Hands Pinned Above Head Art Drawing Pose

Jake Spicer's ultimate guide to life drawing

Draw Brighton tutor Jake Spicer explores the building blocks of life drawing to help you better understand how to draw figures

Ever since my first experience of life drawing classes at the age of 15, the drawing studio has represented inspiration, challenge and friendship to me. It is a communal space that provides common ground for professional and amateur artists of all backgrounds as they contend with the struggle of representing another human being in marks on a page.

Historically a cornerstone of 19th- and early 20th-century European art education, life drawing fell out of fashion from the 1960s onwards and was systematically removed from the art school curriculum. More recently, we have seen the return of drawing as a legitimate means of artistic expression, elevating this universal and seminal language beyond its previous station as a training tool and means of recording. With it, life drawing has also been rejuvenated, with posters for affordable, untutored life-drawing classes displaying a burgeoning presence on the notice boards of pub function rooms, village halls and art studios across the UK.

In this article, I'm going to be exploring figure drawing by examining four primary masses of the body – bone, muscle, fat and skin – and then finish with an overview of drawing the figure as a connected whole. The aim is not to teach you how to draw figures, but to give you points of departure from which to explore the figure through drawing. The fundamental lessons of life drawing stem from the clear observation of shapes and tones in the body and have been stated many times over, in many forms – this series is intended to make you look harder at yourself, your model and the depictions of the figure that we see around us.

THE SKELETON

The skeleton provides scaffolding for our bodies, creating rigid structures upon which our muscles can act. A body without bones is like a teddy bear without its stuffing and, likewise, a figure drawing made without a sense of the skeleton is also soft and structureless.

The skull and ribcage underpin the volume of the upper body, providing a consistent frame that appears prominent from all angles. The midriff by contrast is malleable – a collection of organs, muscle, fat and skin that can squash and compact to create a multitude of shapes. The pelvis forms a bowl-like shape, protecting organs and providing a point of connection between the spine and the dual columns of the legs, largely hidden beneath softer surface anatomy. The bones of the arms and legs give the limbs straightness and clear points of articulation in their joints.

Surface presence

There are points on the body where the presence of bones can be seen more clearly and directly, creating hard edges beneath the surface of skin. Look for these points as indicators of structure and proportional landmarks – they will be more consistent than the tangents of muscle or the shifting creases created by fat and skin. All of the coloured areas of the figure show where bone sits close to the surface.

Simplified structure

You don't need to count out ribs in your life drawings – knowing the character and presence of the underlying masses of bone is enough. The core of the body is defined by the skull, ribcage and pelvis, connected by the flexible pillar of the spine. With the exception of the shin (tibia) and the ulna in the arm, the bones in our limbs are mostly hidden beneath muscle, but the presence of the joint can be hinted at with rough circles – indicators of presence that suggest (rather than pinpoint) the position of the joint. When limbs are foreshortened and coming towards you, you'll notice how those joints overlap, and how tangents joining them will automatically imply the compacted limb. By developing a swift shorthand for the large bone masses of the body you can underpin your life drawings with structure, helping you to improve the proportion of your figures.

Observations

Deeper self-awareness will help you to make better observations of the model posing in front of you. Get to know the bony protrusions of your own body and notice the parallels between your own anatomy and figure that you are drawing. Here are a few things to notice when you are drawing the figure:

1. Shoulder girdle

The arms are connected to the torso via the shoulder girdle which sits like a crown over the ribcage, connected at the ends of the collar bones. Feel the hard protrusions at the end of each of your shoulders – these are the points where the collarbone and shoulder blade meet above the ball-and-socket joint of the shoulder blade and upper arm.

Read more: How to draw the neck and shoulders

2. Ribcage and pelvis

The ribcage reaches its lowest point at the side of the body, arching up to the lower point of the breastbone. Put your hands on your hips – the V of your thumb and forefinger sit roughly at the base of your ribcage, whereas your little finger sits just over the iliac crest of your pelvis. Notice this space on the model and how tilting the body to the left and right can either open up or compact the body on either side.

3. Hips

The pelvis is a large bone structure – its presence is directly suggested by the bony protrusions on the front of the body (known as the ASIS) and the "dimples of Venus" (or PSIS) on the back. The curve of the iliac crest underpins the bump at the top of the hip, roughly in line with the waist band of trousers and skirts. Find the lower protrusion on the sides of your hips, created by the greater trochanter at the top of the upper legbone – this marks the widest point of the hips and the vertical mid-point of the body.

By joining all of these points, along with the point where the trunk of the torso divides into the legs, you'll make the shape of clothing falling over the pelvis. Use this rough, underpants shape as a foundation for your drawings of the hips.

MUSCLES AND TENSION

Human beings are creatures of action and our bodies are powerful tools. Our hands are capable of delicate and dextrous articulation, our legs are muscular trunks that can propel us forward at speed. Even the act of standing on two feet is an impressive show of muscular power and control.

In the second part of this article, we will be looking at the musculature of the body and touching upon the ways in which you can use your understanding of these dynamic masses to improve your drawings. Just as our muscles articulate the structure of our skeletons to facilitate movement, so your observations of the muscular shapes beneath the skin should give your drawings expression and dynamism.

Musculature

There are around 640 muscles in the human body. In the following illustration, I have picked out the larger muscles and those which are most evident on the surface of the skin. In some cases, a set of muscles may be grouped under a single colloquial name like the quadriceps, which is actually four leg muscles together. If you are keen to learn more about skeletal muscular anatomy, start by becoming familiar with these elements first through repeated studies from life and anatomical reference books before delving deeper into a fascinating subject.

Simplified structure

The striated surface of a muscle doesn't express itself on the surface of skin; what we see of the muscle is in fact a hint of its presence bulging with action or relaxing with inaction. Whereas bones impart structure to the body, musculature defines much of its volume.

When you are developing the initial stages of a constructed drawing, beginning with markers of the underlying landmarks of bone (shown in green), notice how the muscular shapes of the body join the tangents of those starting shapes to create a figure with mass.

Surface Presence

Although muscle and its connective tissue covers almost all of the body beneath the skin, it shows its presence in some places more than others. When we are drawing a figure from life, the shapes that we see in our model's body are governed by the balance of bone, muscle and fat that make up their physique.

Genetics and lifestyle combine to create a unique combination of volumes. While the shape of a skeleton is relatively similarly in all adults, the balance of muscle and fat creates very different shapes from one figure to another. A person's regular activities sculpt their body: a dancer will have a different distribution of muscle to a swimmer, who will in turn be different to a weightlifter. A model's pose will also affect the visibility of muscle. When a model goes into pose in a life class, notice which muscles are involved in that action and which are holding it in place.

Observations

When a life model adopts a still pose, that pose is at its most tense and energetic in the first few minutes. Get used to capturing the muscular tension of the figure in a few lines as quickly as possible; the urgency of the process will help to keep your mark making vital and lively, while focusing on the most important aspects of the figure.

It is often harder to capture the tension of a pose from a photograph. Even though we have longer to reproduce the image, the camera stands between us and the model and removes the urgency for recording the pose in swift mark. If you are drawing from reference, you'll have to work twice as hard to get the speed and energy into your mark making that is required to capture tension in a figure.

1. Gesture

The gesture of a pose – the long quality that connects the masses of the body and underpins the sense of action in the figure – often suggests the direction of muscular action. To find and exaggerate the muscular tensions in a dynamic pose, try making marks in the direction of the gesture.

2. Hatching

Use hatching that follows direction of the action and try to emphasise both the bulges of active muscles and the hard edges of tendons where they briefly show themselves on the skin's surface.

3. The back

The back is tricky to navigate. Unlike the front of the torso, which is punctuated by marker points like the nipples or belly button, the back is comprised of subtle forms and almost entirely devoid of clear surface details. This is where a knowledge of the underlying anatomy of the figure can be helpful. An understanding of the masses of muscle under the skin, coupled with observation of the hourglass silhouette of the back and the shadow created by the central line of the spine, will help you to make more focused studies of the back.

Read more: How to draw the torso

WEIGHT AND FORM

When you are working to improve your figure drawing anatomical knowledge can be a two-edged sword. Although an understanding of the masses of the body will help you structure your drawings, it must be developed through the observation of really bodies to avoid your studies becoming formulaic. Many anatomy books for artists focus on skeletal-muscular anatomy, rightly encouraging you to look for both structure and tension in the figure; the great omission is often the integumentary system, which includes fat and skin.

In this section, we're going to delve a little more into the contribution that fat makes to the form of the figure. The considerations of fat apply to life models of all body shapes. In a slim model fat will soften the edges of muscle and bone, whereas in fuller-figured models the flows in the body might take on their own rhythmic forms. In either case, it is the balance and distribution of fat in a model's body that contributes to some of the most individual and engaging forms in the body.

Fat

Our bodies store fat for energy and insulation. The superficial fat present in all bodies is stored beneath the surface of the skin, it is spread throughout the body and softens the appearance of muscle and bone. Fat also builds up in specific pads around the body – as more fat accumulates in those pads, its volume increasingly defines the form and rhythm of the figure.

The following diagram show areas where fat can build up most prominently, softening the edges of the structure from sharp edges of shadow to gentle gradients of tone. In your figure drawings, look for the contribution that fat makes to the form of the body.

Gravity and weight

Bones provide ridged anchors in the body which muscles act upon to facilitate movement. By contrast, fat hangs with gravity. When you are looking at a human figure both your own sense of physicality and your empathy for the model should inform your drawing. One of the advantages of drawing from life is that you can see the model move into and out of their pose, giving you an insight into how forces act on their figure. Notice how the malleable forms of their body shift: within the constraints of skin, both fat and relaxed muscle will be pulled downward by gravity.

Marks that suggest weight do not directly record observed phenomena like an edge or a shape of shadow – they are metaphors, tapping into a feeling. They record a personal response, something that can't be directly prescribed. A concentration of dark marks often suggests weight, whereas pale lines suggest lightness and often marks that suggest form might also be used to suggest weight but the language you develop should be your own.

In the drawing opposite I built up swift, intuitive lines in response to weight, concentrating elliptical marks where it felt gravity was acting on the model's body, particularly the legs, belly, buttocks and breast. I sought tension where the weight hung on bone structures (the shoulders, jaw and hips) and allowed the areas supporting little weight to remain light (the hair and neck). The drawing resembles a figure lit from above, as top-down lighting mirrors the effects of gravity.

Observations

A life drawing both records and explores the body. By making a drawing we allow ourselves time to observe the figure in front of us, discovering things about the pose, the model and ourselves as we draw. We translate what we have discovered into marks on the page, telling a story about what we have seen and experienced. The language of marks, and by extension the medium that we use, will lead us to have different experiences of our subject and make different kinds of drawings.

1. Contours

The edges of the body are often the first clues we have to the form of the figure – as you lay down the external lines that describe the outer limits of your model think about how the weight and emphasis of your marks might say something about the hang of fat, skin and relaxed muscle, tugged down by gravity – the speed, pressure and rhythm of the mark all contribute towards the corporeal expression of the drawing.

2. Creases

When two surfaces of skin press together it is the slim occlusion shadow between them that tells the story of their contact (see point A). To become more sensitive to these shapes and rhythms try making a drawing that begins with the creases, starting from the internal contours of the figure and working outwards, exploring all of the variety and rhythm of their lines.

3. Cross contours

Where contours describe the outer edge of a form, cross-contours describe what is going on between those outer edges. Cross contours are imaginary lines that trace the topography of the figure – you cannot see them, but you can perceive their presence in the rounded masses of the body. To help you perceive cross contours, imagine lines drawn in marker pen horizontally and vertically over your model and notice how marks left by elasticated waistbands, or the curve of rings and bracelets all suggest cross contours. Cross contours can be used to emphasis form, suggesting the direction that you might build up tone in charcoal, colour in pastel or hatched marks in pen and pencil. Notice how the tonal mark-making in the pen drawing of a torso roughly follows the direction of the cross contours in the topographical study.

SURFACE

As we seek to better understand the figure, we often direct our attention to the deepest anatomy – those hidden masses that define the structure and rhythm of our model's physique. In our haste to understand the interactions of bone and muscle, we bypass the one thing that every life drawing should reference: the largest organ in the body, skin.

In a life drawing, the skin of the model becomes our inevitable subject. When we draw the contour of our model's figure, it is the horizon line of skin that we are recording, wrapping around the body and out of sight. Shapes of shadow are cast onto skin, darkening its surface whilst highlights pick out specular reflections. It is upon this uniting protective layer that we see the story of our models' lives played out – from the stretchmarks of childbirth and the creases of repeated expressions, to the stubbly suggestion of a day without shaving and a toothbrush-flick of freckles, still fading from a recently passed summer.

Skin

In a long sitting, when the reactionary process of intuitively drawn short poses gives way to the ebb and flow of a sustained drawing, you have time to turn your attention to skin. A life drawing is always in part an exploration – if we already knew what we were drawing, why would we need our model to hold still for so long? Through making a drawing you discover new things about the model, from shapes and textures that you hadn't noticed before to characterful details on the surface of their skin – your drawing becomes a map of this uncharted territory, describing the topography and landmarks of the surface.

Your drawn marks can speak about many things – from hatching or blocks of tone might that describe the shapes of light and shadow, to cross-contours that can feel around the form, to marks that describe the texture of hair. To tap into the tactile nature of the surface you can use lines of skin tension to inform the direction of your marks. They were initially mapped by the 19th-century Austrian surgeon Karl Langer and the directions of tension can parallel with the anatomical masses beneath the skin and the creases of wrinkles at the surface.

Hair

Second to the skin, hair covers a significant portion of the body, creating a surface with a more varied texture and direction. Aside from being anchored to the scalp, head hair is not restricted by the underlying anatomy that defines the skin's surface – the textural characters of the hairs themselves, combined with the styling choices of the model that shape the overall form and flow of the hair; its tone and reflectiveness define how we see it.

Over the rest of the figure, the texture of body hair interrupts the surface of the figure, creating a tonal intervention in the surface of the skin. Here, the shape of individual hairs can inform the gesture of the mark that you use you can suggest the hair's overall mass – look carefully at the direction and shape of individual strands and practice a swift, repeating mark that mimics its character to build up a mass of texture and tone.

Too often lazy observation inclines us to scribble an indistinct mass for the hair – suggesting hairiness yet failing to properly convey the particular hair that we are trying to observe.

Top tips for drawing hair:

• The texture of head hair is most readily expressed at its boundaries
• Paper can be left light to suggest reflections in hair
• Pubic hair can create dense masses of characterful curling hair shapes
• Where hair is sparsely distributed the character of individual hair comes to the fore
• With dashed hairs, start the mark at the skin and flick out towards the tip

Surface texture

Our awareness of the physical sensation of touch feeds into how we perceive the model in front of us. Whether conscious or not, the contact that your pencil makes with the paper is analogous of the contact your eye makes with the surface of the model's body. Likewise, your experience of having skin yourself will permeate the studies you make of another person's skin. Above are some approaches you can take to rendering surface details on the skin.

Observations

Reduced to a monochrome black and white, skin varies in tone from very pale grey to near-black. The tonal values we see in our model are created by the combination of the local tone of the model's skin (how essentially light or dark it is), combined with the pattern of light and shadow that plays across the form of the body. Broadly speaking, lighter skin tends to show shadows most clearly (above right) as their dark shapes contrast with the pale skin tone; for the same reason, darker skin tends to show reflected highlights more clearly (above left). Mid-tone skin exhibits the most limited contrasts, showing both highlights and shadows with a balanced degree of contrast.

THE BODY

So far in this article, we've looked at the four masses of the body that concern us as draughtspeople – bone, muscle, fat and skin – and the qualities that those masses confer to our drawings – structure, tension, form and a sense of surface.

In this final section, I will help you pull all of these aspects together into a simple and connected process that aims to underpin your observations with a clear sense of purpose.

Drawn anatomy

We are the result of a biological anatomy: both our bodies and our models' bodies are made up of hard edges of bone, rhythmic muscular forms and cushions of fat held in an elastic integument. Our drawings, therefore, should also have an anatomy to them: they can be built from a collection of fundamental shapes with the final lines and tones layered over the top like skin.

Drawn anatomy makes reference to biological anatomy, but they are not the same thing. We do not draw a fully detailed skeleton, layered with individual muscles before we arrive at the contour of the figure, but instead use simplified shapes to support looking – they provide just enough structure for us to move on to the next layer of observation.

A drawing that is overly concerned with anatomical precision can become as rigid and uncanny as a carved écorché, losing the humanity of the model who served as subject. A drawing that only focuses on the surface of the figure with no sense of internal structure can become like a rubber mask, all soft surface with no bones.

Most artists who take a constructive approach to figure drawing adapt conventional models to fit their own needs. The first and most useful structures are those of bone, from the volume of the skull, ribcage and pelvis, which all underpin the core of the torso, to the spine, which informs the gestural line of action in the figure. The volumes of the body are fleshed out with shapes of muscle and fat, with active muscle holding the body up against gravity, and the fat and relaxed muscle hanging with the tug of that downward force. On the left are some simple shapes to look for in the figure that refer to the anatomy beneath.

Recording time

Unlike a photograph, which is snapped almost instantaneously, a drawing preserves time in its marks like a mosquito trapped in amber. The fleeting nature of a life model's pose is recorded in the urgency and repetition of the drawn marks so that an observer with a practiced eye might be able to tell how long the pose was held for.

It is not a bad thing to make a drawing from a photograph, but the drawing will be disingenuous: a pose that could only be held for two minutes, for example, might be drawn over the course of an hour. To make the most of the time you have, one must develop different drawing strategies for different lengths of pose. Here are three suggestions of approaches that borrow from a constructed structure.

3-minute pose

A three-minute drawing must be swift and efficient – in that time you will only be able to say one big thing about the pose and there will be little time to linger over detail. Start by dashing a line of action down on the page that runs through the whole pose from top to bottom – find the tilt of shoulders and hips if the pose is upright, big bone masses – ribcage, pelvis, joints and large volumes of the body with contour lines that exaggerate the character of the pose.

15-minute pose

Fifteen to twenty minutes is an ideal length of time for drawing a simple, complete figure and getting used to establishing the major shapes of the figure in fifteen minutes will help you to develop the foundation of skills you need to developing longer studies.

45-minute pose

A longer drawing allows you to deal with multiple focuses, telling a story about the rhythms of the body at the same times as recording surfaces and areas of concentrated details with more focus. It helps to make a light, 20-minute drawing to establish the big shapes in the body before rubbing that back and elaborating on the study in more detail.

Read more:

• How to sketch and draw feet
• How to scale your figure drawings
• How to improve your life drawings
• 9 ways to draw figures with confidence

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Hands Pinned Above Head Art Drawing Pose

Source: https://www.artistsandillustrators.co.uk/how-to/drawing/2468/jake-spicers-ultimate-guide-to-life-drawing

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