Hey, it’s Ethan here and welcome to this video series on how to draw the human figure.

Now, if you’re a beginning artists whose watching this video, I’m betting that you probably struggles with a few things in figure drawing.

You probably have a very hard time keeping your figures in proportion, creating dynamic poses, and making your figures look realistic.

If any of those describes you, then you’re at the right place!

In this lesson series, we’re going address all those issues and show you a unique approach to learning figure drawing that will help you overcome many of these challenges.

After getting a TON of questions from subscribers  and seeing so many people struggle in this area, I decided to set out to discover the root of the problem  – more importantly – what we can do about it.

So I interviewed over a dozen figure drawing experts and professional artists and asked them, “What is the number one key to mastering figure drawing?”

Each had their own style and take on the question. But there seemed to be a recurring patten among all their answers.

They all seem to agree that the biggest mistake that a beginning figure drawing artist makes is to tackle the subject, without properly learning the fundamentals.

In other words, they rush to drawing the figure, without first developing certain key skills that are critical to success.

And it’s this unstructured approach that leads to many of the problems beginners experience.

To illustrate this better, let me tell you the story of my co-instructor Michael.

Now Michael is a very accomplished professional artist and teacher now.

But when he was first starting out, Michael was just an average person like you and me.

He knew he wanted to master figure drawing… and do it in the fastest time possible.

Eager to get started, he decided to skip learning some of the foundational skills (like proportion, perspective, gesture, and anatomy) and dive into drawing right away.

He chose reference photos from magazines and comic books and drew as much as he could.

He ran into problems here and there, but simple pushed through it with more practice. And sure enough, soon he started to see his drawing skills improve.

Michael was feeling very good about himself.

But then one day, when he decided to draw a figure from real life and from his own imagination, something very strange happened.

He suddenly found that all his well hone skills seemed to disappeared.

His drawing as a complete disaster! The proportions were way off. The figure look stiff and life-less. And there was absolutely no dimension to it. It just looked flat and cartoonish.

It was as if all his hours of practice didn’t even matter!

Frustrated, Michael tried again. And again. And again!

But after many failed attempts, he finally realized the truth.

That all the key fundamental that he had skipped over – the ones that he thought was unimportant – had finally came back to bite him.

It was like trying to build a house without first setting up the proper foundation. And so everything just went crumbling down.

What he needed was to go back and build a solid foundation.

And so he had to start all over again and develop all the skills that he had missed. Except this time, it was even harder that if he was a complete beginner… because he had to unlearn all the bad habits that he’d picked up.

It took him a lot of work, but in the end, it all paid off. Now his drawings are better than ever.

So the lesson you can draw from Michael’s story is that you can’t just wing it!

To master figure drawing, you have to take a structured approach to learning it. And there are certain key skills that you need learn in order to become successful.

Skills like understanding proportion, perspective, and basic human anatomy.

By skipping over the basics, Michael ended up hurting himself in the long run and making his journey much longer and harder than it has to be.

But if you start out by learning figure drawing the right way, you’ll find that it’s much easier than you think and you’ll see faster improvements.

So that’s exactly what we are going to do in this video series.

We’re going to walk you though what these key fundamental skills are and show you the right approach to learning figure drawing.

By the end of this series, you’ll good understanding of the basics of figure drawing and hopefully draw your first realistic figure.

So I hope that gave you a good overview of what we’re going to cover.

In tomorrow’s video, we’ll start diving into some actually drawing.

I’ll show you a super simple (but very effective) way to understand human proportion.

And also go through a cool drawing exercise that will help you embed that knowledge into your memory.

If you struggles with keeping your figures in proportion, then you’ll really love the next video.

Now if you’re already signed up for my newsletter, you can expect the next lesson in your email inbox tomorrow.

But if you haven’t signed up yet, be sure to do that now so you won’t miss out on future lessons. It’s completely free and only takes 30 seconds.

Just go to MyDrawingTutorials.com/Figure (or if you don’t feel like typing, just use the sign up form below)…

 

So that’s it for the first installment in this series. If you liked this video, please help me out and hit that “LIKE” button.

And please share it with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ using the social sharing buttons on this page!

Until tomorrow, this is Ethan for MyDrawingTutorials.com and thanks for watching.