Excellent articles on figure drawing

I found a series of excellent animation articles on figure drawing by Glenn Vilppu in Animation Magazine World online. It is drawing advice for novice animators, based on Vilppu Drawing Manual. Below is a list of the articles with a summary made with Summarize, which is built in Mac OS X. Of course, this will only give you a flavor of the articles.

BTW Sorry for the long post, but I think this series of articles is important enough to spend so much screen real estate to cover it.

1. Gesture

Understanding and being able to create believable attitudes and movements, i.e. bringing our characters to life with our acting, is the basis of our art. A child, learning to speak, starts by mimicking the sounds that he hears and slowly develops the relationship of sounds and meanings that we call speaking.

...Everyone talks about being on a plateau, or hitting a new level, or experiencing the learning curve (a classical example), without actually understanding that each level of development is, in effect, a level of complexity that must be absorbed before one advances to the next level.

...The basis of my teaching is the development of an approach that allows you to acquire knowledge and visual skills in a systematic way, building upon your understanding and abilities in logical simple steps.

...Since the basic approach that I use in teaching is one where we analyze the model, and not copy it, the approach itself helps us acquire the knowledge needed about our subject.

...Long before we can actually see a person's face, we can recognize him by all those elements that make up that individual, such as his general bearing, proportions of his body, how he dresses, how he walks, and holds his head.

2. Spherical Forms

To do anything successfully you must apply three basic elements: first, you must have a plan of attack or approach; second, you need the knowledge to put that plan into affect, and third, you must have the tenacity to carry it through to completion.

...Start by drawing a series of spheres on your paper: first, singularly, and then, in pairs, overlapping and changing in size in relation to each other... Combining two spheres as one complete form but still having, clearly, two parts gives the form a sense of life.

...The most elemental skill is the ability to sense these basic volumes on the flat paper as if they were actually existing, being created by you as you move your pencil over and around their surfaces and through the magic space of the paper.

...Copying or drawing from other artists is an accepted traditional approach to learning in conjunction with drawing from observation and creating from your imagination.

3. The Box

It is a critical form that you must learn how to draw if you are serious about developing your drawing skills.

...Be careful that you maintain the feeling that the corners are at right angles and that you have a sense of foreshortening as the sides recede back in perspective. If you have no knowledge of foreshortening or perspective, or are having a difficult time with this, you should acquire a good book on perspective and take some time to study it.

...Now let's take this box we have been drawing and round off the sides so that it looks like a bar of soap... After you feel comfortable, I want you to see if you can give it life and a personality the same way we did in Lesson 1.

...Look carefully at the other examples on these pages to see how the box was used to help draw them.... The sphere and box are tools that help you to understand complex forms and enable you to depict them successfully in three dimensional space.

4. Introducing Material and Proportion

...Now let us introduce some variety into what we are doing and at the same time open up the possibilities. In Part One, the sphere and box were roughly the same size.

...Proportion is the relationship of various elements in a drawing which includes sizes, tones, textures, quantities and differences that give expression or character to the work. Proportion can be the size of the head to the body or just simply a large form to a small form.

...We will look more deeply into proportion in a later lesson, but for now I want you to have fun trying different possibilities with our simple forms.

5. Drawing Ellipses

A cylinder is essentially two ellipses connected by straight lines and, of course, an ellipse is a circle in perspective.

...Practice drawing ellipses that begin with a straight line and come to a full circle... Albrecht Dürer (1471 - 1528) in his Dresdon sketchbook shows many variations on an analytical, constructive approach to drawing the figure.

...Now try some drawings where you make these tubes cross each other and intertwine.

...In drawing a cylinder, the two most important elements are the angle or axis of the cylinder, and the beginning and end of the cylinder.

...Do a series of drawings, adding cylindrical forms to the ones that we have created in the previous lessons.

...In some of the following drawings you can clearly see the use of the cylinder as a means of construction.

6. From the General to the Specific

All of the work we have done so far has been on the presumption that we were doing a procedural drawing where one element was built on top of the previous rather than a direct type of drawing where each line essentially was the finished line.

In this lesson I will outline a basic procedure showing how all of the elements that we have discussed so far fit in. The essence of this approach is that we go from the general to the specific, and that you essentially concentrate on one thing at a time.

...What is important at this point is that you concentrate on communicating the action in its totality, and not get sidetracked into copying details or becoming preoccupied with specific contours unless they somehow assist in communicating the overall gesture.

...Although all drawing is, in a way, direct, the point is that the sequence allows you to concentrate on one element at a time and go from the general to the specific.

7. The Landmarks of Anatomy

In fact, it took a while for me to realize that you cannot draw something unless you know what it looks like, but knowing anatomy would not make me draw better. What I needed was a method of understanding anatomical facts, so that I could use these landmarks as tools of communication and expression, without violating basic anatomical reality and thereby, detracting from what the drawing was trying to communicate.

...While achieving a clear understanding of the action by amplification of the shift in the central axis, we bring into play fundamental dynamics of reality as well as basic design elements.

...Try standing with your weight equally balanced and then slowly shift your weight from one side to the other and see what happens.

...The end of the ulna along with the epicondyle of the humerus create three clear points that you can use in your drawing.

...The patella functions in much the same way as the end of the ulna does in the elbow,helping to give direction to the leg.

8. Seeing Anatomical Masses

The planes created by similar lines on the sides, those that separate the rectus abdominis from the external oblique, are important elements in understanding the major forms of the front of the torso.

...it is important that you remember that the large muscle in the front, the rectus femoris, does not attach to the iliac crest but goes between the tensor and the sartorius muscles.... , the gastrocnemius, or calf muscle, goes inside the tendons of the biceps femoris, semimembranosus, and semitendinosus, to create the characteristic squarish shape of this connection.

... it is important that you remember that the large muscle in the front, the rectus femoris, does not attach to the iliac crest but goes between the tensor and the sartorius muscles.... , the gastrocnemius, or calf muscle, goes inside the tendons of the biceps femoris, semimembranosus, and semitendinosus, to create the characteristic squarish shape of this connection.

... I have found that if you first start by developing your skill at drawing the simple forms of the animators' hand and then slowly introduce the real anatomical hand, it is easier to control the complexity and develop a method to draw and understand the forms.

9. Seeing The Figure As A 2D Object

In drawing from the model, i.e. reality rather than from imagination or an ideal, we must develop a set of visual tools to help us make that translation from the real three dimensional world (3D) to the flat two dimensional world (2D) of the paper.

...Since a prime requisite for doing this kind of drawing is very careful observation, the poses were, by necessity, very long. The student normally would start his or her training by first learning to draw from plaster casts, as is still done in many parts of the world.

...Some basic art school exercises to develop this skill in observation include cutting out the shapes with a pair of scissors the way children do with a silhouette drawing in grade school, copying photographs upside down, drawing with your left hand to make you look more carefully, and drawing a specific contour without looking at the paper.

...You can now move your arm down, turn it sideways, diagonally, placing it visually anywhere you wish on the figure to establish any point or size relationship in comparison to the size of the head, i.e. the navel three heads down, or the shoulders one head apart in this particular pose.

10. Using Tone To Draw

In learning to see spheres, boxes, and cylinders, we focused on seeing the corners of forms and used these basic visual tools to help us see the orientation of the forms in space and to draw them.... The three approaches, which are indirect lighting, direct lighting, and atmospheric perspective, are distinct but generally used in varying degrees together.

...Remember, it is the angle that a particular surface plane faces that determines its value (degree of light and dark), not how far away from you it is.

...After you have become comfortable using the modeling tone, as we have discussed so far, you can start adding some variables that will give your drawings a more natural look.

...In the beginning of this chapter, I mentioned that we will be discussing three distinct approaches, "indirect lighting, direct lighting, and atmospheric perspective," and that, in practice, we usually use all three methods together to various degrees.

...Look at the details on the right taken from the drawing on the left and notice how this simple idea helped to separate forms and give a sense of depth to the drawing.

11. Getting a Handle on Direct Lighting

The basic elements of direct lighting are highlights, halftone, core, reflected light, and cast shadow. The luminosity of a drawing is affected by how the reflected light is surrounded by the core and the cast shadow.

...The core tone, which is created by the area between the direct light and reflected light that does not get any light, is a potent tool in describing how forms fit into one another. The core functions as a broad tonal line that helps delineate the form's surface with its changes in sharpness (describing the suddenness of change in the surface).

...As you move the light sources, you will see how this core describes the form in conjunction with the reflected light.

...The primary difference is that the cast shadow has a sharp edge and the core has a softer edge since the core is created by the turning of the form, while the cast shadow is created by forms blocking light from other forms.

..."Notice how the core clearly defines the corner of the form without being a straight line."

12. Using The Idea Of Atmosphere

The figurative artist has taken this sense of atmosphere and developed it as a strong tool of expression by abstracting the main elements and learning to use them while describing form.

...In this chapter, using the idea of atmosphere will be expanded upon to include its use as a basic element of design in the drawing to enhance the action of the figure and to clarify the three dimensionality of the form.