Top Ten Figure Drawing Tips for Illustrators

Written By Stephanie Broder

I tell all my students that figure drawing is the most important fundamental drafting skill EVERY artist should study.

Why? Figure drawing forces you to contend with a host of other skills simultaneously: form, proportion, value, composition, style, drawing from life, material use and more. All of this is swirled into the subject matter, which, by the way, is something we see every day: human figures. So we know it well. We know when we get it wrong or it’s not quite working. But we don't always know how to make it right.

Never fear! Figure drawing is one of my favourite things to practice in my own illustration work and one of my favourite things to teach, so I’m ready to give you my top ten figure drawing tips for illustrators!

1) Proportions come from the body in front of you

While I think it’s useful, and important, to understand that the human figure is typically around 7-7.5 heads tall, I think it’s MORE important to look at the figure in front of you and measure them. How many heads tall is your current model? If they aren’t standing, how many heads distance between the top of their head and the ground? While general proportions of the human figure can help us understand averages, only measuring the model in front of you in real time can help you to understand what you are actually seeing. And ultimately, figure drawing is about learning to draw what you see and not what you think you see.

2) Negative space is as important as positive space

If something is not working in the pose of your figure, especially if it’s a pose with challenging foreshortening or overlap, check the negative space. If positive space is the figure, the negative space is the area all around them (air, drapery, ground, etc). Looking at the size, shape and relationship of negative shapes throughout the figure can instantly show what’s gone wrong in your pose and help you to solve the problem. For a real drawing challenge, try starting by drawing ONLY the negative space and see if you can fit the figure perfectly inside of it.

study of the human figure demonstrating the negative space as a method of checking proportion

Look at the negative space in this pose: you can see how narrow the negative space is between the figure's right arm and left arm, because the right arm has such intense foreshortening. 

Image from Art Anatomy of Poses published by SB Creative, draw-over by me

3) Short- and long-form poses have different goals

Short-form poses (between 30 seconds to 5 minutes or so) are often called gesture drawing and there’s a reason for that. In that short time, the main goal is to capture the essence of a pose. Focus on capturing dynamic movement, weight and balance of a pose. For really short poses, models can often hold much more dynamic poses and you’ll get some really exciting movements in gesture drawing! Don’t get too bogged down in details and shading. Save that for long-form poses (10 minutes+). Long-form poses are when you should be taking the opportunity to ensure your proportions are correct, add shading or colour, sketch in details like hands, face and feet and spend a bit of time adding elements like drapery or surfaces.

4) Use points on the body to gauge placement

I like to tell my students that all the answers you need for where things go in your drawing are right in front of you. If you’re having trouble seeing if something is placed correctly or interpreting why it isn’t, pause and compare the challenging point to another landmark on the body. These types of comparisons are probably the single most important tip I can give you. Eventually, you will get in the habit of doing this not only where there’s a problem but continuously throughout your drawing process. Draw lines between key landmarks either in the air (maybe with your pencil) or lightly on the page! Check and recheck. Compare across and all over the body, as well as to anything in the background.

a study of the human figure demonstrating marking relationships between large landmarks on the body for figure drawing

Mark notable landmarks on the body and check the relationship between them. In this pose, we can see the sharp angle between the knees - the model's left leg is much higher than the right. The elbows, on the other hand, have a gentle angle. Notice the bottom of the hanging hand is below the knee. 

Image from Art Anatomy of Poses published by SB Creative, draw-over by me

5) Your pencil will help you with angles

You’ve probably seen artists hold out their pencils and squint at them. And it’s because it works. Holding your pencil flat in front of you (i.e., don’t tilt it away from you so the tip is pointing at your model; it should be level with your eye line), use it to see what angles are happening on various parts of the body. Then, compare it to your drawing. How are your angles? Do they need to be adjusted? Angles are especially important when tackling challenging poses with lots of foreshortening and action poses with lots of movement. So get that pencil in the air and check!

6) Check the balance of your figure with a mirror

This is an old digital illustration tip that can easily be adapted to figure drawing in several ways. You can see if the balance is off by looking at your drawing in a mirror. We all naturally tend to draw with a slight lean to one side or another. It may take a while to notice and adapt to your own tendencies. Using a mirror can help you catch it and fix it early. If you don’t have a mirror, every smartphone with a camera these days can snap a quick picture and digitally mirror the image. The advantage of that is you can keep the image beside you as you make corrections! And, of course, if you are doing your figure drawing digitally to begin with, you can simply use the “Mirror Canvas” option in whatever drawing software you are utilizing.

7) Value is relative, so shade that background

When you are working on a pose of, say, ten minutes or longer, it’s time to start paying attention to the background. This doesn’t have to mean illustrating what’s in the room around the model or inventing a background. A simple shade, either scribbled roughly in for shorter poses or carefully applied in longer ones, goes a long way to making the values within your model pop. If your model is under lighting, the highlights on parts of them may be brighter than the background. You’ll only truly get that effect if you aren’t working with a stark white background. Another solution to this problem? Use coloured paper! White pencil crayon or conte can push highlights back into your image.

8) Hands are architectural, not noodly

Hands are hard and probably worthy of their own (future) blog post. But the simplest tip I give my beginning drawing students is to look at how architectural hands are. Drawing them as wedges and showing angles will create a better approximation than circles, ovals, or anything else softly shaped. Don’t draw sausages for fingers, even though a sausage shape might decently approximate a fully extended finger. Our fingers are rarely fully extended! Notice how every joint (and boy are there a lot of joints on hands!) is like a hinge, creating sharp edges as they bend. This includes the wrist! Even the edges of the hand are rarely soft and better approximated with angled lines, not curves.

pencil illustration of two hands where one shows a hand that is too rounded and inaccurate and the other shows a more angular drawing

9) It’s ok to stylize

One of my favourite jokes to tell my classes is that if a client wants a photorealistic image for their project, they will hire a photographer, not an illustrator. It’s really not that much a joke, even though I always say it with a laugh. Chances are, you’re not looking to make your art practice or art career centered around photo-realistic drawings. So don’t hold your figure drawings to that standard! It’s ok to stylize your drawings, aka make them look like something you specifically drew. Don’t use it as an excuse to be sloppy with proportion, balance and value - we are trying to practice all those skills! But if you make your model’s eyes a bit bigger, legs a bit longer, curves a bit rounder, bends a bit deeper - hey, that will work GREAT for an animation or illustration study!

10) Practice, practice and then practice more

This one’s sort of a freebie. You know it, I know it - we all know it! Whatever truth or myth there is in the idea that it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill, I can say definitively that your figure drawing will improve the more time you put into it. Practice should be fairly regular (so you don’t forget lessons you’re learning), varied, and involve self-reflection and deliberate attempts to change or improve techniques. In other words - practice smart, practice often.

But also, have fun!

Stephanie Broder
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