A Plan to Study Drawing (Using Vilppu Book)

WHAT'S THIS? An One Week Study Plan/Schedule for learning a way of figure drawing (the constructional way).
Of course this is not THE way. It's just one way. I'm using Glenn Vilppu's "Drawing Manual" book here that illustrates the whole procedure very nicely. He likes to say "There are no rules, just tools". His learning-to-draw procedure is one such tool.
What I write here is just a very short, condensed form of the excellent explanations in this book.

TIME: 1 hour/week. I know this isn't much but it works for me -  I've done all of these steps sometimes before, though not in a structured, methodical manner. Also, I'm still a fulltime art student and these exercises are done in my spare time.

BOOK NEEDED: Vilppu Drawing Manual

MATERIALS NEEDED: A lot of accurate images of nude people. I used a big collection of Bouguereau and Old Master paintings. It doesn't matter what kind of image – they just have to be accurate, and photos should have the least possible distortion.
Also needed: A medium which you can handle (I used paper and ballpoint pen), so that you can focus on the exercises and not on the technique.

The week-long plan:

DAY ONE
Gesture drawing. Using your image collection, draw the movement of the figures with flowy, fluent lines. Don't draw traditional stick figures but simple lines – one line leads to the next, 20-60 seconds per gesture drawing. Show the movement, don't copy the model!

DAY TWO
Spherical forms. Translate your model/reference into round/beany flexible forms, built on top of the gesture drawing. Draw them loosely and transparently so that overlaps are visible.

DAY THREE
Box forms. Translate your model/reference into flexible, squared and rectangled boxes. You can make „soft" boxes with rounded corners that look like soap bars. Make them bend and move with the flow of the gesture drawing.

DAY FOUR
Combining spheres and boxes. Draw your figures as a combination of both boxes and spheres (for example, the torso can be a rectangled box in which the rib cage is an egg; the limbs and neck can be cylinders, etc.) Make them flexible, vary proportions/adjust your shapes to suit the anatomy.

DAY FIVE
Contraposto. Study and copy figures in contraposto (where the weight rests on one leg). Observe how in this pose, one side of the body stretches while the other side squeezes together. A balanced contraposto pose can be tricky to draw – draw as many as you can in your timeframe.

DAY SIX
Do gesture drawings of hands. Copy hands in as many different poses/angles as possible, identifying the simple underlying shapes.  Draw them in this simplified way, made up of flat boxes (the palm) and cylinders (the finger joints).

(DAY SEVEN
Read the rest of the Vilppu book from page 99. At least that's what works here for me! Vilppu describes various principles, such as value, light/shadow, rendering, negative forms, seeing shapes, etc. that I've already studied ad nauseam at Angel Academy. So I won't go into detail here.)