Love Life Drawing - Lane Brown's Figure Drawing Workshops (1-3)

Sometimes it feels like life drawing teachers can’t make up their minds. Do we want you to draw what you see, draw with cylinders and boxes, draw the gestural curves, draw the simplified shapes of value, or draw the anatomy?! We ask you to practise in these various ways so that you have tools in your toolbox. And it’s really important to have tools in the toolbox! But just having the tools in the toolbox isn’t enough. You’ve also got to know how to pull out different tools at different parts of the process to create the thing you want to create. And that is what we’re going tolook at today in this article. I’m going to  show you how I draw a figure and explain what tools I use and when. Very often I start with the head, like in my demo below. I don’t necessarily think that’s the best place to start. Maybe the rib cage is, but starting with the head is such a habit for me. Normally I would recommend you draw that head in terms of a sphere with a brow line on it. That would be using the tool of drawing simple forms. However, for this drawing I used a different tool – I drew the simple abstract 2D shape that the head created. This makes use of another tool: the ability to see abstract shapes.