hi there welcome to my studio my name is Siobhan this is Art Skills Online this is where i post
videos about figure drawing and specifically how you can develop your own dynamic and
expressive style of drawing through drawing the figure so my aim is to help you improve
your drawing through techniques such as gesture drawing and contour drawing
so today i'm going to show you the process of making this drawing this is just a simple ink
and charcoal study i posted a video last week of two other drawings that i made in the same drawing
session so if you want to see other examples of the style of drawing you can check that out
i'll leave a link in the description but today i'm going to walk you through this
drawing step by step explain my approach and also you know some of my drawing decisions
throughout the process i want to show you how effective it can be to use drawing techniques
such as contour drawing and mapping to really make a very fluid and expressive drawing like this
i love to draw like this because it means that i don't have to stop what i'm doing
and try to measure or try to make an exact anatomical likeness i do
reference anatomical points that are important landmarks
and those are what actually helped me to map out the drawing but i don't rely super heavily
on say locating all the muscles or the bones or things like that throughout the drawing process
so this whole first section is a gesture drawing really with ink there's no structure or precision
here i'm just blocking in a very loose shape to sort of understand the composition and the pose
do then when i start with line work i start with the head to get that shape in and right
beside her head in this pose her arm and hand is bent backwards like this the elbow pointing up
with the shape of the head marked in it's very easy to map and get the proportion of the arm
because i'm just comparing the length of the arm to the shape and the length of the head and
that's critical because the i can often misjudge the shape or the length of the hand for example
but seeing it beside something else helps me to draw it correctly
and then from here i'm going to map the shoulder down to the elbow i'm going to
find the top of that inner arm that's really important and all i'm doing there is comparing
where that's located to the top of the shoulder so i know that i need to get that distance in
and then from there i'm mapping from the elbow down to the wrist so you can see here that i'm
not actually following the marks of the ink wash at all instead i'm now using a contour line
the next important landmark then is the hip or the pelvis
and in this pose it's tilted quite a lot so to find that exact correct tilt
i'm going to establish the angle of the back or the upper torso so again working
from the shoulder down i'm going to follow the contour of the outer edge of the torso
with that it's really easy to judge then the angle of the hips because i can just look at the
image the reference image and see that the angle goes out to the to the right like this
another important contour to draw is the one for the upper arms that's the
outer edge of this upper arm for me this is a great expression or gesture
of the pose the way the arm is folded back like that it's important to get this into this drawing
so you want to get a bit of detail in there around the hand and the fingers
i really wanted to get that arm right i think that was key to the drawing
so that's good and now the pose is pretty much done it's really all there and those are just
two or three simple points to hit shoulders elbows to wrists and the tilt of the hips
i hope i'm not over simplifying it but for me you know i wanted
to stress how i actually don't use anatomy as a stringent hardcore principle of my drawing
i think it's important to know about anatomy for sure but for me it should never be the
point of the drawing it's always a means to make the drawing it's not an end in itself
i think your knowledge of anatomy should help you to identify landmarks but i think if you
draw the pose with by mapping things out and by using a very considered careful contour line you
don't have to draw every muscle and every tendon and you know stress about trying to find them
personally i feel like if i was to just focus on drawing muscles and all of that i would feel like
i was illustrating rather than trying to capture the pose at the end of the day you want your
drawing to improve good knowledge of anatomy will support your art but the thing that'll make your
drawing better will be your technique and that for me comes down to my mark making and my observation
so thank you so much for watching the video i hope you enjoyed it and i hope you got
some useful information out of it or at least some inspiration for your own drawing practice
please subscribe if you haven't already or share this video with someone you know who's
interested in figure drawing thanks again for watching and i'll see you in the next video