"No really - do I HAVE to draw from life?"

I hear this question quite a bit from aspiring artists and students. How important is drawing from a model standing in front of you?

To understand why, you'd need to understand all of the following:



Single lens(camera) vs 2 lenses (human): photographs distort images due to a single lens, especially the further it gets from the centre of the picture. Everything in the image becomes flat, destroying the illusion of form once copied by hand. Also, a camera may not pick up subtle colour variations, such as how light and colour bounces off one object to another. The colours that it does pick up, may end up edited out in an attempt to increase the contrast and saturation. Jan Vermeer's work was unknown for 3 centuries mostly due to the fact that he used a camera obscura device (a small projection box that was the predecessor of the 1840s camera) to conceive his paintings. The objects in the foreground were brought significantly closer to the viewer than you would actually see if you were standing in front of it. This meant that the depth of the picture was somewhat diminished...ever see the phrase 'objects in mirror may be closer than they appear'? That's what mirrors can do, and a camera works by using a mirror.


You've seen one skeleton, you've seen em all, right? I think it's ironic that even though an artist can study anatomy from life for 20 years, and we all have the same skeletal structure, musculature and landmarks they probably will still not be able to render a convincing human form from their imagination. It's because we're all so very different from one another. Not only that, because we see so many different people all around us, we're inundated with 1,000 of pieces of information about the human figure at once - subconsciously. The person we see the most, however, is ourselves. All this information no doubt floods our mind when recalling how a human body is supposed to look like. If not drawing from life or reference, the artist is left with either sifting through all this beguiling information, or recalling one person from memory - and even then that memory is infused with the anatomy of several others. We can never get a clear picture in our minds of an actual figure, and translate that to the page with ease.

Expressions. One of the most important reasons, and often overlooked, that one should avoid drawing figures completely from imagination is the fact that we both project and empathize the thoughts and feelings of those we see and think of. In the case of drawing from life, picking up on the emotion of the subject is a good thing. Subconsciously drawing a wistful gaze when you had no intention to do so isn't. Perhaps you might be thinking of someone that you don't have the best of relations with, maybe you yourself aren't in the best of moods. Chances are you might give your figure an unintended expression if you're putting the pencil to the paper straight from the mind.


Now, that's not to say that you always need a model handy when you need someone smiling, or that an artist cannot imagine someone giving a proper smile. What is best though is that you have a mirror or book of facial expressions handy to key off of. As soon as you see how someone might have dimples, a furrowed brow, crinkled nose, etc you can immediately create your own drawing without copying another drawing or using the exact likeness of yourself or a model. This also applies to the rest of the figure, and anything else within the environment in your picture plane.

Even the tiniest bit of reference, as little as a few lines, can get you holding an image of a complete 3-dimensional form in your mind. The end result need not look like your reference at all. In fact, it probably shouldn't. For the life of me I'll never understand why people spend 4 hours with charcoal detailing out every single detail until it looks exactly like the subject before them. The kind of piece that you need to get up real close to in order to see how it was done...it's masturbation, in my opinion. But I digress.

One important thing to note is that there is no 'right' or 'wrong' way - if you're in animation class you'll attempt to describe the figure in sweeping, interesting gestures to give it life and rhythm. Egon Scheile drew figures suggesting the underlying bones and viscera of the body, and during the renaissance Michelangelo actually invented muscles for his figures while Da Vinci studied cadavers to get a better understanding of the structure.

If nothing else, references, whether it be drawings, a mirror, or a live person sitting in front of you - are a way to efficient drawing. It gives you a good start so that you can complete the drawing with confidence and accuracy.