Rudiments of Drawing
You can let your mind go wild with imagination and feeling for your drawings but before that, you will have to know the basics of how to construct forms convincingly. Even your ugliest of forms akin to fat, hairy people and animals must have a believable connection to real life. Otherwise you are creating abstract or surreal drawings you find only in your wildest nightmares!
The human body's height is about 7.5 heads high but kids have much larger heads in proportion to their body and this depends on their age. There is a difference in gender, women are slightly elongated in the leg department and men have broader shoulders with narrower hips. If you are drawing cartoons, any of these forms and proportions can be exaggerated for great effect.
The skeleton is the real basic structure of the body including animals. Over 200 bones connected by muscle and sinew - unless your spinal column has been fused a few times. Not all animals have bones and those mammals that do are varied in number.
In the 20th Century there have been several well-known anatomy teachers of human and animal forms. Burne Hogarth and George Bridgeman were masters of life drawing with their intimate knowledge of anatomy. They are worth studying. Their personal contribution to American art is exemplary.
Both theses masters built their forms using interlocking "blocks" to show the "volume" and depth. Adopting this method allows you to make your figures three-dimensional or, as Hogarth states, "Puts the form into deep space" giving it individuality. Also this will enable you to foreshorten by adding the correct perspective.
Using the block method has a drawback for the beginner in that it will lack life even with the correct perspective. It will also be void of spontaneity and individuality which is really what you might call comatose or dead. Your aim should be to create an emotive quality, in other words you have to communicate to your target audience these qualities, otherwise it is just another dull poster.
How do you put life into your drawings? It will develop with a lot of practice but the emotional quality only comes from within you, spiritually. It is basically having a mental image picture of the form you are drawing in front of you and "feeling" the form. It is the opposite of what Bridgeman called "being too tight" and so your approach should be fast and lose to obtain results that will have an emotional impact on your audience.
