How to Draw and Paint People

I bid you welcome to the sixth post in the "How To Paint" series. You can look at the Intro, Materials, Subject and Composition, Color, and Techniques posts where we went over the fundamentals and how you can get started with oil painting. From here on out we'll tackle some common themes and subjects and eventually get to a step by step painting. As usual feel free to skip and jump around. These next posts in the series are not basics but more specific topics.

The image to the left is the "Birth of Venus" by William Adolphe Bouguereau. You may think it ironic, the choosing of a painting of a goddess surrounded by angels, cherubs, and other non-human entities in a post about painting people. But ever since we've been able to express ourselves through art we've been using our own human form to represent non-human subjects of all kinds from God, Satan, angels, the weather, the seasons and celestial bodies, to abstractions like emotions and vices and so forth.

Bouguereau painted regular people as well and was so good at depicting the human body and all its features in such realistic detail that some people claim it isn't even art.

The Human Form

I think it's worth looking into how we draw people before we paint them. By studying the human body and sketching it out, you get to learn all of its contours and shadows, and gives you an idea of the colors you might use when paint it.

The first thing we must look at is anatomy. Using live models is probably the perfect way to study the anatomy while drawing or painting, but this is expensive and rarely available outside the classroom. An easier way is to use photo references and/or use medical journals and anatomy books. Jean Michel Basquiat was a big fan of using "Grey's Anatomy." Leonardo da Vinci studied anatomy vigorously and understood that artists must study muscles and bone structures before they could properly depict people in two or three dimensions.