How to Draw Humans Pt. 1

Greetings, Earthlings. 

The homo sapien is an organism that I’m sure we’re all familiar with. Most famous for being bad at running, swimming, jumping, climbing, burrowing, camouflage and even just making positive contributions to their respective ecosystems; the human animal is usually only redeemed by their remarkable intellectual capability. Now that you can place them, remember all of those times I said, “I will teach you anatomy, but not today”? Well, today actually is that day. For the next few lessons, I will be teaching you how to draw humans. Part 1 of this series will be the first stepping stones: posing and proportion—real basic general, alterable stuff. Part 2, which is already up here on Parker Press today, goes into the diversity of the human condition and you should check that one out after this.

So! Grab something to write with, something to write on, and a ruler. Let's get started.

You know these little wooden guys? They’re connected by systems of elastic tension and sold to artists to help them reference human anatomy and posing? Yes? Great! They are garbage. They’re static and unrealistic. The only thing they’re good for is understanding proportions and today I’m teaching you how to deal with that all on your own. Don’t buy garbage.

For posing, let’s start off somewhere familiar: stick figures! This is your new hybridized stick figure that you will use to get a sense of the shapes that people make.  

The stick figure’s name is Gumdrop. Gumdrop works on axes of movement made out of complex mechanisms called joints (all of the little circles). Here she is from a few different angles. You can sort of gauge how her joints change what pose she’s in (because they’re modeled after your own). Look for a person in your environment right now and, without disturbing them, identify how this stick figure lies in their form.

You can find this basic structure within any figure. 

As we look at proportions, we are temporarily shelving the idea of stylization. Once you feel like you know what to look for in a design, disregarding scale and such things becomes more of a freedom. Cartoons are fantastic, and stylization is the best! It is not necessarily good for your growth to make those choices out of a place of limited ability.

This is a thing I haven’t specifically recommended thus far: Measurement! For the anatomy of human people, we’re going to want units and their halves. I’m using centimeters because I like them. We want to start with 10 units. This is our “average” before I get into how height and age affect the verticality of people in part 2.

The ½ ticks are going to be at 1.5, 3.5 and 4.5. 

I’m naming the dummy we’re building here Bones because of his generic metrics and qualities, like that of an anatomy skeleton you’d find at the doctor’s office.  Map out the milestone pieces that are in green first.

• Bones’ head takes up 1 square unit. 

• His whole rib cage takes up 1.5 units. It starts at 2 and ends at 3.5. The sternum ends at 3, but the ribcage itself ends at 3.5, as you can see.

• The pelvis starts at 4 and is ½ a unit long. We’re at 4.5 now.

• Put some little diamonds just above tick 7 for Bones’ knee caps.

• Bones’ feet start at the ankles and are 1 unit high from 9 to the floor.

 Now look at the orange bits.

• Bones’ neck is ½ a unit tall from tick 1 to 1.5. 

• his shoulders (the shoulder “meat,” scalene), another  ½ unit. Now we’re at 2.

• Bones’ waist (the gap between the bottom of the ribcage and the top of the pelvis) is 1/2 unit long. It starts at 3.5 and ends at 4. 

• Bones’ thighs are 2.25-ish units long. What matters is that they end somewhere around those diamond knee caps. They start at 4.5 and end at, like, 6.75 sort of. You don't need to measure that too precisely.

• His shins are 2.25 units long as well.

Now look at the blue.

• Bones’ humeri (plural of humerus) are 1.5 units long. They start at tick 2 and end at 3.5.

• His forearms are also 1.5 units long, starting at 3.5 and ending at 5.

• His hands are a unit long from tick 5 to tick 6.

Here is a blocky diagram, if that helps. To the discerning eye, Bones is kind of wacky-looking. His legs might look too short, the arms too long, and so on. That is because most people do not have this ratio. There is no such thing as a ratio that most people have. This is just a starting place before Part 2. I can explain why the hands look too long, though, it’s because “the hand” goes from the palm and wrist to the finger tips. Since the fingers aren’t defined yet, the amount of surface area tells your brain that that stub is just the palm, and it imagines that fingers will extend out further. They don’t.

Here you can find Gumdrop in the diagram. You should practice marrying these concepts of posing and ratio. There is a resource called Line-of-Action, which is a free-to-access website meant for practicing figure drawing. It was made by generous and professional photographers who want to keep their work safe from exploitation, and that is why I’m not demonstrating the function explicitly. But, if you're interested, it is a fantastic resource.

In Part 2 of How to Draw Humans, we get into how people vary by sex, shape, height, and age. I also get into stylization and how to make the free dive into comfort and capability within your own designs.