The World of Figure Drawing

Porcu's Anatomy

When I first started taking Frank Porcu's anatomy class about two and a half months ago, I was a mess. Lost, confused, in the habit of drawing flat two-dimensional figures and unable to keep up with his fast paced medical jargon..."Here you'll find the anterior superior spine, the metacarpus, the tibula, fibula, blah, blah, blah..." At one point I thought that he had suddenly started speaking Vietnamese. He taught us that in order to compose an "anatomically correct" figure drawing we should start by locating "the pelvic box" on the model and then build a three-dimensional "world" from there. Pelvic Box??? That must be located somewhere near the Holy Grail.

So I petered along for about a month or so, drawing stick figures and three-dimensional shapes trying desperately to grasp these concepts. Wait a minute, wasn't I trying to learn how to draw beautiful portraits? Why did I feel like I had wound up in medical school? Just when I was about to quit, Frank Porcu comes over and starts giving me a one-on-one. "You see what you're doing wrong...You see all that (as he wags his charcoal stick like a disapproving finger at my stickish figure), you're trying to draw all that as if it's two-dimensional." He then sits down and begins to sketch on my pad. For the next 15 minutes or so I see all my mistakes. I see the places in which the body can be drawn as a 3-dimensional figure. My eyes go beneath the skin and finally understand that there are bones and muscles at work that operate in exactly the same way in 99.9% of human beings. If I learn how they move and where they are positioned according to the skeleton, I will always be able to draw human figures in almost any position. I got it. I finally got it. Frank excused himself and happily whisked off to help the next student in need of rescue. I'm staying at least another month...no doubt.

NOTE: Porcu picture taken from The Guildhall at SMU website (guildhall.smu.edu)

Drawing before my Porcu Lesson

You see that crazy looking back leg...The victim of two-dimension drawing.

The next class after my Porcu lesson. It's incomplete, but I'm getting there.