The other day, I was outside and the way the sun was angled in the sky, I noticed my feet casting these crazy shadows. The shadows really exaggerated my foot shapes and got me thinking about drawing feet. So, I snapped a few pics to use as reference.
The best way to learn how to draw anything is to draw it a lot and use reference as much as possible. Anyone that says using references is cheating is nuts. Don’t listen to them. Drawing from reference makes you see what is really there. If you do this enough you start to recognize and develop patterns for how you see, think about and draw things. Those patterns are shorthands that you can apply to your drawings later on down the line. So here are my “patterns” for drawing feet and what I think about when drawing them.
For me (with feet) it’s two basic things: 1)thinking of the foot as flaring out from the ankle as opposed to bending forward from the heel, and 2) thinking of the bottom of the foot as two separate things a heel and a ball, as opposed to a big flat flap.
The flare goes forward to the toes and backward to the heel. You can really see it exaggerated in the shadows in the pictures above. It’s kinda closer to a triangle than a flat rectangle. It also helps me little to exaggerate how much the heel really does stick out toward the back.
In the first pic above you can see the flare forward and back and that triangle shape I’m talking about. The shadows are really exaggerating it but that’s why I like it. And then the second thing: thinking about the bottom of the foot as two separate things – the ball and the heel. Thinking of the ball and heel as separate and then locating them on the drawing helps me get a better mental feel for the foot. I like to lay out the ball and heel and then connect those bits to the ankle, the arch of the foot and then the toes.
Drawing toes is another thing for another day.
Feet! Details, details, so many things to consider. Nice commentary.