Proportion and construction: building a figure from simple shapes

1Why draw the human figure?

People are the subject of most of the pictures you see: campaign posters, comic strips, fashion sketches, church and school murals, book covers, and the dancers painted on hotel walls in Kigali. A figure that looks "wrong", with arms too short or a head too big, is noticed at once, even by people who say they cannot draw. This unit gives you a reliable method, so that your figures look believable every time and you can then change them on purpose.

Two words carry the whole unit. Proportion is the size of one part compared with another part, or with the whole: for example, how long the arm is compared with the whole body. Construction means building a drawing from simple lines and shapes first and adding detail last, the way a builder puts up the frame of a house before the walls.

2Key vocabulary

• Figure: the whole human body as a subject of art.
• Shape: a flat, two-dimensional area such as a circle or a square.
• Form: a three-dimensional solid such as a sphere, a cylinder or a box. Bodies are forms, so we build them from forms.
• Stick skeleton (armature line): the first, very light lines that show the spine, the shoulder and hip lines, and the limbs.
• Contour: the final outline that follows the edge of the body and its clothing.

3Materials (all low cost)

• An HB pencil for guidelines and a 2B pencil for final lines. A clean stick of charcoal from the cooking fire works too.
• An eraser, A4 paper or pages from an old exercise book, and a strip of scrap paper about 2 cm wide for measuring.
• For the mannequin below: one empty cereal box or other thin card, scissors, a needle and thread or paper fasteners.

4Step by step: construct a standing figure

1. Plan the height. Mark a dot for the top of the head and another for the feet. Everything must fit between them.
2. Draw the spine as one light line joining the two dots. Even when a person stands still it curves slightly.
3. Add the head as an oval at the top of the spine.
4. Add the shoulder line and the hip line. These two short lines tell you how the body is tilted.
5. Add the limbs as single lines, with a dot at every joint: shoulder, elbow, wrist, hip, knee and ankle.
6. Build the forms over the skeleton: an egg for the ribcage, a box for the pelvis and a cylinder for each part of each limb.
7. Draw the contour around the forms with your darker pencil, add hair, clothes and features, then erase the construction lines you no longer need.

Worked example: planning the height

You want a standing adult 16 cm tall on your page. In the next lesson you will learn that artists often measure an adult as 8 heads tall. So one head = 16 cm ÷ 8 = 2 cm. Draw your first oval 2 cm long, and check every part against it. If your first oval is 3 cm long, your figure will need 8 × 3 = 24 cm, which will not fit, so you catch the mistake before you have drawn anything else.

5Make it: a jointed card mannequin

A mannequin is a model with moving joints that you can pose and draw from. Make one now; you will use it in every lesson of this unit.

1. Open the cereal box flat. Cut out a head (oval, 3 cm long), a ribcage (egg, 5 cm), a pelvis (box, 3 cm wide), two upper arms and two forearms (each 4 cm), two thighs and two shins (each 5 cm), two hands and two feet.
2. Punch a small hole at each end of every limb piece with a pencil point.
3. Join the pieces at the joints with a knotted thread or a paper fastener, loose enough to turn.
4. Pose the mannequin standing, then sitting, then kicking a ball, and make a 2-minute stick-skeleton drawing of each pose.

6Look closely

Study the drawing below by the French painter Jean-François de Troy (1679–1752). He drew a kneeling person wrapped in a large cloth, using red and white chalk on blue paper.

• Find the big, simple form first: the cloth makes one large rounded mass, almost an egg lying on its side.
• Find the base: two feet and the folded knees sit on one flat ground line.
• Notice what he left out: there is no face and no background. The pose is clear before any detail is added, which is exactly what construction aims for.

Practice