Sketching-People

Chapter Three
BASIC FORMS
Once you have established a gesture, you will want to begin to define it
dimensionally. By going through the drawing a second time, you can use
spheres, boxes and cylinders to establish how the figure is positioned
spatially. While a gesture gives you a feeling for a pose, it’s the basic forms
that begin to make the figure seem like it has mass.
Though the body isn’t made up of spheres or boxes or cylinders, these will
later help you to sculpt out muscles, bone and flesh from the flat page. They also
serve as a surface on which to hang details such as the nipples, the bellybutton,
scars or tattoos. Ultimately, you need to develop a model of a figure in your mind that
you can draw from any angle, in any pose and to any level of detail without having
an actual person in front of you. Once you achieve this, drawing is just a matter
of altering shapes to conform to your specific subject.
When you are drawing from life, your drawing must ultimately emulate what you
observe. But conceptual drawing is necessary to re-create on a flat page what you see
in reality. You are melding the two techniques of drawing—drawing what you see
and drawing what you know—and one is not more important than the other.
Being able to construct a figure from imagination gives
you the control to alter what you see and the freedom to
invent figures and environments. You aren’t limited
by what’s in front of you; you can draw
whatever you imagine. But using your
observations gives you new inputs so you
aren’t repeating the same drawings over
and over again.
The techniques in this chapter will
help you to better translate what you
see into a drawing that appears to
have actual volume and dimension.
BASIC FORMS CREATE A SENSE OF VOLUME
This figure was created by building basic forms on top of a gesture.
For example, the square knees, the round breasts and the
cylindrical limbs all have the basic forms as their foundation.
“Art does not reproduce the visible;
rather, it makes visible.”
—Paul Klee