Between the Front, Side, and Rear Views: What’s Missing from Figure Drawing Instruction

Here’s something I probably don’t need to convince you of: Drawing the human figure entirely from your imagination is some difficult business.

Yep. I thought you’d agree.

There are many reasons why this is so, and why the figure is more of a challenge than other subjects you might draw from your imagination. The essential difference, however, is that the human body can move in so many ways, and can take such a wide variety of poses. Furthermore, because any pose might be drawn from any number of viewpoints, the range of possibilities for how the figure can appear is almost limitless.

The problem is, none of the existing methods for learning to draw the imagined figure focus on a broad, defined repertoire of poses and views. The vast number of pose/view combinations inevitably raise questions such as “which do I learn?” and “where do I start?,” which probably explains why students and teachers avoid this approach, or undertake it in a haphazard way.

Instead, most books and other resources focus on just a few poses and views (typically, the standing figure from the front, side, and rear views, and sometimes the seated or bending figure from the side; see figure 1), while emphasizing gesture, the geometric forms of the body, and its skeletal and muscular anatomy. Their reasoning is that if a person understands the basic proportions of the body, its geometric construction, and anatomical mechanics, he or she can manipulate a drawing of the standing figure from certain poses and views into other poses seen from other positions.

In reality, however, there’s a wide range of uncertainty between the front, side, and rear views. To rotate the figure in your imagination from one of these three views to another and draw it accurately—to say nothing of manipulating the figure from these static, artificial poses into dynamic, natural ones— can be a frustrating process.

As someone who has struggled with both learning and teaching imagined figure drawing, I’ve always felt there had to be a better way. It’s not that the idea of altering certain views or poses to create new ones is bad—approached properly, it can be useful and necessary for drawing from the imagination. It’s what’s missing from this approach that makes the learning process slow and confusing. And that missing element is, precisely, the teaching of a greater, defined repertoire of poses and views of the figure.

Strategic Poses and Views of the Figure

In creating such a system and avoiding the overwhelm caused by the sheer number of poses and views, I’ve attempted to identify those pose/view combinations that are most strategically useful in drawing the figure. By strategic, I mean poses and views that are useful in themselves, but that also can serve as references for drawing more figure variations.

As an example, let’s assume you can already draw a decent, imagined figure from the front and side (if that’s not the case, don’t worry—we’ll work on those views soon enough). Now, pretend you needed to learn just one new view of a balanced, standing figure. That’s manageable, right? Just one new view.

Pretend you needed to learn just one new view of a balanced, standing figure. That’s manageable, right? Just one new view.

More specifically, let’s say it’s a three-quarter view. Not any vague “three-quarter view,” but a view exactly halfway between the front and side views. And assume that you learn not only to draw this view, but commit to memory certain visual relationships that appear within the body when it’s viewed at this angle.

So what advantages does this offer? After all, it’s only one new view. But consider this: Because the three-quarter view lies halfway between two you already know, you’ve learned the view that is most different than either of them, and cut the range of uncertainty between them in half (fig. 2). Consequently, rotating the figure into other views between the three-quarter and the front or side views is now realistic and manageable.

Furthermore, because the views to one side of the figure are mirror images of the views to the other, you could soon draw a basic standing figure as it would appear from any angle within 180 degrees, from one side view to the other.

Of course, the three-quarter view of a standing figure is only one example of many strategic pose and view combinations that can help artists to draw the imagined figure. And yes, you would need to learn more than just that one pose/view to really benefit from the approach I’m describing. The three-quarter view from the rear of the figure, for instance, would be very useful to learn, as would poses with the weight of the body distributed differently than in a balanced, standing pose.

In the next post, I’ll reveal how this approach to drawing the figure helps to teach these various poses and views in the most efficient and accurate way. If this is something that might benefit you, check back in a couple of days!