Line Drawing

sketch for line drawing

This was a line drawing of a figure positioned somewhere between an angle of 45 degrees and side on to the viewer. It would be devoid of tone, so I decided to exaggerate the foreshortening to help give an illusion of depth and take the upper part of the model back into the picture plane.

line drawing

I didn’t expect this drawing to take me a great deal of time to complete, having no need to add tone but how wrong I was! Although I carefully measured almost everything by constantly making comparisons with other areas I’m not convinced that some areas are accurate. If my measurements are correct, I found that I didn’t need to intentionally exaggerate the legs, feet and arms, yet they look very large in relation to the upper torso, head and upper arms. To me the foreshortening looks more exaggerated than in any other seemingly correctly proportioned figure drawing I’ve done. I suppose at least he doesn’t look like a cardboard cut out!

Added to this, after a break, the model moved his arms and feet slightly, despite marking their location beforehand. I really got caught up around the feet on this occasion and had trouble trying to get them to look believable, especially the inside of the left ankle, which I think looks too pronounced and the right foot looks too shallow to me, giving both feet a distorted appearance. I can’t help thinking the head is slightly too small. The model’s feet look excessively long when in reality they are not. On the plus side - he does have a fine bouffant.