It may feel like it obstructs your creativity, however learning the basic proportions of the human figure will help you produce accurate first drawings. I know I have reached a near finishing-point in a sketch only to realise that the shoulders are not wide enough, or the torso is too long. With practise, and really seeing and measuring the human form, these inaccuracies will diminish.
You can measure the below proportions of the body on yourself. Some people are surprised when they find out that the bottom of their nose lines up with their ear, or that they are eight heads tall. We’ve listed these proportions below as a basic guide to the human body (an average adult):
An adult’s head:
When you draw the oval of your head, divide it vertically and horizontally. Front on, you can fit five eyes along the horizontal line (not including the ears); draw your two eyes in the middle with one left in between. The pupils will be on this line.
The bottom of the nose is about one and a half eye widths down from the eye line.
One eye width beneath the nose are the lips.
The ears start from the top of the eye and finish at the top of the mouth.
An adult’s body:
A “perfect” adult’s body (developed during the Renaissance) measures eight heads high. It helps if you draw the head and then number another seven heads beneath it (see diagram below).
Draw the pelvis between spaces three and four as a flattened circle. This is important because it is the body’s centre of gravity and stability. You can then draw the line of the spine from the head to the top of the pelvis.
The thighs will fill the space between four and six, and the calves between seven and eight.
The torso begins halfway between one and two and touches the pelvis.
The shoulders are three head widths on the top of the torso line.
Draw a line down from the top of the shoulders to the fourth head. These are the arms. Elbow joints sit at space number three, wrists at four and your hands take up the space to five.
Practicing life drawing
These basic proportions will aid you to see the human body in sections and will help you produce a more accurate drawing.
It is important to practice as much as you can and get exposure to different human forms if you want to master drawing the figure.
Over the summer holidays many of us our leave our paintbrushes and pencils where we left them after our final art class. So we have introduced two new short courses to motivate you to continue your art practice throughout the break. These short courses are also great gifts to give at Christmas time because the gift of creativity and experience is invaluable. Be sure to request a gift certificate upon payment.
Join Marco this December for a three-day Intensive Drawing and Painting Course.
Marco Corsini, A kind of homecoming, 2014, Oil on linen, 120 cm. x 120 cm.
Marco will combine a series of presentations with personal tuition in drawing and painting, with an emphasis on working from observation and the development of sophisticated technique. Some of the aspects covered include composition, underpainting, representing form, space and texture, colour and its relationship to composition and form, and more. Find out more information and enrol here
This course presents a fantastic opportunity to learn the four elements of sketching with our new teacher, Hilmi Baskurt.
Hilmi Baskurt Untitled
A former student of iconic British painter Frank Auerbach, Hilmi will introduce you to structural sketching, value sketching, Chiaroscuro and contour sketching. Hilmi earned a Master of Fine Art degree in painting from Royal Academy of Arts and his Masters’ thesis was on the subject of Composition. This drawing course will be extremely beneficial for beginners and artists who would like a refresher over the holidays. Find out more information and enrol here
This is a Still Life that we have used for working with tone in our drawing course. Yes, the fruit and vegetables you see are real and have been hand painted. Taking the colour out of the Still Life allows students to accurately see tones in the subject. When lit, it is beautiful to look at and fun to draw.
Our next 6 session Drawing short course will begin on Thursday August 7th and will be tutored by Jesse Dayan. See the previous post for more about Jesse and his recent exhibition. You can find out more about the course at:
MAC Drawing tutor, Jesse Dayan will be exhibiting at C3 Contemporary Art Space with Adrian and Daniel Stojkovich. The exhibition entitled, ‘Where Were You? All Things’, features reproduced images from major historical/political junctures in Latin American history. The artists are attempting to recover something from history that is only perceptible from a distance. Perhaps a narrative or an indication of the primordial conflict beneath the political?
‘Where Were You? All Things’
June 25 – July 13
Opening night Wednesday June 25th 6 – 8 pm
C3 Contemporary Art Space
1 St Heliers Street, Abbotsford VIC 3067 Open 10am – 5pm Wednesday to Sunday
Tony Irving, Dutch Perspective 2014 oil on linen 92 x 122 cm
Tony Irving will be speaking at Enderby Studio Art Program next Tuesday. A Melbourne-based artist, Tony’s figurative work often originates from everyday life and contains playful narrative nuances. The work demonstrates a mastery of colour and composition, borrowing from the great painting techniques of the past to create relevant work for our time. You can find out more about Tony at http://tonyirvingartist.com.
Marco Corsini, The unforeseen, 2013, oil on linen, 60 cm. x 70 cm.
With a full Studio Art Program during recent terms, we have decided to start a new program which is similar in format but with a focus on painting. Our new painting program will be coordinated and tutored by Marco Corsini and will run on Saturday mornings.
For more information regarding the program, please follow this link.
Bella, our children’s class teaching assistant, is going to shave her head to raise funds for the Leukaemia Foundation. To raise awareness for the cause she has put together this wonderful video. We are very proud of her.
Andrea Smith, Garlic on Green, 2007, Oil on Canvas, 25.4 × 25.4 cm, (Forum Gallery)
Our guest artist speaking at Enderby Studio Art Program this week is Andrea Smith. Trained in the academic tradition in Florence, Andrea Smith fuses classical technique, sensitive use of tone and a subtle play of light with a contemporary boldness. She has co-founded an art school in New York (The Harlem Studio) and later founded another in Rome (Atelier Canova). Smith has exhibited in Europe, the U.S.A and Australia.
Smith lives in Rome where she teaches at Atelier Canova. You can find out more about her at: http://www.andreajsmith.com/
As part of her painting studies in our Studio Art Program, Jo Wellington completed this wonderful copy of a part of Eugene Delacroix’s, The Orphan Girl at the Cemetery, 1823-1824. Jo studied Delacroix’s painting technique and use of colour in order to undertake this work.
“Despite its status as the presumed art commodity par excellence, painting has regained new conceptual force. This lecture will argue that part of the reason for this is painting’s singular capacity to store time, and to articulate it in a range of different tempi. Painting can occupy several time zones at once.”
On the 19th of December 2013, American art historian David Joselit gave a lecture at MADA (Monash Art Design & Architecture) faculty on the subject Where is Painting?. This is a brief summary of the lecture based on notes taken during the talk, all direct quotes from the lecture are made by Joselit and are in quotation marks. (Thank you to Melissa Corbett who has passed on these notes. M.C.)
The lecture began with Joselit placing the role of art within the context of our current society. He started out by saying that “Art is a signifier of value in speculative economies”, with terms associated with art used to impart connotations of glamour and mystique on a variety of luxury consumer goods from wine to cars, to new boutique apartments springing up in residential neighbourhoods that used to be home to vibrant artistic communities but have long since been driven out by gentrification. This ability to confer meaning onto other commodities within the economy makes art a meta-commodity.*
According to Joselit, it is “Modern art’s unlimited capacity for meanings and action, standing for the passage of time, futurity. For eternity unlike changing realm of politics.” This ability of art to transcend time, to reside in a state of both timelessness and timeliness can be illustrated by the way that a painting by Velasquez can still be appreciated by us today and relevant to a contemporary audience long after the disappearance of the Habsburg dynasty from Spain. This transcending of time happens in the very act of creating a painting or as Joselit stated the “Marking and storing of time in painting occurs at the same time.”
In his attempt to rehabilitate art from it’s current role in commodity culture, Joselit is interested in referring to the scoring experience within painting, as an alternative to Debord’s idea of the “accumulation of spectacle”** within art criticism. This idea of scoring – the way that time is marked within an artwork, is explored in further detail during his analysis of the painting by Eggerer.
Joselit observes a definitive break within the history of painting in Western art, noting that “After Pollock the gestural stroke became external rather than an expression of the internal.” Artists have tried to address this relentless trend towards the external within modern civilization in a number of ways; some contemporary strategies as identified by Joselit listed below***:
– Scoring painting’s circulation: series or ensembles eclipse unique individual works;
– Use of technological application of painting: inkjet printer; evolving digital animation;
– Souvenir of life, subset of life in the artwork eg. reproducing a blog as a painting.
After going through this list of trends within contemporary art, Joselit suggested the idea of the interface as a way for artists to mediate their role between internal and external reality or experience.
Interface: “A way of bringing the edge to the centre. A way of communicating the reality of something that was previously unseen or inaccessible.” For example the development of the GUI (graphical user interface) in computing enabled users to easily give commands in natural language to a computer to execute certain functions and see the results of these commands / functions, without needing extensive knowledge of the inner workings of the computer itself.
The lecture then looked at the enduring influence of Marcel Duchamp on contemporary art. This was summarized as: “Duchamp’s Doubt = remediation”. An in-depth lecture by Joselit exclusively on Duchamp is available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zh-rSG5rpU
The final section of the lecture is an analysis of the Thomas Eggerer painting Floor Piece. It is a demonstration of how an artist can use a variety of different mark-making techniques in a painting to result in a scoring of time.
Painting marks the movement of pictures:
– Collage – “the entry of something from the world into art, the traffic between the world into art, the traffic between the world and internal of representation – internal threshold of interfaces.”
– Scoring of time – illustrated in the table below.
Scoring of time
Sketching = fast
Effect of artist’s actions
Stuttering = repetition of elements
Effect of artist’s actions
Dripping and staining = slow movement of paint
Effect of painting itself
“Paintings that employ a combination of these techniques result in the painting occupying a range of different time zones, in the case of Eggerer’s Floor Piece the dislocated body occupies different zones of the physical painting and time.”
“Painting slows the image down to a geological pace.” A kind of “modulation of velocity”.
“Painting can present a composition of complex time signatures – capacity to be both slow and fast, resulting in painting having a timeless quality that is able to communicate to us through the ages.”
At the end of the lecture members of the audience were able to ask Joselit questions in regards to the lecture. One of the questions related to the common site of people taking photos of artworks in galleries and museums. Joselit’s thoughtful response to this common practice was that the way galleries and museums were frequently laid out and the large numbers of people moving through the exhibition spaces did not lend itself to people spending a long amount of time contemplating a single artwork. This sensory and information overload resulted in people taking photos of artworks for electronic storage which could then be returned to for future contemplation and perhaps be curated into their own private exhibition on a computer or social media.
* Within Marxist analysis this process of commodification within capitalism is summarized as the subverting of the use value (the amenity of a house to live in with your family) in favour of it’s exchange value (the realization of what your house is worth in financial terms when you sell it) within the economy.
** “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”
From the landmark 1967 text “The Society of the Spectacle” by the French Marxist philosopher & sociologist Guy Debord, see here for online version:
To briefly summarize, within late capitalist society the image is the primary mediator between the individual and social reality, best exemplified by the important role of advertising and marketing in contemporary society and economics. “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”
*** Explored in more detail in David Joselit’s article “Painting Beside Itself”:
The thighs will fill the space between four and six, and the calves between seven and eight.
