a set of four fundamental skills. You don’t need to try to learn all of these at once, but it’s useful to have an idea of what you’ll be working on in the future.

OBSERVATIONS

This is the ability to draw what you are seeing with natural looking proportions and shapes that aren’t distorted by your brain’s pre-conceived ideas of what things should look like. This is the skill to start working on first.

FORMS

This the ability to see and capture the 3D forms of the figure on paper. One part of this is about seeing the figure in terms of simplified forms and planes. The other part is about understanding some of the anatomy that makes up the figure.

GESTURE

This is the ability to draw the figure with life and energy.

VALUES

This is the ability to simplify down the light and dark we see into well designed shapes of.

We also have a PDF guide that helps you figure out where your skills are now and what skill to work on next which you can get here.

Basic observational Skills

When you start learning to draw, you are likely to have the same problem most humans have: your brain’s pre-conceived ideas of what things look like. We learn symbols for what we think a hand or a face looks like, and these symbols strongly distort our drawings.

So the first skill to work on is your observational skills. In other words, drawing what you are really seeing. In the early stages, you can use techniques to manually check what you’re seeing and transfer that to the paper. In time, you won’t need to use these techniques much. The techniques include:

MEASURING DISTANCES

For example, you can compare how long the arm is relative to the head, and then replicate that relationship in your drawing.

MEASURING ANGLES

For example, you can check what the angle across the shoulder is by holding up your pencil to it and then ensure your drawing also has that same shoulder angle.

VERTICAL & HORIZONTAL ALIGNMENTS

For example, you can check what is lining up vertically with the ear and ensure your drawing replicate that.

ABSTRACT SHAPES

For example, you can see the negative space between the arm and the torso (the space between them) and see this as an abstract shape. You can then learn to draw this shape. Abstract shapes are great because our brains don’t have pre-conceived ideas about them.

To start learning about these techniques in a little more depth, start with this article.

Mindset

Learning to draw is often a bumpy process. Having the right learning mindset is going to set you up for success and make it really enjoyable.

There are a few challenges that come with learning to draw:

OUR EYES PROGRESS FASTER THAN THE DRAWINGS

In other words, often you can envision what you want to draw long before you can actually put it down on paper. This can often be disheartening.

PROGRESS ISN’T ALWAYS VISIBLE

Quite often, drawings look better when multiple different skills come together. Sometimes, you might improve in a skill area, but it’s not yet clear in the drawings because you haven’t yet improved the other skills. So sometimes you are progressing but you can’t see it.

DRAWINGS CAN APPEAR WORSE BEFORE APPEARING BETTER

So what you’ll notice is that there is a disconnect between learning and progress and beautiful drawings. So for this reason, you have to gauge your own success based on your learning rather than just constantly judging whether your drawings look ‘good’.

Over the long-term, you can expect your drawings to look better and better. So if you have been training your skills consistently for 6 months, then it’s worth checking how your drawings are looking now versus 6 months ago. However, it’s not useful to compare your drawings from session to session.

To learn more about what the learning process often looks like, check out this article.

Making a plan

Creating art can be spontaneous and unplanned. Learning art skills is a different story. As with any project that includes a lot of different components and milestones, it’s best to have a plan.

For many years I tried to learn to draw by randomly sketching and sometimes randomly picking up an art book or watching a random drawing video. This approach did not work well! Once I started trying to map out a pathway for exercises and skill building, things really took off.

What should your path look like?

SET YOURSELF UP FOR SUCCESS

Give yourself doable exercises with realistic goals, so that at each stage you feel like you are succeeding. The goal should not be big and vague like ‘I’ll do these exercises and then I’ll do amazing drawings’. If you are doing basic observational exercises about measuring proportions, then your goal could be to do drawings with improved proportions. The drawings might not look great because you still need to work on other skills like gesture, form and values, but that wasn’t the point. The point was, did your proportions improve?

DON’T AVOID THE HARD THINGS

Don’t shy away from important skills because you have struggled with them before or you find them off-putting. I avoided working on simplifying forms and also anatomy for a long time because I found them difficult. Once I actually got stuck into learning them with proper exercises though, it turned out they weren’t as scary as I had thought. And because I really needed those skills, my drawings improved so much.

If you’d like more guidance about how to make a plan for your drawing practice, check out this article.

As I mentioned above, we also have a PDF guide that helps you figure out where your skills are now and what skill to work on next which you can get here.

Fresh eyes challenge

We developed a super powerful sequence of exercises that will help you build a foundational understanding of figure drawing, and right now it’s totally free to do the whole thing. You’ll start with a simple 2D model of the figure which you can play around with on our website. This exercise is so useful. From there, you’ll build to a 3D understanding of the figure. This challenge sets you up to:

– Understand the basic anatomy that is most important for figure drawing

– Understand the broad proportions of the figure

– Understand the building blocks of the gesture of any pose

– Understand the simple forms that comprises the human figure.