To prepare for figure drawing...

Part of what we do at the Academy, even if you don't take the life-drawing classes... are these "master copies." You look at the figure end up trying to reproduce it at a larger scale it... but not just line for line. We look at the initial gesture of what the figure is doing. Then we try to find the best way of describing that figure with the least amount of lines possible. That is not is easy as it looks. We do the same with "masses" which you'll see blow represented as boxes... with no joints. After that, we use comparative measuring to figure out proportions, etc.

Did you know that most figures can be easily chopped into quarters (visually, not in the murderous rampage kind of way)?

Here are some of my tracings. The second image is the one I am actually doing at a larger scale after I practice with the tracings.