The Body, pt. 2 – Perspectives

PerspectivesByJTjr2018

There are a few times when I have to draw figures in different perspectives.  Sometimes, I can get away with just eye-balling it, where I look and imagine where thing’s are going to be.  Other times, I have to draw lines to help guide me.  There are a few ways I can think of when drawing human figures at different angles.  Knowledge in drawing one or two point perspective can be useful.

One way is to draw evenly stacked cubes with a ruler (based on characters B & C). Each cube represents a head-length to the character’s body height. You can adjust the number of cubes in the stack, depending on how tall your character is (e.g character B is only two cubes high). Next, the figure is drawn within the cubes.  While this approach can be useful to beginners, there’s another way of doing this without the cubes.

Drawing perspectives without cubes can be less time consuming.  This approach is based on character A.  I start with one line for on the first point, then add an intersecting line from the second point as the shoulders. This second line is a guide for the character’s shoulders.  Next, I drew lines from both sides of the second line to the first point.  This makes a triangle pointing down to the first point. From there, I drew my figure between the new lines. I added more lines from the second point to guide my where the parts will be (hands, knees, feet, etc.).  This requires a lot eye-balling to make sure the figure looks right.

Once you get use to drawing the figure in numerous angles, you can easily eye-ball it without having to draw any guide lines or cubes, giving you a mental image in your head on how the figure will look.