I mentioned in my stick figure series post two of the poses foiled me, so I set them aside to do more detailed studies. Here they are.
The original problem, something many beginner artists experience, is a tendency to straighten out the human torso. I think it’s an extension of the symbolic thinking trap described in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Rather than processing the visuals of an image, pieces of it encode as symbols. When you try to recall the image, what you remember is just the collection of symbols. There is an eye, a mouth, a nose. If you try to draw from that recollection, you’ll make something like a child would, abstract, iconic, but lacking in any representational detail.
As I practice, I am developing a better visual memory, but it is still hard to access. The symbolic system still holds me back. In figure drawing, the system says “the rib cage sits above the hips, head sits above the ribs, shoulders stick out from the side”. The more a pose strays from that iconic representation, the worse I’ll tend to do with it.
My goal with these two pictures was to do honor to the original poses, which I failed to do in the original pass. This time, concentrating on the angles, I think I succeeded. They’re even a touch exaggerated, which I am fine with.
