2 minute poses · Figure drawing practice

Longer holds, real construction. Two minutes to five, with the masses and the proportions rather than the silhouette.

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What this drill trains

Proportion on a body, over two to five minutes rather than thirty seconds. Gesture asks what the pose is doing; this asks how big everything is relative to everything else, which is a slower question and the one that decides whether a figure reads as a person or as a doll.

The unit is the head. The classical drawing convention is eight heads tall and most real adults are closer to seven and a half, but the number matters far less than the habit of measuring against something rather than judging in the abstract. Waist at about three heads, fingertips at about four and a half.

The other half is foreshortening. A limb pointing toward you occupies almost no height on the page, and every instinct you have says to draw it longer. Overlap and width are what sell it, never length.

How to do it

  1. Mark the top of the head and the floor first, before any drawing. Those two marks fix the scale and stop the figure growing off the page.
  2. Divide that height into eight and mark the chin, the nipple line, the navel, the crotch, the knee. Five ticks, thirty seconds, and they carry the whole drawing.
  3. Block the ribcage and the pelvis in as masses, at the tilts you can see. Not boxes with corners - masses.
  4. Run the limbs as centre lines between joints, then give them width. Width second is what stops sausage limbs.
  5. Check three widths against the head: shoulder, hip, and the gap between the feet. Widths carry more of the read than heights do and almost nobody checks them.
  6. Only now add contour, and only where it says something - the outside of a hip, the inside of a knee. A full outline all round flattens everything you just built.

Why the references are drawings, not photographs

A mannequin states the proportions instead of hiding them. On a photograph of a clothed person you cannot see where the ribcage ends, so the one measurement the exercise is about is the one you have to guess at.

We draw these ourselves, which means no licence, no attribution, no model release and nothing that can be repriced or withdrawn. It also means we can put the landmarks exactly where the teaching needs them.

Work from a real person too, whenever you can. A life drawing class beats any reference library including this one, and nothing here is a substitute for a body in a room.

What we measure, and what the number means

Proportion: the ratios between the lengths you drew, compared to the ratios in the reference. Scale is ignored entirely, so a figure drawn twice life size scores exactly the same as one drawn small - being large is not an error, disagreeing with yourself is.

The session also records which direction you are wrong in, because almost everybody is consistently wrong the same way - usually legs too short and head too large. Knowing your own bias is worth more than any single corrected drawing.

Foreshortened limbs are excluded from the ratio check rather than counted as errors, because a correctly foreshortened forearm is genuinely shorter on the page and scoring it as wrong would teach the opposite of the lesson.

Where it usually goes wrong

Legs too short. This is the single most common figure error and it happens because the legs are more than half the height and nobody believes it.

Head too big. The second most common, and the two together produce a figure that reads as a child no matter what else you do.

Starting at the head and working down. You will run out of page at the knees every time. Mark the floor first.

Drawing the outline before the masses. An outline drawn first has to be right first time; masses can be corrected.

The lessons this drill helps with

Everything where the parts have to agree with each other, which is most subjects and all people.

How to draw a face · How to draw a hand · How to draw a dog · How to draw a tree · How to draw a rose · How to draw a book

Questions about figure drawing

How many heads tall is a person?
Seven and a half in life, eight in the drawing convention. Use eight while learning - it is easier to divide and the result reads as a slightly idealised adult rather than as an error.
Why do my figures look like children?
Head too large and legs too short, almost certainly together. Mark the halfway point of the whole figure - it lands at the crotch on an adult and much higher on a child.
How do I draw foreshortening?
Draw what you measure, not what you know, and sell it with overlap and width rather than length. A forearm pointing at you really is that short on the page.
How is this different from gesture?
Gesture is thirty seconds and asks what the pose is doing. This is two to five minutes and asks how big everything is. Do gesture first as a warm-up, then this.
Do I need to learn anatomy?
Not before this. Anatomy makes a well-proportioned figure better and does nothing at all for a badly proportioned one - the order matters.
Are these real models?
No, they are mannequins we drew. That is deliberate: on a photograph of a clothed person you cannot see where the ribcage ends, which is exactly the measurement this exercise is about.

Session lengths

  • 2 minute poses The real session, and the default. Long enough that the correction starts happening inside the session instead of between them.
  • 5 minute poses The real session, and the default. Long enough that the correction starts happening inside the session instead of between them.