CARTOON ANATOMY (REVISED)

Oh, Man! Wouldn't you kill to have a figure drawing class that included real-life models that look like this (above)? I lined up a couple of draped models like this one the last time I taught a cartooning class, but they weren't very well received. 

Students who were good at drawing traditional models seemed to have had the hardest time adapting to this type. I think they were frustrated because they couldn't figure out how to apply what they'd learned in other classes to comedy. 

   

Me, I believe in the value of both kinds of figure drawing. I love short, drastic poses like the one above, and I also like slower, analytic posing of the classical kind. 

John K has an interesting take on figure drawing sessions. He believes in long, long poses that give a student plenty of time to analyze what they're seeing and figure out an approach.

Lately I've been drawing poses off the net. Pictures can't substitute for live models, but I always get a good seat this way and I don't bother anybody when I get up to get a cheese sandwich.

I love dead leg poses like the one above. They're funny and they give the illusion that one leg is longer than the other.

Wow! A rare Double Dead Leg Pose!!!!! How often do you see that!?

I never thought about it before, but there's such a thing as abdominal dresses (above). What a gift to cartoonists!

They're sexy, but they're the kind of thing you want somebody else's girlfriends to wear, not your own.

One last word about dead legs: they appear in walks too. Not in Preston Blair's classic walk, but in walks you see on the street. After pushing forward with the rear leg some people don't lift it to the front, they just slide it forward with the toe dragging (or almost dragging) along the ground.

I like the idea of someone having an an assertive, power stance when they're standing still, then a languid dead leg walk when they're in motion. That seems like a contradiction but in real life people often have contradictory behaviors.