Principles of organic form 3

First post on this topic here. Sec­ond post on this topic here.

We’re get­ting into prin­ci­ples that are use­ful not only in draw­ing the con­tour of the form, but also in ren­der­ing inte­rior forms.

FORMS MERGE INTO ADJACENT FORMS. Forms of the body are not dis­crete. Think about how the inside of the upper arm merges into the lower arm. The curve of the biceps antic­i­pates the inside of the elbow as it approaches it. If you just draw the upper arm, then the lower arm, with­out observ­ing how they merge together, the form will not look organic; it will look like a mar­i­onette. The way that form merges together must be care­fully observed; it varies depend­ing on mus­cle flex­ion, angle, and so on.

SMALLER FORMS ARE PACKED WITHIN LARGER FORMS. Think of a large form, such as the thigh. Although you can approx­i­mate it with a sort of smooth tube shape, when you look closely you see that there are smaller forms along the whole length of the larger form. Nes­tled within those sub-forms are even smaller forms. In order to ren­der the thigh in such a way that it looks organic, we need to care­fully observe how those sub forms inter­act with the main form. This becomes espe­cially impor­tant as we try to rep­re­sent how light washes across a com­plex array of packed forms.

FORMS KNIT TOGETHER.

ALL FORMS ARE CURVED. The body is com­posed of rounded forms. This prin­ci­ple is rel­a­tively easy to under­stand and make use of when you are draw­ing the out­line of the body: all of the lines you draw are curves. That’s the case even though bones are rel­a­tively straight, because the sinews and mus­cles around the bones wrap around them and cre­ate round­ness. But it also has a less obvi­ous impli­ca­tion when you are using gra­da­tions of value to depict three dimen­sional organic form: every point on a curve is receiv­ing a dif­fer­ent amount of light than any point next to it. That is to say, every part of the body is part of a value gra­di­ent. If you draw or paint an area of flat color that does not change in value, it will look flat, not round, and there­fore not organic. All forms on the body, large or small, must be ren­dered as a gra­di­ent (how­ever sub­tle) from one value to another in order to look organ­i­cally rounded.