Principles of organic form 1

Let’s talk about fig­ure draw­ing. In most draw­ing meth­ods, the first task is to cre­ate a line draw­ing of the edges of all sig­nif­i­cant forms. In the draw­ing sys­tem I’ve been study­ing, this line draw­ing is called the con­tour. Each part of the con­tour rep­re­sents a hori­zon. In other words, it is the last part of the form you see before it curves out of sight.

In devel­op­ing an accu­rate con­tour, it’s help­ful not only to learn to draw what you see, but also to under­stand cer­tain prin­ci­ples by which organic form is orga­nized. With­out that under­stand­ing, it’s easy to uncon­sciously impose the wrong kind of order on the form you’re look­ing at, and then fail to see the small errors that creep in. That’s why it’s use­ful to have a check­list in your head of how organic forms are orga­nized, so that you can make sure what you think you see is what you really see.

That’s not to say that you should impose some kind of pre­de­fined idea of what the form should look like. But the fact is that every organic form I’ve ever drawn fol­lows these prin­ci­ples, so under­stand­ing them helps you to be an informed observer. For exam­ple, a cou­ple of weeks ago my teacher looked at a draw­ing I was work­ing on and noted that the ter­mi­na­tor (the shadow edge) of a fore­arm was par­al­lel to the con­tour of the top of the arm. I’ll talk about the avoid­ance of par­al­lel forms later, but for now just under­stand that I looked at the arm in ques­tion and real­ized that I had imposed the wrong kind of order on my draw­ing. The ter­mi­na­tor on the form I was look­ing at was not par­al­lel to the edge of the form, but I had drawn it that way. Keep­ing these kinds of prin­ci­ples in mind makes it eas­ier to draw what you see, because it helps you draw cor­rectly and to iden­tify and fix the mis­takes that you make.

This will be an ongo­ing series of posts to describe a series of prin­ci­ples that are use­ful to under­stand in draw­ing the con­tour. These prin­ci­ples are at least as impor­tant has hav­ing a tech­ni­cal knowl­edge of anatomy, because they apply to all of the forms of the body, and do not tend to vary from per­son to per­son so much as for­mal anatomy does.

CURVES ARE CONVEX, NOT CONCAVE. All forms of the body are com­posed of curves, not straight lines. While it is quite pos­si­ble to rep­re­sent the con­tour via a series of straight line seg­ments (and, in fact, many draw­ing meth­ods start with an ini­tial block-in that con­sists of straight lines) the actual con­tour con­sists of curves. Some of those curves are rel­a­tively straight, but they will look wrong unless you find the real curve rather than sim­pli­fy­ing them into a straight line.

And the curves are not just any curve; they are always con­vex (push­ing out­ward). That is the case even if the model is very skinny. The forms of the body are full, not hol­low. Of course, there are many parts of the body where the largest forms go inward. Think of the web between the thumb and the first fin­ger, for exam­ple. But if you look closely, the smaller curves that make up these larger forms are full; some­times very sub­tly so. They are com­posed of con­vex curves smoothly joined together. If you draw these forms as con­cave (hol­low), as they may at first appear, they won’t look quite right.

If you think about it, this prin­ci­ple makes sense. The body is a mass of tis­sue enclosed by skin. The tis­sue (mus­cle, bone, sinew, fat) pushes out­ward against other tis­sue and against the skin. That ten­sion cre­ates full, outward-pressing forms. Where the skin is slack, such as around wrinkes or where the skin is larger than the tis­sue it encloses (as in parts of the body of an older per­son), the skin still tends to fall in curves that are con­vex, because the inter­con­nect­ing tis­sue that the skin itself is com­posed of tends to push out­ward against itself.

Try look­ing at your own body, or that of peo­ple around you (they don’t have to take off their clothes, although that can be nice). Look for the way that every hori­zon of every part of the body is com­posed of inter­con­nected con­vex curves.

More on this later.