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    Figures and Faces: A Sketcher's Handbook
    Figures and Faces: A Sketcher's Handbook
    Figures and Faces: A Sketcher's Handbook
    Ebook218 pages1 hour

    Figures and Faces: A Sketcher's Handbook

    By Hugh Laidman

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    About this ebook

    Artist, illustrator, and teacher Hugh Laidman shows how simple and rewarding it can be to draw two of the most challenging of artistic subjects — the male and female figures.
    A brief review of anatomical structure is followed by detailed illustrations and clear instructions for rendering line, tone, structure, and form in a variety of techniques. Explanatory drawings, practice exercises, and step-by-step photographs are used to discuss sketching, sustained and contour drawing, working with charcoal or pastels, as well as finding and posing models and drawing people of different ages and ethnic groups.
    Art students to professionals will find the text's direct terminology and detailed illustrations of immense value.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDover Publications
    Release dateJun 14, 2012
    ISBN9780486141817
    Figures and Faces: A Sketcher's Handbook

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      Book preview

      Figures and Faces - Hugh Laidman

      1971.

      INTRODUCTION

      A Rustic Concert, after Giorgione.

      Figure drawing is drawing the male or female figure unclothed. To draw the clothed figure with any degree of authority demands a knowledge of what goes on beneath the clothes. Some of the best figure artists are fashion artists whose work is to create drawings that sell clothes. Whatever the artist’s specialty, illustration or design, he or she is the better for a knowledge of figure drawing.

      Figure drawing is not only a form of study that precedes drawing the clothed figure. Frequently it can be appealing in its own right. Goya painted two Majas, one clothed, one in the altogether. Of the two, the unclothed is the most remembered. Thus Goya’s posthumous fame as an artist-libertine, although church records show him indulging in periods of fervent religious devotion.

      Few life drawings endure to become examples of great art. (The term life drawing applies to drawing nudes in art classes, mainly in college, but occasionally in high school.) Calamitous as most of these early attempts are, making them serves to give artists a solid foundation for all drawing. Fortunately most life studies do not survive past their creator’s graduation from art school.

      Susanna Bathing, after Tintoretto.

      I have drawn half a dozen sketches from the works of the old masters. This is a fine method of study, and not a suggestion to slavishly copy paintings. The idea is to create your idea of what the early sketches of these great works may have looked like. It is meaningless to merely copy anything. Studying, accompanied by analytical sketching, is helpful. You won’t be the first to use this method of learning. The great artist Manet, inspired by A Rustic Concert, went on to make a fairly close interpretation that is as famous today as the original. All I intend you to do is study the works of some of the past masters by making quick sketches.

      In your search for models you will likely encounter more resistance to posing in the nude from men than from women; more from underachievers than from Phi Beta Kappas of either sex. It is usually vanity, not modesty, that triggers the balk at posing. The guy knows that his clothes hide a spare tire ... the lady might like a little more time at exercise class before stepping on the model stand.

      Generally a group of artists can locate and pay for a model for weekday evenings or Saturday afternoons. Relatives, friends, and most especially other artists are the best source of nonprofessional model supply, short of joining a nudist club. The simple fact is that the relative temperature of the studio has most to do with the willingness of people to pose as life models. When the artists are comfortable, the model is freezing.

      When no nude model is around, draw the clothed model (referred to in art circles as draped). If you have no model, practice drawing from memory.

      Use your modest friends in bathing suits. Cut action figures from newspapers and magazines, try to draw the body underneath, squint your eyes and do quick sketches. Draw from statues in an art museum. Use your mirror.

      The student, in drawing the figure, is faced with seemingly contradictory aims. On the one hand he is attempting to draw a recognizable figure, on the other he wishes to avoid the dead, mechanical look. To further confuse the issue, in today’s aesthetic climate things are seldom what they seem. Ingenious imitation, trickery, and accident are frequently substituted for creative ability. In the early stages of figure drawing, a heavy emphasis will be upon drawing what you see.

      In the beginning, as you draw what you see before you, you will stress the things you wish to stress and eliminate what you feel should be eliminated. As you draw, you will gravitate around a fixed point. You will approach the problem of learning to draw the figure in many positions and from many directions. You will draw in many techniques. One or more of the ways may appeal.

      Somehow you must approach both the aesthetics of drawing and the logic of drawing at one and the same time. In your early figure drawings you will concentrate on construction and form. At first you will be concerned mainly with how to get lines and tones in such relationship, one to the other, that the viewer can identify what you have drawn. The aesthetics of the drawings may become apparent even before you have mastered the mechanics. Your batting average will go up once you have mastered the tools, materials, and a few fundamentals. Once you can put the line or tone on the paper where you want the line or tone to be, then you can say to the viewer, That is what I meant to say.

      Diana Quitting Her Bath with One of Her Attendants, after Boucher.

      Psyche and Cupid, after Gérard.

      Over the years the majority of those who boasted of any degree of art awareness approached art in the belief that the artist had a predetermined conception of any work he had in the planning stage. This is in direct contrast to a currently popular trend of public art appreciation in which the artist, after completing his drawing, waits for the critics to tell him what he, the artist, had in mind.

      The established theory of fine art distinguishes art from nature by saying that man premeditates and fabricates art while nature goes on with no help from him. A robin’s song, however beautiful, is instinctive rather than fine art. To be considered an artist, from the time of the very first stirrings of prehistoric man, he had to make something, even if it was only for himself. The art of drawing is the art of objective completion, as contrasted with dance and music, which emphasize

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