Hello everyone, as I said a few days ago I’m working on a new series of videos which will talk about the common mistakes we all make in figure drawing. These can be easily fixed if someone is kind enough to point them out to us. Some of these may have extra information in the form of text and photos as it is below. The video for this episode 001 Massing will follow in a couple of days. All this is free to support your efforts in drawing. Here it goes:

Common Mistakes – 001 Massing

I want to say a few things about massing. There are a few basic rules in figure drawing that will deliver results. But underlying them all is massing. If you cannot master massing, no matter how much you know of all the other elements of drawing, there will always be something missing. Somehow it just will not be quite right. So if you’re not already versed in massing, give it your best and results will follow almost immediately.

What is massing? To force images turn into words, massing is a simplified visualisation of a complex form brought about in order to be able to make educated decisions about the form’s basic properties. These properties are absolutely necessary to know if we wish to draw the form. They are the size, shape, position in space and it’s relationship to other forms.

All of us who tried to learn to draw the human figure have been repeatedly puzzled how can it be so hard to draw something we are so familiar with. We wear a body ourselves, we see the human figure from the moment we open our eyes in the morning, all day long and then we probably dream of it too. The answer  to this puzzlement is simple. The figure is so complex and constantly changing that it is not possible to observe and capture each and every detail needed to convey our relationship to it on a piece of paper. The thing to do is what we always naturally and effortlessly do when something is too complex. We simplify.

The great masters knew this and worked out a good system which works really well. They have discovered that we can fairly easily relate to simple geometric shapes. A box a ball and a cylinder have become the artist’s greatest aids in his effort to comprehend the human form. Turning the complex form into something manageable, something which low level of complexity would still allow us to make conscious decissions about the form’s size, shape, position and the relationship to other forms on the paper.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Albrecht Durer, one of the artistic giants of German Rennaisance left us his drawings capturing his process of simplifaction. Working out proportions was one of his obsessions. And proportions are nothing else than the relationship one form has with another within the sheet of paper.

In the image below Luca Cambiaso used the same method to work out his composition. The simplified figures are fast and easy to draw. The drawing easily becomes the narrative as one doesn’t need to pause a thought till a portion of the image is drawn. Changes are possible and fast. If you look, you’ll see the same simplified geomeric solution in all the master drawings. Some of them are more hidden, some of them only make a dot where others would place a line but the principle is the same.

To demonstrate the above in a very practical way, compare the following two drawings. They are drawings of my students. The first was made during the first session of an eight week long course, where each week has only one three hour session. The second drawing was made towards the end of the course. Both drawings were made as a part of a series of “warm up” one minute long poses.

The immediate impression of the first drawing is that it is very flat. Despite the three quarter position of the figure. The second drawing is quite the opposite – presents clear and lively volumes despite the pose of the figure turned flat with its back to the artist. Neither drawing has any detail, shading or elaboration. The lack of time did not allow for this and so we are in luck to observe the stripped down construction or lack thereof.

Since the geometric approach was already explained when the first drawing was made you can see the attempt to apply this knowledge in the first drawing as well however the results two dimensional and lack vitality.

Applying the same approach only after a few hours of practice and guidance results in a great construction ready to be developed into a nice drawing. And of course, the smaller details within the larger mass would have been approached using the same technique. Massing is all when it comes to understanding the human form.