Figure Drawing

As I said in my last post I have been experimenting with some drawing. I am not very good at drawing people so I thought I would practice. I looked up figure drawing up on wikipedia. It talked about how there are three main techniques, so I tried each of them out. They are all in charcoal, one of my preferred mediums, and they are based off of images I found using google images, (no I did not just make them up, and I was pretty diligent about drawing them accurately... except for the action poses).

Shapes: Draw the person based on the shapes they are made out of. Notice the emphasis on the outside boundaries.

Light: Draw the person based on the areas of light and dark. Notice the outside edges are only discernible  because of the shading. I liked the vividness of this style best, but sometimes it was hard to keep the boundaries accurate.

Anatomy: Draw the person's skeleton, and then add muscles, skin, etc. I failed miserably at this one because I don't know my anatomy good enough. I'm especially bad at doing people's heads this way, and I found keeping the shapes related to the skeleton difficult.

A combination: These action poses (which by the way were much more interesting to draw, and hence I put more effort into them) I did a basic outline, like in the shapes but then went back emphasized the light and dark. I think most of these turned out pretty well. By doing the outlines first it was easier to know where to do the shading.