Drawing people from life

Some tips on how to draw figures in public

This winter I’ll be teaching an eight part Drawing the Figure online course and I am spending a lot of time thinking about how to approach rendering a figure. Often I’ll find myself using some of these points when I’m sketching people in public, such as in cafe or at the park.

Here are some tips on ways to approach sketching figures from life.

Diagonals through the body

Whether it’s because of how we might be shifting our weight, tipping our head or the way we are standing, we constantly create diagonal lines through our bodies. When drawing the figure, beware of squaring these diagonal lines too much. By squaring I mean making them too horizontal and vertical. Too often we have the tendency to make the eye line and shoulder line look perfectly straight across. Look for how the body tilts diagonally from one side of the body to the other, whether it be in the eyes, ears, shoulders and hips.

The ancient Greeks conveyed this shift thousands of years ago, when they began tilting the elements of the body from a straight on view as depicted in the Kouros sculptures, to more naturalistic, contrapposto poses.