Most art students, when taking an art class, expect quick results and good products in a relatively short period of time, therefore the idea of doing non product oriented exercises, may not rank very high in their vision of what learning is about. Most students, if left alone, will drift back doing what they already know how to do, whatever that may be. Others may put up a strong resistance against anything new that may upset their artistic status quo.

Learning how to draw the human figure can be a difficult and time taking, a process loaded with stumbling blocks, and frustration. In particular if you are constantly comparing yourself to someone else, an old master for example, a comic book artist, or anyone else whose work you admire. To compound the problem you can ad a lack of persistence, the "been there done that" attitude, the "doesn't work for me" attitude, or simply the unwillingness to spending time exercise in an area that you may not be very proficient to begin with.

The exercises I have envisioned for you, are just the tip of the iceberg of a huge pool of similarly related exercises. Keep in mind that they are not expected to produce instant results.  It's a matter of fact, if you have drawn the figure before you may see yourself drawing it differently. This can be upsetting to some because it will seem like their performance is deteriorating instead of improving.

This is not your regular run of the mill collage project, like the kind of collages you may have "done before". I want you to rip the paper with your bare hands, this approach is supposed to teach you self confidence, improve your brain-hand coordination, and allow you to come up with original shapes. Shapes that may acquire the accidentally of folds in clothes because of the way the paper was ripped.

Rip the paper with your bare hands in the shape of pants and shirts. Absolutely no scissors or knifes. Using those will defeat the purpose of what we are after.

Don't look for photos of pants and shirts, you got to rip your own from colored paper that doesn't present you with a photographical image of pants or shirts to trace from.

Begin with the pants and shirt, leave your figure's head last, this should prevent you from making the head too big.

You could fold the paper in half and rip it symmetrically, for symmetrical looking figures. Then you could proceed in making the figure less symmetrical.

Acrylic will act as a glue, a tiny dab in the back of the ripped paper will suffice in "gluing" the pieces together. There's no need in using actual glue, I don't recommend it.

Acrylic paint, (you should have a tube of black and a tube of white as specified in the syllabus) can help you in trimming the shape of your figure (using white), and vice versa. Unless you prefer trimming or enlarging the figure with snaller pieces of ripped  paper.

Most folks, if left at their own recognizes, will begin the drawing of the figure by using outlines.

Although this approach seems the easiest and the most natural, in reality it's not. It seem easy and natural only because it relates to writing. Writing is for the most part something that the most of us are and have been engaged with to a much larger extend than drawing.

But drawings and writing although they share some linear structure, they couldn't be more different. Writing is about neatness and precision, always, or else it fails to communicate. Drawing is not always about precision and neatness, at least not at its beginning.

Be generous with the amount of space dedicated to the figure, which is the white of the paper, but as you go along reduce the amount of space dedicated to it. This is not a design project, your approach doesn't have to be neat and planned to produce results, but the results won't be the same as those achieved by drawing a pencil outline first and then filling the background.

Although there are other ways of arriving to defining the shape of the figure, such as using linear contours, and an exercise call "blind contour", defining the figure outline by its negative space, is the most effective exercise and the one that will produce the most dramatic results.

Blind contour is also a very good exercise in which the drawing of the figure outline is done by staring at the figure, usually a live model, and not at the paper.

Please read and watch the content of this page http://www.nvcc.edu/home/nvportg/youtube_video_page.htm to get a better idea of the potential that scribbling has in developing your drawing skills.

What scribbling is supposed to do, as a concept, is relatively simple and effective: its goal is to improve your speed, the speed at which you move your drawing tool.

Scribbling is not an end in itself, and alone it may or may not lead to the formation of a new style or a new repertoire. Like all the other exercises presented in this page, it may give you different results every time it is performed.

Using circular patters, based on my experience, is the most effective way of scribbling, because is the most controllable, and allows you greatest variations in drawing speed and pattern variations.

Straight lines are the most direct route between any two given points. Even though there are no straight lines in the human body, the structure of the body can be visualized in a bare bone approach using straight lines.

Straight lines could simplify the drawing approach to the figure by focusing on its structure, in particular its skeletal structure.