Vitruvius, a Roman architect who lived between 80 BC and 25 BC, wrote that the proportions of an “average” man could fit simultaneously inside a square and a circle. Vitruvius may have spent too much time cooped up in the basement of his Flintstones house. If he ever put on his robe and sandals, left the house and simply looked around the market or the temple, he would have easily seen that a set of universal human proportions doesn’t have anything to do with reality. Instead, he put his observations aside and focused on his concepts. Sought the [yawn] “Golden Mean.”

Many artists tried to work out this “Vitruvian Man” in drawings. They turned out really funky.

Leonardo da Vinci solved it in his famous drawing “The Vitruvian Man.”

You know it was successful because it has since shown up everywhere. (If you’re stumped for a creative way to illustrate your I.P., just throw him in a circle-square!)

Like Randy “Macho Man” Savage, my figure drawing class last Wednesday took me by the neck and slammed me down onto the mat of careful measured drawing. I wasn’t prepared.

After nine years, I walked into a CCAD classroom, ready to draw the hell out of whatever figure stood, squatted or reclined before me. I had my soft lead and my small sketchbook. I intended to plop down on a drawing bench, fire up my iPod and blast out some chunky, dark gestural drawing. Doug Norman, instructor and fine artist, had other plans.

He began and ended the class talking about measuring. Outstretched arm, pencil and thumb, squinting-eye measuring. From the hand-out:

Measured drawing techniques are intended to better enable you to discover relationships occurring in the motif and to facilitate your transcription of those relationships to the page. This method of drawing makes for active and directed observation and more “objective” drawing.

He talked about da Vinci and the sculpture of Isabel McIlvain. Imagine the intense observation required to sculpt these.

This particular example Mr. Norman showed us demonstrates proportional measurement: something artists strive for, but rarely achieve. Their impossible dream: to accurately measure relative size, direction and location. “Relative” is the keyword there, and seeing these relationships depends on the artist’s awareness.

In fact, it may require that the artist take a skinny-dip into the pool of madness to accomplish the purely objective standard of proportionally measured drawing. Mr. Norman showed several slides from Euan Uglow (1932-2000), a British artist who meticulously measured his subjects using hash marks on his paintings and drawings.

This incredible attention to measurement came at a price. At times, it took Uglow six or seven years to finish a painting. One story goes that his model finished a BFA, Masters degree, Law degree and got married before he finally finished the painting.

A consideration for the artist when drawing objectively is their own point-of-view, their own eye level. Our eye distorts objects in space, and feet become gigantic the lower we are in space. Heads become smaller. Artists use their imaginations in this case to solve the painting or drawing, even if it differs from what they observe. Andrew Wyeth surely enlarged the head of this model, even though, since his eye was level with the model’s pelvic bone, the head measured smaller to his eye.

I never considered this type of distortion before. It popped into my own drawing that evening, but like a doofus, I over-compensated for it by drawing the figure’s waist too small. And, a slave to my own eye-level, I still shrunk his head. I also struggled with line-weight. I wanted to explore the surface planes, but each line I drew had the same uncertainty, the same scribble. The result had little volume and laid flat on the paper.

Measuring informs drawing, but you can be left with some pretty pitchy results if you only draw what you measure. Still,

With all the various techniques of measured drawing it is important to remember that they are aids in organizing your perceptions through the process of drawing. We can agree with Matisse when he says exactitude is not truth , but still recognize the benefits of modifying first impressions with a more analytical approach to seeing an drawing.

Next time I’ll talk about the book Mr. Norman mentioned, “Undressed Art: Why We Draw.” Move over archery and motorcycle maintenance. The real Zen practice is in figure drawing.