Judging the right place to put the joints

Dan Gheno will speak at length about the tricky issue of foreshortening, the way the full length of a human limb is not seen when you are viewing it straight on, instead of sideways. [...] So here's some advice from Gheno on how to judge the right place to put a joint in human limbs.

No matter how jarringly big or small the individual body parts may look to your eye, they will always have a rhythmic connection to the rest of the body. As you know from previous articles, all body parts have some sort of reciprocal, arcing relationship with one another. For instance, when you swing your arm at your side, your wrist follows an arc that crosses over your hipbone or great trochanter; and your elbow swings along a curve that passes over the area between your navel and the bottom of your rib cage. Meanwhile, if you bend your leg and swing it upward, it will follow a curving track that would eventually pass through your arm pit. If you raise your ankle, you’ll find that it follows along a curve that if continued would ultimately arc across your great trochanter. And so on.

You can easily see how sketching these radiating, curved tracking lines on your image will help you relate one joint to another when drawing a straightforward, mildly foreshortened figure. But although these radiating relationships can seem quite distorted and confusing in a highly foreshortened figure, they’re still very useful. Just remember that you’re looking at these imaginary arcing lines in perspective: Each arc bows out as it approaches your line of sight and tightens as it recedes. Don’t worry if you find it difficult to consciously account for their perspectival distortion at first. Usually it’s just a matter of keeping these radiating guidelines in the back of your mind for them to work. As you consciously measure one body part's length against another's, these conceptual, arcing lines will labor subconsciously, stimulating your mind, eyes, and hands to find and replicate the natural rhythms that run through the human form.

dealing with tanned parts of models

Dan Gheno on how the tanned portions of a nude model seem to stand out and push forward:

"Pay close attention to the local value differences of each individual body part. Arms, legs, necks, and faces regularly get more exposure to the sun and appear darker than the rest of the overall figure. If you see this in your model as you draw, don’t ignore it; any foreshortening in the limbs will become magnified when you draw a slightly darker arm or leg silhouetted against a lighter torso. Even a slightly darker neck will seem to push forward as a mass when viewed against a slightly lighter shoulder mass. But remember, this effect is subtle, and as always, primarily trust your eye.

"I often encourage my students to study individual, isolated body parts to help them better understand human anatomy and amass a working vocabulary of figure forms that will aid them in seeing detail more quickly and precisely. As constantly happens when you draw something out of context, your sense of foreshortening becomes hampered when drawing a leg or an arm detached from the torso. Don’t let yourself unconsciously correct the foreshortened proportions while drawing a bent limb. If the upper arm looks a lot smaller than the lower arm, draw it that way, and it will have more life and dimension."