Drawing the Nude From a Live Model: Step by Step
Step 1: two-dimensional silhouette drawing
Blocking in the template
Sketch the body's silhouette with line segments, the way you would trace a geography map, without caring for a moment about what the shapes represent. You can blur your gaze and look with one eye only, to better perceive a shape rather than a three-dimensional body. The point is to be precise about the orientation of the lines you draw — THE ANGLES.
Drawing shapes by observing angles is an excellent tool for getting good proportions, much better than projecting and transferring pencil lengths at arm's length (it is full of uncertainty; you always end up rounding to halves, thirds or quarters).
Run the test to convince yourself: draw a rectangle with a height-to-width ratio of about 3/5 placed 2 meters away, then copy it the way you usually do.
Then draw a diagonal and copy it, trying to reproduce exactly the same angle as the diagonal beside it. You should see that you are good at drawing triangles!
Most difficulties appear when you must measure a height-to-width ratio (shoulder width relative to the head, for example); prefer measuring an angle, it is more reliable! For the shoulders, project the triangle made of top of skull / base of neck / tip of shoulder, and triangulation gives you the shoulder width.
More generally, projecting diagonals, virtually extending lines to create intersections on your outline, etc. should allow you to first copy a shape in two dimensions.
Try to see shapes AS A NETWORK, look for relationships between shapes, triangulate; do not look at the subject as a body yet, strictly as a two-dimensional shape.
Checking negative spaces
Negative spaces are the shapes left between solid shapes (the triangle of emptiness between the arm and the head, for example). If the leftover space is not closed, virtually close it so you can identify something like an “L” or any not-too-complex shape you can memorize instantly and reproduce.
It is an excellent tool to check your shapes, powerful for drawing what you see instead of what you know: because we believe an arm MUST have such proportion, a face MUST be symmetrical, etc., we correct our drawing and pile up mistakes. A camera that only sees pixels or a child tracing a contour make fewer mistakes — the world is truly cruel.
To go further, all of this is a right brain / left brain story; you will find abundant literature on the subject.
Step 2: drawing in three dimensions
The next task is to draw what you see with the help of what you know: proportions, sensitive measurement of volumes, sharp or soft angles, etc.
A good way to assess the widths of body parts is to see them in 3D as more or less flattened tubes whose cross-section you would estimate. You can picture the sections by drawing ellipses to figure out thicknesses — quite telling. That works for arms, legs, wrists and even the waist or rib cage, which you can picture locally as a flattened tube. One benefit of this “sausage slices” representation is that drawing an ellipse not only lets you gauge a thickness: the drawn section also locally ORIENTS the limb.
Note: do not spend too much time on a perfect silhouette; remember the model moves from pose to pose. Ideally, get rid of the silhouette early and work step by step too: the head, then the shoulders, the torso, etc. Redo your silhouette if the model moves too much.
Some parts always change position after the break: the hands, the face for example. So draw those in one go if enough time remains before the break. Never start drawing hands just before the break — it is impossible to find the same position afterwards.
Step 3: consider anatomy
3D-style drawing lets you set down well-proportioned shapes. To draw a body correctly you must know how it is built; there is no escaping anatomical study.
If it seems obvious that drawing a bicycle properly requires identifying the wheels, the metal chain, the leather saddle, etc., it is just as obvious for the body.
Know how to identify under the skin whether there is bone, muscle or fat; understand the position of the hips whose complex shape you must know; UNDERSTAND joints to know how to draw a knee (which is nothing but femur and tibia heads with a roaming kneecap, plus ligaments and muscles around); be able to tell a deltoid from a pectoral muscle and know which one runs beneath the other, etc.
This is the most tedious or most fascinating step: you really must understand the body as a mechanical machine.
So many anatomy plates are badly made because they never spell out the mechanics; they look like copyists who traced photos without understanding… Look at Leonardo da Vinci's plates: everything makes sense! The pectoral inserting under the deltoid, the drawer and hinge movements of the knee are clear, the elbow mechanics are crystal clear. Look at yourself in a mirror, move around, identify and understand what moves under the skin… You have a few years ahead to question movements and identify the bones and muscles that produce them.
Once you can tell femur / tibia / kneecap / muscles apart, drawing a knee is trivial.
You can then serenely model volumes by hatching (which orients them) or by spotting bumps and hollows with strokes to your taste.
Last step: shading
Volumes understood and drawn, all that remains is shading.
Note how important lighting is to make light and shadow areas easy to identify: a single directional light source, like a spotlight, works best.
An ideal studio is a room where lamps light the easels only, without secondary sources polluting the scene. This gives crisp, dark shadows on the model.
It may sound like a detail but it makes a real difference: drawing a subject legibly sculpted by shadows and lights is very pleasant, whereas dealing with double or triple shadows is painful. Drawing 2 shadows under a breast gives you twice as much to draw for nothing; it wastes time and looks bad. Be demanding about your studio lighting — remember life drawing is a race against the clock.
You often see beautiful directional lighting and crisp shadows in 19th-century academy drawings (image opposite).
With suitable lighting, you can identify 3 types of shadows and lights corresponding to 3 gray values (more or less, not strictly):
- cast (projected) shadow and core shadow (same value, the darkest)
- form shadows (in between)
- light and diffuse shadows (or soft form shadows)
Gray out progressively respecting the hierarchy of gray values. Darken every cast shadow to the same value (more or less), form shadows to an intermediate value, and lightly hatch the diffuse shadows inside the lights.
Harmonize while keeping in mind that you should end up with only 3 clearly distinct values for good readability of volumes: light (white of the paper) / medium gray (form shadows) / dark gray (cast shadows).
Of course, this 3-value simplification deserves nuance, but it first helps you efficiently rank your values and get used to telling apart the type of shadow you are transferring.
Once happy with the rendering of the shadows, clean up smudges with a kneaded eraser. You're done!
close-up of the ankle with the 3 gray values: light / form shadow / cast shadow
the 3 types of shadows and lights (cast shadows, form shadows, diffuse shadows)
Additional notes
Easel position
Prefer an easel over a desk, even a tilted one, so that you only make left-right movements when switching from looking at the model to looking at your drawing.
Set the height so the sheet sits on average at chest height: higher and raising your arm gets tiring, lower and you have to bend over, thereby no longer looking at the model from the same viewpoint.
Lastly, draw standing rather than sitting for better freedom of movement, to be less stiff (personal preference).
Materials
Black PITT OIL BASE pencil (Faber Castell) medium, black stone (Conté), kneaded eraser, white Canson XL A2 pad.
Summary of tools for drawing what you see
There are several ways to measure and reproduce an image you are looking at; use the ones best suited to each need, the way you would use a protractor to measure an angle, a ruler for a length, or a piece of string to compare two lengths.
- Transferring angles: Safe, fast and intuitive — just make a gesture with your hand at the same inclination as what you see, as if you were to brush past a shoulder, follow a curve without touching it. You already know how; simply refine the gesture. Well suited for trapezius muscles, the neck, etc. Even the face (nose, cheeks, eyebrows...)
- Identifying and drawing negative spaces: extraordinarily powerful for drawing what you see while forgetting everything you know; a verification tool. Very useful for foreshortening or even the face (the shape between eyebrow and eye has a distinctive outline easy to reproduce, whereas drawing an eyelid well without oversimplifying is very hard).
- Comparing lengths: the least reliable measuring tool, which naturally leads to normalizing everything since you approximate that a nose is as long as a forehead or as the distance from nose base to chin. In the end all faces end up three-thirds for these distances. Use sparingly and carefully, rather to project long distances (leg length versus torso, etc.).
- Plumb lines, verticals, horizontals: project points horizontally or vertically to check that you observed a placement correctly.