Here's a few life drawings I did years ago. I saved them, not because they're good drawings...which they're not...but because they remind me of a conceptual breakthrough that I made that day. That was the day I realized that you don't have to draw the model as that person really is. The model can serve as a springboard for your own thoughts.
Obviously that's not an original idea, but every artist remembers the day or the year that some lesson yawned through in art school finally percolated up to the conscious mind with immediacy and vividness.
The models were both slim. I arbitrarily gave the male a big body just to see what would happen. These were quick poses so I finished up fast with cartoony legs.
This (above) looks like the original had a poignancy that I failed to recognize.
Above, I tried on a suit of armor.
I had a teacher who got livid when I drew figures in a comic book way with no sensitivity to nuances in the real model. He'd have tried to kill me if he saw this, and I wouldn't have blamed him. How do you like the neck on this drawing?
As I said in previous posts, I'm a big believer in live figure drawing sessions that include both draped and undraped poses. In the example above it seems to me that the draped figure offers the most to learn from.
There used to be lots of books containing figure drawing reference. I wish I'd bought this one (above).
