So I have always loved to draw, because every time I do it I disconnect from reality and stop thinking crazy, focusing only in my pencil and paper.
I started drawing animals, I think as almost half of humanity, and of course they didn’t end up looking like the animal I was initially trying to draw, but that is just the beginning. Then I tried during the next years to draw portraits, and I realized I found that very beautiful, because as I was drawing the face, I was paying attention to every detail of it, and that made me realized how unique bodies are. I specially was interested in the eyes, lips, and hands, but that is just a random fact.
Placing aside for a minute all the detail our bodies have, I’m going to focus in this page only in the general geometry of it, as our teachers of DAR and AFO taught us to do always first, and relating it to the drawing.
Sometimes people don’t realize how simple the general structure of the body is, and so how simple it is to draw it by only following simple shapes, as the circle, the square or the triangle.
Every part can be made by simple geometry, connecting panels and small figures to finally reach the shape we had in mind. When I learned this I began using my hand or face as reference, and drawing every joint as a circle.
Then on your own you will realize that by having this circles of different magnitudes, you just need to connect them with two lines from their sides, to create a mass.
If we think about the body as architecture, this procedure is no different from how a building is drawn, as we always start by building its skeleton with simple general geometry, and then we proceed with a more detailed vision. We would say the elements that hold the structure together are the articulations, and each of the multiple positions of the body are different buildings to draw.
For example, to draw a face we can always start from a square and placing its significant crossing lines, so then we will have the middle and central point. We could draw different positions of the face with only that base, but let’s say that we want to draw the simplest one, that is the front view.
We would draw a circle with the reference point that we already had, so that we would have two simple figures in our paper: a square and a circle. Then, only knowing that the distance from our nose to out highest point is slightly larger, we will draw two circles, a bigger one on the top, and a smaller one on the bottom, using our square’ references. Once we have this, we only have to connect them with two lines on their sides, and as soon as we have that we can see that our face general proportion are two circles of different magnitudes.
This procedure is only about paying attention to the main distances and in case of the body the joists, exactly the same as a building’ skeleton.
In my opinion, the drawing skills that we are taught by our fantastic teachers are always suitable for other artistic drawings, so I would say every architecture student could perfectly draw a human, an animal, or even an object if they think about them as a building.