Henry Moore’s Volumetric Figure Drawings

In preparation for my Tone to Color in Figures class, I’ve been looking at figure drawings with charcoal, ink, even a bit of paint in them. Below are some of Henry Moore’s figure drawings. Henry Moore was an English artist who produced most of his best known work in the early to mid 1900s. As an artist who primarily sculpted, Moore is exceptionally skilled at building volume and form, even in his drawings.

To build volume, Moore used several artist’s techniques for creating the illusion of form in a flat surface. Let’s start with the basics:

0. FORM. A form is a three-dimensional figure. It is often confused with shape, which is two-dimensional, or flat.

1. SHADING. Moore often used shading to make his forms look full and round. Shading light-to-dark makes objects look three-dimensional on a two-dimensional surface, because shading shows that some parts of the figure are facing towards the light, and some are facing away from the light, so the object must be round, or multi-dimensional.

2. CORE SHADOW. Sometimes he drew a core shadow along the moment where the light turns into dark. A core shadow is not always present, but sometimes can be seen to be the darkest part of a shadow, in the brief moment where an object turns from light into dark, and there is no reflected light coming from the other side. This core shadow, sometimes called the “third line” then informs us about the 3 dimensional shape as it’s coming towards us, much like the outside contours inform us about the shape along the side.

3. CROSS CONTOURS. Outside contours are the lines that follow along the outside edge of the form, the outlines. Cross contours are lines that cross the form. They can go in any direction, but they follow along the surface to tell us about the topography of the form. Cross contours can be applied in the shadows to provide information as both contour and shading, but cross contours exist on their own, without light or dark.

4. EXAGGERATED MASS & VOLUME. Mass refers to a three dimensional form that has the illusion of having weight, density or bulk. Moore often simplified, blocked out, and bulked out the figure with broad rounded forms to have exaggerated mass.

5. ELIMINATION OF DETAILS. Details can look light and small, and distract the viewer’s attention away from the large masses.

6. THICK DARK LINES. Thick lines look heavier than thin lines. Dark lines look heavier than light lines. Moore often used a combination of thick and thin lines. The thick dark lines add a feeling of heaviness to the body. The thin, sometimes lighter cross contour lines emphasize how thick the other marks are by contrast, and they articulate the volume of the shape.

8. FIGURE FILLS THE RECTANGLE. Rather than diagonally dancing across the page, Moore’s figures square up and fill it. If the paper was a room, they’d be elephants, eclipsing the empty space within it.

In this pot, you’ll find a range of flat to round, exaggerated to classical, drawn and painted figure studies.

Notice the first few. See how the outlined sections of the figure looks flat without weight or form, and how the areas with cross contours, shading, and thick dark lines look heavy? Farther down, see if you can find the paint that adds opacity to the ink, thus making the figure become more physical, adding still another dimension to its form.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

•