Cecilia Nude, Braiding her Hair

This is my favorite model to draw from. She is especially good in that she doesn’t charge anything and is always available, since she is entirely imaginary. You may think, looking at her, that she is a little overweight, but she is not overweight at all she just appears to be that way in the drawing. Just like fashion photography requires thin models because the camera makes the figure fuller, so in drawing people always appear fuller than they actually are. Perhaps you do not believe me and think I am making this up as a jest, No I’m not, it is a scientific fact. Here, let me explain.

The body was constructed by nature to draw circles and ellipses. For example, if you hold your whole body still and just rotate one finger from the joint where it connects to the palm, it will describe a quarter circle. Or, keeping everything else still and just moving your hand back and forth from the wrist will produce a shape like a quarter circle also. Going on to the elbow joint, using just that joint your arm will automatically “draw” a half circle. The whole arm from the shoulder gives a full circle. Consequently, you can see that all the joints of the body act like compasses big and small producing various sized circles and parts of circles. No wonder it is then that artists always have there figures come out looking round. So much so that one of my drawing teachers used to say, “If your figure doesn’t look like link sausages it isn’t any good.”

So where do straight lines come from, some how it is a kind of freak of nature that arises from the interaction of two joints at the same time, for example just put your index finger against your thumb and rock them back and forth as if you were threading a needle, you get a straight line from the interaction of the two finger joints.

So you see round figures such as you find in Picasso, Ingres, Rubens and others are not an artistic style or whim, but the result of an absolute law of nature!