Before there was Photoshop

[bcholmes]

I'm doing my homework for my life drawing class. Same prof as all my cartooning classes. He's really good, and I've finally had some good lightbulb moments. Things suddenly go click! Learning is!

But, I'm sitting here, reading my text about proportion and figures and so forth. It's a good text, by Walt Reed, called The Figure (1976). And here's the introduction to ideal proportions. It starts with a picture of naked guy in a jock strap.

1. This model is a man of average height and good physical development. His total height is seven times the height of his head. If you ran into him accidentally in real life you would consider him well-proportioned. Yet when we draw him on paper, as the silhouette demonstrates, he seems to be much broader and stockier than most Americans think the "ideal" man should be.

2. The head is the basic unit by which the figure is measured. In the head-unit "ruler" above, the vertical height of the head is sued to make vertical measurements of the body. Thus we say that the model is a "seven-head" figure.

3. In the ideal figure the body is eight times the height of the head, as we have diagrammed above. Notice that although the total height of this eight-head figure is the same as that of the seven-head figure at the left, the size of the head has been reduced in the eight-head figure. All the other parts of the figure have been elongated proportionately, so that the figure now seems slim and graceful.

Huh.

Now, dividing a height into eights is certainly a heck of a lot easier than dividing a height into sevens. I could grok that. But the rationale appears to be that we want to elongate the figure to look "slim and graceful."

And I'm realizing: I'm being taught to draw stretched-out people, and think that's "ideal". Or, really, to think nothing of it at all.