A further book I am reading is on figure drawing. Here are the details:
Barber, B. (2005) ‘The Fundamentals of Figure Drawing’, Arcturus Publishing, London
It’s presented in a straightforward fashion, it’s aimed at beginners so is just right for me at the moment. I get the impression from my attempts and what reading from the book I have done so far, that figure drawing is really challenging.
Barber argues it can be very helpful to understand the structure of the body: skeletal and muscular in order to inform figure drawing. We actually have a life-size model human skeleton in one of the labs at university where I work so I will ask if I can draw that. I think that’s going to be interesting.
What’s also been very useful so far is learning about the proportions of the body, how the head is about an eighth of the length of the body, and how this changes with children and adolescents.
Because it is such a challenging area, the work I do with this I will keep fairly low level and in the background so that I can concentrate on the main building blocks of the course. So, the priority for the rest of this month is still on representing the tone of simple objects using different techniques.
Kris' Art Learning Log 