Last night I attended the second session of a workshop on Drawing Figures from the Imagination: Anatomy Simplified, offered by Damon Lehrer of the Boston Figurative Art Center. The idea of visualizing anatomic forms as 3-dimensional volumes is not new to me, but he was able to provide some additional insights into anatomic details and how the body moves together that were very helpful to me.
Last week we started with the rib cage (basically an egg shape with an area cut out of the bottom, as you can see in the top left drawing below).
The basic idea concept is that if you can visualize how an egg (or any of the other forms one might use to visualize the body) rotates in space with its center “belt” and vertical axis, that can help you to represent in two dimensions the many complex poses that a live or imaginary human being might take. We talked about visualizing the torso and hips moving together as a “bean” shape (see “Warrior I” drawing below – I was super pleased about being able to draw that out of my head!!!), and that alone I think will help me tremendously. Most of all it was so helpful to draw through the problems alongside of him, to really reinforce the concepts.
You can view Damon’s demonstration drawings at http://www.meetup.com/Boston-Figurative-Art-Center/photos/19969462/.
I can’t wait to get back to the model in the next week or two and reinforce this knowledge. Of course, the whole idea is to be able to draw WITHOUT the model!
