Human Body Drawing: Lesson 3: Construction from Memory
By applying the following instructions, you are going to do something that all drawing amateurs have tried to do more than once and that very few have managed to achieve perfectly: draw the human body from memory.
First of all, let me show you the necessity of learning and putting these principles into practice, because you might be asking yourself: "Why must I learn to draw the human body from memory, when I can do it from nature using a model?" Without a doubt, but the first answer to this question is simply the following: "When one knows how to draw the body from memory, one is much better able to draw or paint it from nature." It is obvious that if the artist is capable of drawing the body from memory, they will know, with better understanding, how to grasp, resolve, and interpret the problems relating to anatomy, proportions, and the proper construction of the model.
Furthermore, there are many artistic subjects, providing themes to be treated on canvas, which require either drawing or painting characters to be represented from memory: thus paintings representing landscapes, seascapes, the corners and alleys of a city or a village, where it is often indispensable to place one or several characters of reduced size of course, but which must be represented correctly, as "living" beings, acting, walking, talking, going up or down stairs. In those cases, "the model does not wait", that is to say, they do not stay there, motionless, like a model to be drawn or painted; one must therefore, there being no other solution, "see" them, study their attitude in a minimum of time and resolve the problems they pose, or finish it afterwards, by drawing from memory. In short, consider that by studying the body from memory, you constantly practice resolving all the problems that drawing any subject can present.
Let us suppose now that you are not reading this book for an exclusively artistic purpose, but that you are doing so with the firm intention of devoting yourself tomorrow to commercial or advertising drawing. In this case, the arguments are not lacking. Just know that all your work, all your value, all your progress, will depend largely on your ability to draw more or less well, from memory, the human body.
You must, absolutely, be a master of this knowledge if you want to make projects and carry them out, explain to your client or your boss what you are going to do, and be able to realize it afterwards so that your signature becomes known and gains value.
I therefore insist that this data be taken seriously: consider that it constitutes a fundamental basis for mastering the drawing of the human body, whatever the purpose, whether working with or without a model.
FIRST POINT: REDUCE THE BODY TO A SCHEMATIC
IMPORTANT: With these few paragraphs, we fully enter into the practical explanation of what we have just presented up to now: let us now pass from theory to practice, let us put to the test the studied knowledge relating to the ideal proportions of the human body. For this application to be real, you will have to consider it as practical exercises. Have a pencil and paper at hand; work hard; do not miss this opportunity to master one of the most difficult, but also the most fascinating subjects of your artistic career.
Formerly, one could see in drawing supply stores a sort of "wire mannequin" whose limbs, head, and trunk were represented by simple metal rods joined by means of small ball joints representing the articulations (fig. 17). The idea was not new; before the appearance of this device, several drawing treatises already existed, studying the human body in such a schematic way.
Personally, I believe that such an absolute simplification of the body could not serve as a schematic and cannot be successful. That of the "wire mannequin" was nil: it disappeared very quickly from the shop windows. It is certain that such a schematic is, in its practical aspect, of very little use. However, from a theoretical point of view, I believe it is ideal for studying certain particular points. This is why we are talking about it here. Indeed, when drawing the human body from memory, the preceding schematic allows one to remember two fundamental things:
- The drawing of the body done from memory has as its starting point the structure of the skeleton.
- The construction must be based on the symmetrical conformation of the body, determined by the central axis or SYMMETRICAL CENTER OF THE HUMAN BODY.
An old master used to say: "When you draw a character from nature, construct it going from the outside to the inside; when you draw it from memory, construct it from the inside to the outside." He meant by this that when drawing a model that you have in front of you, you must start with a simplified, broad stroke, and continue with a tighter stroke, so as to get closer and closer each time to the real shape and to reach the definitive outline, "constructed from the outside to the inside". Whereas, when drawing from memory, one must sketch out the construction starting from the inside, start with the skeleton, then envelop it with flesh and then draw the hair, to arrive at the surface, at the finished drawing, "constructed from the inside to the outside".
The wire mannequin shows us that the structure and attitude of the body derive, essentially, from the sketch of the skeleton. It helps us to understand that the body appears as the drawing of the skeleton and its joints is sketched out (for more clarity see the illustrations below, fig. 18).
On the other hand, the wire mannequin reminds us, by the very thinness of the trunk's axis, that
