No, not a collector's action figure still in the original box - though in a sense action figures are close. I'm referring to the figure drawn as a series of boxes and cylinders (or what I like to call tubes and cubes). And again, like the basic form exercises I started this with, we've all seen it a million times. And you probably well understand the main purpose of it - to help solve problems of perspective and foreshortening in figure drawing, so you can draw an arm pointing toward you rather than just held straight down at the figure's side like a soldier standing at attention. Beginners tend to shy away from active poses and foreshortening and instead draw the figure like a flat paper doll, with every part of the body parallel to the picture plane. It's a lot easier. (It's also how I drew Fafhrd, aside from that one arm.. )
Ok, I'll skip over how valuable boxing the figure can be for foreshortening and action poses - I think that's already well understood. Instead I want to discuss some of the more subtle and less well-known reasons for doing it.
Here's a page from Hogarth's Dynamic Figure Drawing. You can clearly see how he's conceived of the rib cage and pelvis as block shapes, though not just simple rectangular ones. But notice something else - the way the shadows remain contained in the planes of the boxes. The usefulness of 'boxing up the figure' goes well beyond its most obvious virtues. It's another strategy to help you place shadows, to help keep them under control for maximum simplicity and clarity. There are light planes and dark planes. And the fact that there's already a definite line showing where those planes meet is immensely helpful for placing shadows.
Because the human body does consist of planes - many of its parts do anyway (all of them if you want to slightly labor the point). They're not perfectly flat planes that meet at sharp, straight corners like a block of wood - they're gently curved - more so in some places than others, and the corners are rounded. Like a slightly used bar of soap, or like a wooden block that's been taken to the belt sander. Or like the body panels of cars.
Like a wood carver, an artist begins with simple blocks. To carve a puppet head for instance, Pappa Gepetto might select a piece of 4x4 and pencil in outlines on the front, the side and the top, showing him where to carve wood away to get a really rough blocky pseudo-head shape, which is very close to the actual finished shape of the head, but is defined entirely at this point by planes, which he will then file and sand down to make smooth curves where appropriate.
Here you see Hogarth's version of a head as a block shape, somewhat carved down and smoothed on the metaphorical belt sander to round off the corners nicely. And again, see how easy it is to figure out where the big shadows go.
One of the great strategies artists use to simplify drawing is to shade the big forms first. The big forms of the body are the rib cage, the pelvis, the head and neck, the cylinders of the arms and the legs, and the blocks of the hands (drawn as mitten shapes at first) and feet (wedge blocks). Start to figure out your shadows early, in this blocking stage, and it's pretty easy to get a sense of strong solid form. And this way you don't get confused by lots of little shadows all over, which happens if you think about little details before the big forms. This is another strategy I used in my most recent painting that you can clearly see, and that Tintoretto used as well. All the masters use it.
See, here's the beauty of this, and what really ties it all together into a unified system - you're reducing the body to a few basic forms, and you already know how to shade basic forms, right? We covered that in the first post. BAM!! Full circle. Draw the figure as basic forms, shade them according to the core shadow system (or another one - that's only one approach of many described in great detail in Dynamic Light and Shade) and your figures now have an amazing solidity and sense of realness to them.
In the last post I mentioned that shadows are pools of darkness, and when the figure moves or the light source moves they flow around it and into the valleys and hollows. Knowing where the major plane breaks of the body are really helps you to understand exactly were to place these valleys and hollows. Hogarth and Hale both go into great detail about these plane breaks, and their importance to artists. I'm only presenting a quick overview here, in hopes that it will spur some of you to get the books and start to fill your head will these amazing ideas, which will transform your art.
As I already mentioned, these books (aside from How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way) are advanced instruction manuals for the serious art student, and as such they can be pretty dense and take some real slogging to get through. What worked for me was to do an initial read-through of each of them, in which many of the ideas went way over my head. But now I had seen the words and the concepts, was somewhat introduced to them anyway, and a few months later I went back and started going through again, taking it slower this time, going a chapter at a time, and this time I found it making a lot more sense. A lot of the ideas that were brand new and completely alien to me the first time were somewhat familiar now because I had read them before. I've re-read all of them several times now and done many drawings to practice the concepts (not nearly as many as I should - more in the arena of dozens rather than hundreds, but still it has greatly improved my work).
Well, I think I've covered pretty much all I wanted to with these posts. One more thing I want to mention, and this is for the really serious art students (and those who can afford it) - some of the most useful artistic aids I own are a skeleton, a skull, and an ecorche figure (a statue of the body with no skin on it, showing the muscles clearly). The skeleton is the body, and the body is the skeleton, at least in structural terms. Remove the bones, and all you've got is a pile of shapeless muscles in a sack of skin. Learning the forms of the bones is actually more important than the muscles. In fact, Hale describes the life of a young art apprentice in Renaissance days - one of the first things the master would do is throw him a bone and tell him to draw it. Literally, every artist had a collection of bones and would draw them from every angle, learning all the surfaces and forms - they all give shape to the surface of the body - the muscles follow he curvature of bones. Today we can buy somewhat inexpensive plastic replica skeletons and skulls - there are even specialty bone houses you can find online that sell castings of individual bones if you want to get really serious about it.
I got the ecorche (or simply anatomy statue) from the Anatomy Tools website - it's not cheap, but they also have smaller ones I believe that are more affordable. I've found it to be invaluable for checking exactly how muscles overlap in certain parts of the body like the underarm area, and for checking details like which rib the base of the pectoral muscles sits along, etc. You can remove the arms and the head and hold them at whatever angle you need to see how various parts of the body look at unusual angles or with specific lighting. It really supercharges the process. The ecorche (eh-core-shay) is an extravagance that I have wanted for a long time - it was Hale who really made me want that and the skeleton and the skull, and it took me many years before I could afford to get one (the skeleton and skull weren't so bad).
Ok, guess I'll wrap this up here then. Oh, though I should mention, there's now a more modern alternative to the ecorche in the form of software like Poser. It actually lets you define things like how big and muscular you want the figure, and where the lighting is. If you check the Anatomy Tools website they may have their own program for this, I'm not sure.
Alrighty then, DM out!
|
|
Bookmarks