When I was a little kid, I drew everything. I drew trees, flowers, buildings, cars... Actually, I mostly copied drawings from Garfield cartoons or video game instruction manuals, but that's beside the point. I often drew people as well--well, tried. Faces were hard to get right, and bodies arguably even harder. I sort of clung to a cartoony style of humans, partially because my main exposure to figure art was The Far Side, and partly because it was easier that way. We are so used to looking at humans, so familiar with the human body in general and especially the face, that the tiniest mistake in a drawing of a person is glaringly obvious even to someone who knows very little about art. So in many ways I wasn't just clinging to cartoons--I was hiding behind them.
I'm trying to remember exactly how the transition happened, but I'm not entirely sure. Part of it was just that I was realizing more and more how interesting people are as artistic subjects, and how unavoidable they are. No matter what you draw, sooner or later there will be a person in it. Even landscape artists need to understand figure drawing. But honestly I think it was more pride than anything: I wasn't that great at drawing people, and I was supposed to be good at art, dammit! So some time in high school I decided to buckle down and get good at drawing people. I checked out book after book about human anatomy and figure drawing. My drawers filled up with pencil drawings of naked humans copied from other artists' work--with the "sensitive" bits usually left out, because I was an awkward Mormon kid who didn't understand that stuff like that only draws more attention to the sexualization of the human body. (The time my little sister finally found my secret stash of artistic nudes is a pretty funny story, actually. Let's just say they're one of the few things I drew growing up that isn't still intact in our house somewhere.) Once I had a basic grasp I started drawing out of comic books, so that I could learn to develop a style--after all, I was still (and still probably am) a cartoonist at heart--and just because there's no better way to access an inexhaustible variety of interesting poses than to flip through old X-Men comics. (Incidentally, this was my only comic book phase, and most of my very limited knowledge of the Marvel universe comes from a few select issues of X-Men, Spiderman, and the Fantastic Four. X-Men was the only one I really liked...) Slowly but surely, I was starting to understand how to draw people.
And then something strange happened: I almost completely lost interest in any other subject. Suddenly trees were boring. Trees all look kind of the same, and if you mess up no one will ever know. How do you know if you've drawn a good tree? I didn't want to draw cars anymore; there's so little expressive power there. Animals were the only subject that really stayed as a contender, because structurally animals are pretty similar to humans anyway. And of course sometimes I would draw a page full of variously-posed Garfields, for old time's sake. But ever since I borrowed those figure drawing books from the library, I knew that people were what I wanted to depict. I understand, of course, that what I'm saying about trees and cars and other things isn't actually true; you can get plenty of expressiveness out of anything if you know what you're doing. But the desire to depict people primarily and everything else merely as an accessory to people has stuck with me ever since.
The problem, of course, was that I learned to draw people not from drawing people, but from copying someone else's drawings of people. It was free, private, and tremendously helpful, but there was something missing. In my high school art classes we posed for each other sometimes, but the poses weren't long enough, professional enough, or nude enough to provide an adequate education. I looked forward to when I would be able to take a real figure drawing class. That more or less happened in the winter semester of 2012--I say "more or less" because I attended one of the few colleges conservative enough to put bikinis on speedos on their figure drawing models, which still left some vital information to the imagination. (Incidentally, for whatever reason the art department was also really short on male models that semester, hence the overwhelming emphasis on the female form in my drawings from the class.)
I was about to end my intro there and jump into my actual artwork, but now that I've brought it up a few times, I think that the importance of drawing from a live, nude model is worth mentioning here. In the rest of the world it's a given, but in my religiously conservative community it's somewhat frowned upon--in fact, for my first college writing assignment, my humanities professor put up some reproductions of Renaissance art with our writing prompt: "Is this pornography?" Fortunately her answer was no--I don't know how you could get a degree in the humanities and think that the Sistine Chapel is just a bunch of gratuitous smut--but the students' papers were apparently split about 50/50 on the issue. *shivers* Anyway, learning to draw from nude models is important in the same way that architects need to know what scaffolding looks like--even if you always draw people with plenty of clothing on, you need to know what's going on underneath or your final product will look something like a Dementor floating around in those form-erasing robes. If you want an example, take a look at some Gothic art. It's beautiful in its own way, but the bodies often look like they've been snapped in half under their drapery. And it was done on purpose; the lack of appreciation for the mortal human body was supposed to reflect the Gothic emphasis on the higher spiritual realm. Anyway, this is all tangential now, but basically drawing from nudes is important to me because I think that the human body is the most important, integral part of human spirituality (whatever "spirituality" may mean anyway), so rather than transcend or ignore it, I want to understand and appreciate it. And live drawing is important just because the human eye doesn't actually work like a camera lens, so a drawing done from life is always going to look more lively and realistic than one copied from a photograph.
I think I'll save my actual figure drawings for my next post and just leave this one as my "manifesto" about figure drawing.