How to Draw People in Relation to Each Other with the Following Drawing Lesson

RELATED FIGURES : How to Draw Groups of People / Human Figures

When the pupil has learned to draw a figure with some sense of proportion of line and appropriate expression of detail, it is time to devise other exercises. Too often students plod at the single figure year in and out. For their compositions they take a figure from their sketch book, add others, and then wonder why they do not come together happily. They will not because they have been seen isolated, and remain so even if a number are crowded together. When we watch people in real life or in the cinema, constantly their gestures and movements form a link between them. In dancing, which is the art of movement, the line is consciously rhythmical, but in ordinary intercourse, and all the more so because movements and gestures are unstudied, the line expresses also emotion in varying degrees. Two people meet, and their heads incline in conversation, the more earnest speaker laying a hand on the other's shoulder. These movements establish a sympathetic line or bond of union which creates a unified and controlling form. The speakers are not now two but one, and the lines pass from one to another. In a more obvious case, one figure bowed in grief, and the other bending sympathetically towards her, the lines flow together so obviously that the idea of consolation in sorrow is complete without the necessity for appropriate facial expression. The lines of the figures express the emotion.

In such exercises these controlling lines must be sought for at an early stage. It is worse than useless to draw first one figure and then the other, for the eye is then seeing the figures detached. The combination must be looked for. (FIG. 23-25).

In such associations as two figures pulling or holding hands, the lines formed by the united arms and hands must be drawn, and the two hands as one.

Two figures seated or standing with arms entwined furnish a good instance of the controlling line.

The sympathetic relations of the feet should be noted, and the variations in their position. Attention should be given to the hands which in the figure in grief form a cup in which the face is held, or where clasped round the knees follow the shape of the latter. (FIG. 23). Or again they form a bowl when they are used to drink from.

These exercises may be followed by combinations of three or more figures. There is no need to wait for professional models, for pupils in turn will be ready, for a few minutes, to act their parts.
Such work will enable the student to face the unconscious emotional gestures and combinations of real life, whether sympathetic or antagonistic.

A friend once told the writer that when making studies for a series of compositions of wrestling, so violent were the movements that he had only time to select a contour, say pyramidal in shape, indicating the figures locked together, with perhaps a suggestion of the space between the legs. Afterwards, with the aid of models posed to fit into the sketch, the structure and detail of the wrestlers could be examined.