Drawing Tips:

Thinking Globally:

This refers to the ability of viewing the whole configuration of the model. How the light falls over the overall form, and not getting caught up in one area at a time, with no harmony between them.

Knowing what details to focus on:

Reinforcing forms and lighting effects that help to communicate the global configuration is preferable to getting caught up in details that will fall flat and make the drawing look over-labored.  There are many forms and structures that can be observed in the body. They are not only plentiful, but they change as the model changes, breathes, and retakes their position. One must be tactful in which details most convincingly work in favor of their drawing.

The model as a living subject:

It is not uncommon for an artist to feel frustrated and isolated by a pose that can never seem to retake exactly the same. It is important for an artist to realize that their will be varying degrees of discrepancies in the models positioning. Rather than “chasing the pose”, which ends up consuming valuable model time, the artist can make conscious decisions that end up assembling information from the model, even as that information changes. For example, I might take a single pose to draw a hand, as it is often the feature that will change the most throughout poses. Once I have established a contour of the hand, even as it changes I can still use the hand as a guideline on how to achieve the appropriate lighting effects. It is important to remain calm, and to realize that part of the challenge of figure drawing is dealing with a living, breathing model. Although attention must be made to maintain the pose as closely as possibly, in a sense you are assembling an image from a series of slightly different poses.

Treating the interior:

Mark making is an important aspect of rendering the interior of the form. Although you want the marks to have an allure all their own, you do not want to compromise the appearance of volume. In other words, the focus of the total illusion should surpass the focus of the mark making.

Direction of Mark Making:

I am often asked how to determine the direction of  mark making. Typically I use 2 directional forces that I will abide by. Those are the form of the model, and the direction of the light. Somewhere in between these 2 is where the direction of my mark making lives. If one is to follow exclusively the form with their mark making, this can make for limbs that are rendered like carrots. There needs to be an understanding of mark making that compliments the feel of the light and the flesh of the model in order to function optimally. Sometimes I will keep it simple and use mark making that is either in the direction of the light, or perpendicular to the light(I am right handed so it depends where the light is coming from).