How to Make a Figure Drawing

I am in an open life drawing session in the city. The room is packed with both experienced artists and beginners of all ages. They come here to make drawings of a life model. Some look purposeful, intent; sharpening pencils with X-Acto knives or stroking warmup patterns onto the page. Others idle nonchalantly or chat casually with a neighbor. The model, a lean, agile man, stands on a raised platform, ready to begin a series of dynamic and graceful gestural poses. Overhead spots cast a light that suggests the drama of theatre. We open sketchbooks, or flip over pages of newsprint pads and pick up a pen, a piece of conté

Consider ways to make a good figure drawing. There are many possible strategies, and techniques.

Then there are ways not to: like becoming so hyper-aware of everyone around you that you get disoriented, comparing yourself to them as you mercilessly critique your every stroke. Or getting so caught up in the standards of classical master drawings that you can’t see or draw the real figure in front of you. Or making impossibly large-scale drawings that can’t be finished. Then there is downing too much coffee, becoming agitated and accidentally spilling it onto the page, or forgetting your glasses and groping blindly around the page, or overly bearing down, gripping the pencil hard, and critiquing every new mark mercilessly as you make it, then getting myopically caught up in details and not finishing the drawing. The list is endless.

However, sometimes these so-called wrong approaches can be reframed, leading to interesting results. While being distracted by everyone does seem like a bad idea, pausing from your work, look around the room in a detached manner and take in the quality of the focus and concentration around you. Instead of obsessing self-critically about Michelangelo, riff on him. Bring some very specific elements from one of his drawings into your work, like the way he crosshatches or how he describes the collarbone. And that unfinished drawing might unintentionally turn out to be the best one of the night! You could like the visual effect spilled coffee creates. Paint more caffeinated washes onto the page! The out of focus effect of light on the figure, resulting from your lack of glasses, might turn out to be rather poetic.

Make ambitious large-scale drawings you can’t finish or draw figures so tiny and cryptic you can’t see even them. Draw with beautiful flowing lines, with exquisite handwriting, or express the figure with awkward, raw and honest marks on the page. Focus! Bear down and grip the pen like a vise, drawing with intensity, so that you send seismic ripples of energy throughout the room. Or dial it down, working with apparently casual indifference. Loosely hold the pen so that it dribbles out of your hand, and it clatters to the floor shattering the zen stillness of concentration.

While these approaches imply right and wrong, what is right one day might be wrong the next. That can even be true for a confirmed creature of habit. So what is right for me ten days in a row, might not be so on the tenth.

Being open, paying attention to the environment, and to my drawing process as it unfolds, allows me to follow the course. And possibly, to switch directions midstream. I get more out of myself and my drawing experience by being flexible. But that’s not so easy.

I show up with an intention, a process, knowledge, my understanding of drawing as I know it. And sometimes it’s pretty smooth sailing. Other times my mind begins to leapfrog back and forth, performing mental gymnastics as I go from pose to pose. I can trick myself into believing I’m not trying too hard, being flexible, when in reality I’m putting way too much effort into it.

Meanwhile, drawings happen. In spite of, or because of all the mental gymnastics, they can reveal moments of clarity; the fleeting insights and inspirations that can arise within periods of focus and flow. I accept the possibility that something that happens unintentionally is not necessarily bad. All those passing thoughts, momentary moods, memories, and impressions of space and sound can get in the way, or become the way.

Focusing on the wrong way to approach a drawing won’t automatically tell me the right way. What seems like a ‘wrong’ approach, such as being overly aware of others in the room, gripping the pencil really hard or accidentally spilling coffee on the drawing, might even lead to a surprising result, turning failure into success. Pay attention, trust yourself and the choices in your eye and hand. That portrait drawn with the broken pencil found on the ground might just be one.

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