Using measurement to improve figure studies
Exercise 9 of the Love Life Drawing beginner figure drawing study asks us to use measurement techniques to improve on the stick figures I was doing before. I have had a lot of trouble applying the standard art measurement tricks in my digital work. Getting a solid measurement on the iPad without accidentally brushing my skin against the screen, which will shift the picture and throw off the measurement, is basically impossible. I wanted to do the exercise faithfully, though, so I set about finding a way to pull it off.
My solution was to import the reference onto the canvas and draw a unit length on top of it. In this case, I chose the distance from the chin to the top of the head. That is one unit. I then copy-pasted that unit several times, laying them end-to-end vertically until it spanned the height of the figure. They say as a rule of thumb a human is about 7 heads tall, and that was pretty accurate for this set.
That gave me a vertical line with 7 segments within it. I then cloned that line to make an axis for comparing my figure to the reference, shrunk the reference and hid both axis lines. I drew a freehand figure next to the reference at arbitrary size. Then when I turned on the axes, I could line the bigger one up with my drawing and see how it looks next to the reference. The axes give me two extra points of feedback: where do things sit relative to the various segment ticks, and how far away does they sit from the axis?
With that info, it’s pretty easy to see and correct things like:
- The head is too small
- The torso has a greater pivot than my freehand version
- The head is too far back
- The calf is out of proportion
Over the course of this set, I improved by some degree on all those problems, but they are still problems. For the life of me I just can’t seem to make myself put a head in the right place relative to the rib cage. But I’m not going to beat myself up over it. In time I will probably get that right without measuring, and until then, practice practice practice.
