Drawing Foreshortening is Fun

This was the long pose for Wednesday night's open figure drawing session at Geiger Studios. We had a male model and this was my view of the model when the pose was chosen, a lot of foreshortening!

Foreshortening is fun and frustrating at the same time. The fun part is in the accomplishment and in the problem solving of drawing the body going away from you while communicating that to the viewer.

The frustrating part is the challenge: drawing the objects closer to me bigger and the drawing the objects farther from me smaller. I know the feet aren’t that big on the model and I know the head arms and hands aren’t that small but I have to let go of reason, make my proportion measurements, and focus on drawing what I see, not what I know about the human body. So I draw the feet bigger because they are closer to me and I draw the head arms and hands smaller because they are farther away from me and trust it will work out at the end, and it does. Visually, this drawing works, you understand a human figure is lying down. It’s so cool.

CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE, GRAPHITE ON PAPER 14" x 17"