The difficult part of teaching figure drawing is that everywhere you might begin is the middle of the topic. It’s hard to discuss anatomy without addressing proportion, but it’s hard to discuss proportion without referring to anatomy. You can’t really see foreshortening without appreciation of two-dimensional shape, but you can’t draw it without knowing how to create volume. Around and around it goes, each topic interpenetrating another.

So we start with gesture drawing. The goal is to finish a complete drawing in one minute. That sounds impossible, but “complete” only means that you’ve included the whole figure, head to feet. It does not refer to the finish. A gesture drawing typically has no finish.

One school of thought about gesture drawing has you forming a lightweight anatomical basis for further development of the figure. Such drawings are spare, schematic, and good for setting up a picture with a minimum of correction and fuss.

This is not my school. I like making a mess.

To my mind, the value of a gesture drawing is empathy. The drawing should strain as the figure strains. It should relax as the figure relaxes. A gesture drawing should portray compression and extension as the model performs them. It should prefer energy over accuracy.

The secret to making this work is line variation. When you press harder on some portions of a line and softer on others, the line weight changes. This is a crucial skill in drawing. You want to be able to draw at different pressures just like you want to be able to play a musical instrument at a range of volumes.

Draw several pages of these lines in a soft medium. Think about pressing as hard as you can without breaking the tool, and as softly as you can without leaving the support, and variations between.1

Then try loops, again with varying pressure.

Then try figure-eights, which is another kind of loop.

Then mix simple loops and figure-eights.

You may notice that merely varying the line creates a sense of depth. Remember that, because we’ll come back to it.

With that, you’re prepared to draw the figure. Move quickly. Look more at the model than your paper. Use loops to capture the pose, building up your figure on the paper as if you were making a sculpture out of wire. Forget that the outside contour of the figure exists. Let it form naturally from the loops. Where the model is exerting strength, press harder. Where she is relaxed, press lighter. A pose is a dynamic of alternating slack and tension. Let your hand respond to those differences.

It may happen that the drawing starts to feel overpacked with marks in some places. If you have some spare seconds, you can open them back up with an eraser. But—this is important—don’t think of it as correction; think of it as more drawing, but with a different tool. You’re making form or light, subtractively instead of additively.

Gesture drawing teaches abandon. We want our drawings to turn out well. That’s fine and necessary. But too much of it, and you may crush the life out of them. Gesture also gives you a way to enter the art of figure drawing. Most of us, first faced with the model, encounter bewilderment about how to proceed. The answer is gesture: start at the center of the model’s form and loop outward. Put the whole form down in a minute, with gusto and courage. Engage your shoulder. Engage your feet, if you can, shifting from ball to heel and left to right as you stand at an easel. Then turn the page and repeat.

After several hundred gesture drawings, you’ll notice that the later ones possess a felicity that the early ones didn’t. This is evidence of your body growing wiser about looking at bodies. A mystery reveals itself here: you’re not using only your eyes to see.

Fondly,

Franklin

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This is the first of a series of letters to you in which I will share what I know about the magnificent subject of figure drawing, with which I have a strange relationship.

I don’t know how it is now, but when I went to the Rhode Island School of Design in the 1980s, it was full of the kids who were the best draughtsmen in the graduating class of their respective high schools. That was me. At RISD, however, I was in the middle of the pack.

There were some techniques for which I had instincts. One of them was gesture, which is when you put down a figure drawing in thirty or sixty seconds. As soon as I saw the teacher demonstrate it, I could do it. Composition, too, came easily. The latter was a huge blessing. Not having a sense of composition is the visual equivalent of tone deafness, debilitating and hard to remedy.

Many other skills eluded me. I had two line weights: icepick and jackhammer. My sense of proportion wasn’t dependable. I never got the hang of inventing the figure from imagination. Because I was (and continue to be) interested in comics, that last problem was an annoyance.

I set out to address them. I drew thousands of lines to practice varying pressure. I measured and corrected to make up for the lack of felt proportion. I studied anatomy, mostly out of the Robert Beverly Hale books. I admired and drew from the George Bridgman books. I collected many others. Finally, to edify myself, I wrote an anatomy book, titled, simply, Art Anatomy. After failing to find a publisher for it, I published it at artanatomy.com using XSLT 1.0, a language so powerful, yet so horrifying that developers invented new templating systems rather than adopt it.

I announced that illustrations were forthcoming. They never came forth. The book sat on the web for a couple of decades as my work went in a completely different direction. I was captivated by modernist ways of representing the figure. Recent paintings employ broad areas of flat color, simplified shapes, and a comics-like way of rendering by signs.

They no more require anatomy than they require algebra. Some might regard my not completing the book as a failure, but I was honoring my art. When the art no longer required that knowledge, I stopped pursuing it. Nevertheless, the fact that there was a pretty great art anatomy book sitting un-illustrated on the web bothered me sometimes.

When COVID hit, I was moved to complete two abandoned projects. One of them was the publication of Aphorisms for Artists, which was also sitting on the web, unloved. I accomplished that in 2024. Your mother sent me a picture of what you did to the copy I gave you. It was ragged from repeated reading. I have hardly ever been so proud of anything.

The other is Art Anatomy. Worldwide lockdowns caused drawing clubs to move online. There’s no substitute for drawing the model in person, but we wanted to support the models while they couldn’t work in the regular way. I got used to live, on-screen figure drawing. I also finally learned how to use a digital tablet. Now many of these clubs are hybrid online/in-person, and more people are drawing the figure than ever.

COVID wasn’t the only impetus to complete Art Anatomy. Another one is you. Your mother, again, told me that you were frustrated with your figure drawings and wanted some instruction. That a teenager in the age of the AI boom was interested in figure drawing struck me. You may be unusual or even unique in your interest, but there is little reason to know this material apart from the sheer pleasure of knowing it and using it, and here you are anyway.

Weirdly, circumstances have gradually become favorable to the sprouting of this acorn planted twenty years ago. As the discipline of art criticism fades from relevance, I’m transitioning professionally from artist-critic to artist-wizard. I am dusting off the ancient tomes and learning to read their script. I am rediscovering arcane knowledge. The magic itself has developed as well. XSLT is on version 3.0. Spells that used to require animal sacrifice now need only polite incantations and the characteristic wizardly hand-waving. The tablet eliminates the physical-art-to-digital-image pipeline.

You reminded me of how much I have missed teaching. Alas, this is a strange and unprecedented time for the kind of schools at which I used to teach. Publishing an art textbook on the web in the 2000s didn’t get much traction. Now the colleges are losing traction. Art Anatomy was, I believe, merely ahead of its time. I mentioned some technological changes above, but the biggest change took place in the overlap of technology and culture. When Art Anatomy went live, the only people in online communities were confirmed dorks. Now there’s a possibility that such communities will replace schools. This could end up being one of them if I make good on the promise of the book.

I think the subject of figure drawing is never going away. It survived photography. It will survive AI. You and I have estimable and sizable company in our captivation. I’m grateful for your interest, and the enduring interest of so many others.

Let’s draw.

Fondly,

Franklin

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