Ballet Dancers
- BALLET DANCERS - .A scratch-tool drawing on a 9 x 12 size white scratchboard sheet That I did for my book, "The Best of Stephen Fabian," published by Loompanics in 1976.
Drawing the human figure correctly is fundamental to anyone who wants to be a professional illustrator. There are exceptions of course, Mel Hunter was not very good at drawing people but he managed to have a successful career because he was outstanding at painting astronomical scenes, alien landscapes, and spaceships. The great Chesley Bonestell also concentrated on painting astronomical scenes, any humans he painted were usually in miniature form hidden inside bulky spacesuits.
But, if you want to broaden the field for your illustrations you need to be good at drawing and painting the human figure. When I began learning to draw I had every intention of being able to draw any subject, and the first important lesson I learned was that my sense of observation had to improve, I had to become more aware of the nature of the subject I was looking at. The art instruction book I was reading directed me to look at my own fingers and to notice that each finger has three bones, and that each bone on a finger is progressively shorter toward the tip of the finger. That arrangement gives the hand muscles leverage over the fingers, the strength for grasping things.
In this scratchboard drawing I was careful to apply three other lessons given in that book: The first one; There are no straight lines in nature, including the human figure, restrict your straight lines to those in man-made objects. The second one; Light and shadow reveal the form of things, let the "light" guide your hand as you draw the shapes of things. And the third one; "Emotion," is important when drawing humans. If you put "feelings" into your characters, the viewers will experience that "feeling". Look at the dancers in my drawing, can you feel the emotions I put into them?
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