Break the stick figure habit: draw the clothes first

I learn a lot about art by watching kids draw in my comic drawing class. At some point, many people have come to the conclusion that the way to draw the human figure is to start with a stick figure.

In my experience, drawing a stick figure never leads to a good drawing. That’s because our bodies aren’t like sticks, just as our faces aren’t circles with two dots for eyes and a smiley face for a mouth. Our bodies, needless to say, are more complicated than that. As an artist, you have to be sensitive to the fact that our bodies are not sticks. They have mass and shape. Now, anatomy is not an easy subject to learn. There are more than two hundred bones in the body, linked together with a myriad of muscles, which weave and intertwine in a very particular way.

Just as our bodies are not stick figures, neither are our muscles like a sack of potatoes. After seeing too many stick figures, I finally decided, in a recent comic drawing class, to ditch the stick figure altogether. Instead, I had the kids go straight to drawing the clothes. With this method of building a body, you don’t have to worry about anatomy and muscles, because all you’re drawing is the clothes! This method actually makes sense, because in everyday life, our experience of seeing the human body is limited to what people wear (unless, of course, you’re a superhero walking around in a full-body spandex suit). Unfortunately, I’ll have to wait for Halloween or dance class to witness that)

So here’s a five-step process for drawing the clothed human body:

[1] Draw a shirt. Keep it very simple and cartoony, with a T-shirt collar and two sleeves.

[2] Draw a pair of pants connected to the shirt at the waist. Again, keep it simple and cartoonish.

[3] Draw some shoes connected to the pants, one shoe per leg.

[4] Draw a hand at the end of each shirt cuff.

[5] Draw a head on top of the shirt.

And there you have it! A basic drawing that is much easier to work with and more accurate than a stick figure.