Drawing is important because

 

it does a lot of fundamental skill-building stuff for artists. For instance, drawing

• improves your eye-hand coordination
• lets you practice sight-size drawing
• helps you understand the underlying structure of whatever it is you are looking at
• try out different design concepts
• become more comfortable translating 3-dimensional objects into a 2-dimensional space
• helps you understand the expressive power in gesture, line, brush mark, or mass
• and according to Juliette Aristides in her very excellent book Lessons in Classical Drawing, "every good drawing exhibits an understanding and control of tone, proportion, harmony, and composition."

Artists need to incorporate drawing into their daily practice, no matter what their medium of choice.  And whether you are working all day, or just caught up in the other demands of modern life, or just "not ready" yet, it can be hard to set that drawing time aside. 

So, if you're like me, you need a little nudge to do the things that are good for you. 

Warning: these sites feature both nude and clothed models.  They also offer some form of selection, timed drawing, and choices if you want to work on animals, hands, heads, etc. 

• ArtsyPoses - Drawing tool & Models
• Figure & Gesture Drawing Tool
• The Drawing Script

and my favorite site:

• Posemaniacs

The Posemaniacs site features "models" that are computer generated and show the underlying muscles. The figures can also be rotated 360 degrees to get differing perspectives, enlarged, and timed. Some may find the images kind of creepy, but I find them less distracting, allowing me to focus on the form, proportion, and gesture of the human figure. 

 

Comments

[Suellen]

Thank you for this post. These are great websites - had no idea they existed.

[Debra Snyder Heard]

Thank you for sharing! I love drawing and have always felt it is a very important foundation for art. Even though I have several degrees in art , I have enrolled into a college anatomy drawing class this fall (living in the South, these type of classes were not available while I was in school). I’m very excited to see how my skills improve.

[Susanne Clark]

This is a great blog post and some really good resources for life drawing. Thanks for sharing Sue.

[Jeanette]

I couldn't agree more. Drawing is such a basic of creating any kind of art and fewer and fewer people seem to want to spend time on learning how to draw well. The jump into painting without knowing the underlying structure ends up with never ending adjustments and frustrations.

I had not seen the Drawing Script before, great resource, thanks for sharing it.