Find Your Guidelines.
When drawing the human figure, measuring parts of the body against one another will certainly
help you draw correctly. In this section, you will learn how to make sure those parts of the body are
aligned correctly for the pose you are drawing. You can use a pencil, or paintbrush, as discussed on
page 44 in Chapter 4, to act as a guide for your straight and horizontal lines. With more and more
practice, you will be able to imagine these vertical and horizontal lines, with no guide, so that you
will be able to line up one part of the figure with another part to draw the figure with the correct
proportions. You will be training your eye to look for connections that you normally would not
think about.This drawing of a standing figure may seem quite straightforward. However, the lifted head, the raised arm, and the bent arm
all need to be properly aligned to suggest that the body’s muscles and skeleton are working in sync, and also to create a
believable gesture. Using the finished drawing shown here, the following examples have some imaginary lines inserted that
the artist may have seen with his own eye to use as a guide to draw this convincing figure composition.
Figure at Rest,by Dean Fisher