The ideal figure is seven heads high, although fashion illustrators — or our friend El Greco — make it nine heads high. Forget about them for now. Forget about short people or infants too. For our classes, seven heads should be the measure. And remember, your task isn’t to copy what’s in front of you. Any camera can do that. It’s to understand what the figure is doing and why it can do it. You learn anatomy to understand what’s beneath the skin. And you don’t express the figure by what it is, but by what it does. It is what it does.
