How do I draw foreshortening without it looking wrong?
Foreshortening fails because you draw what you know the limb measures rather than what it measures on the page. The fix is to measure, to use overlaps, and to trust a length that feels impossible.
- Difficulty
- advanced
- Time
- 35 min
- Read
- 4 min
Short answer
Measure the foreshortened form with your pencil held at arm's length and draw exactly that length, even when it looks far too short. Then describe the depth with overlapping contours and with the width of the form, which does not shorten, rather than with its length, which does.
An arm pointing at you might measure the same on the page as the width of the hand. Everything you know about arms says that cannot be right, so you lengthen it — and then it looks like a stretched limb rather than one coming towards you. Foreshortening is a battle between measurement and knowledge, and measurement has to win.
Step by step
- Measure the length on the page before drawing it.Arm fully extended, elbow locked, pencil vertical, one eye closed. Mark the top of the form with the pencil tip and the bottom with your thumb. Compare that to a known unit — the head, the hand, the width of the shoulders. Whatever it says, draw that.
- Draw the near end first and at its true size.In a strongly foreshortened form the nearest part is dramatically larger than you expect. A hand thrust towards the viewer can be as wide as the chest. Establishing that first forces everything behind it into the correct scale.
- Use overlap to say what is in front.Where the forearm crosses the upper arm, the near form interrupts the far one. That single interruption tells the eye about depth more clearly than any amount of shading. Look for every place one form passes in front of another and draw the interruption crisply.
- Draw contour lines across the form.Imagine bands drawn round the limb like the rings of a sleeve. The more sharply those bands curve, the more the form is turning away from you. Even lightly sketched, they establish the direction of the surface immediately.
- Rely on the widths, which do not change.Length compresses; girth does not. A foreshortened thigh is short but exactly as wide as it would be. Getting the widths right is what stops a short limb reading as a small limb.
- Increase the contrast on the nearest part.The end coming towards you gets the crispest edges, the strongest darks and the most detail. The far end softens. This is atmospheric perspective working over a distance of half a metre and it genuinely helps.
- Watch the joints rather than the outlines.The silhouette of a foreshortened limb is unhelpful and often ambiguous. The positions of the shoulder, elbow and wrist along the length of the drawn form carry the information — mark them as points before drawing any outline.
- Check with the negative space.Look at the shape of the gap between the arm and the body rather than at the arm. It is an unfamiliar shape, so you have no preconceptions about it, and drawing it accurately forces the arm into place.
Tips
- Photograph the pose yourself and hold the phone up next to the drawing. Not to copy, but to confirm that the impossible-looking measurement is real.
- Practise on simple objects first — a pencil pointed at you, a rolled magazine, a cardboard tube. The principle is identical and there is no anatomy to argue with you.
- Deliberate exaggeration is a valid choice in comics and animation, but exaggerate from a correct measurement rather than instead of one.
- If you cannot make it work, shift your own position slightly. Choosing a viewpoint with a little less foreshortening is what a working illustrator would do.
Common mistakes
- Lengthening the form because the measurement looks wrong — It is the single reason foreshortening fails. Your knowledge of the object is fighting your eyes, and drawing is the discipline of believing your eyes.
- Relying on shading to create the depth — Shading a form of the wrong length just makes a wrong length look solid. The proportions and overlaps have to carry it.
- Drawing the outline first and filling in — The outline of a foreshortened limb is the least informative view of it. Build from the axis and the joints outwards instead.
Questions people ask
Is foreshortening the same as perspective?
It is perspective applied to a single organic form rather than to a set of parallel architectural edges. The underlying geometry is identical.
Why does it look worse from a photograph?
Because a phone lens is wide, and a wide lens exaggerates near-far size differences. A photograph of a hand reaching towards the camera gives you a hand much larger than the eye perceives it, so copying it faithfully looks cartoonish.
Does drawing from life help more than from photos here?
Yes, and noticeably so, because you can move your head slightly and understand the form in the round. Two eyes and a moving viewpoint give you information a flat photograph does not.