Light Reveals the Form.
To help you understand how to approach figure drawing, this section contains copies of old master
drawings. These are drawings by artists of the past who were recognized in their day, and are still
recognized today, as great artists. The examples succinctly show the main points to keep in mind
when drawing the human form.The most important point to remember when you want to draw a figure three-dimensionally is that you must think in simple
forms. Poussin rendered these figures very simply, as blocks. This is a good way to begin thinking about how to draw the human
figure. In this work, you can clearly see the sides of the subjects’ bodies and also the front and back of their bodies. Each limb has
been defined in the same way. The arms, legs, and heads are all blocks, and each side of the block is fully lit, in shadow, or half lit.
By simplifying in this way, you can more easily deal with the complexity of the form. This is the lesson of Poussin: Simplify.
Copy after Nicolas Poussin’s The Holy Family on Steps,by J. S. Robinson