FIGUARY – Figure Drawing Month

January 22, 2022

Join the Figure Drawing Month Challenge – FIGUARY!

If you are looking for a fun way to learn about the human figure and an opportunity to practice drawing, I would like to invite you to join the Figuary – an art challenge created specifically for this purpose.

At the time of writing this article, we have the 5th Covid-19 wave, and more restrictions are forced upon us. So again, many of us have to stay at home.
Figuary is a great alternative to live drawing sessions (especially in this current situation) because you can participate in this challenge online – while having almost the same experience as in “live” sessions with models.

By the way, Figure drawing exercises are an excellent way to improve your drawings. Many artists who participated in Figuary commented that their drawing skills visibly improved after 28 days of this challenge.

Personal comment: We had “Anatomical drawing” classes in Art School. Live sessions with model and all figure + human anatomy drawing exercises improved my drawings the most. If you are a self-taught artist (especially a beginner), I wholeheartedly recommend you to try some of the figure drawing exercises.

Interested in joining? …All you need is a pencil, paper, and some free time!

What is Figuary?

Figuary is a Figure Drawing Challenge that takes place in February. Every day for 28 days of February, many artists worldwide dedicate their time to practice drawing the human figure.
The name “Figuary” is a combination of two words: Figure and February.

This challenge is a collaboration between Love Life Drawing (Kenzo and Mayko) and Croquis Cafe (Larry and Sharyn Withers). Croquis Cafe provides resources – video recorded modeling sessions and still photos of models, whereas Kenzo and Mayko create short and simple tutorials which go together with a short 15-minute practice session from Croquis Cafe.

The recorded modeling sessions have a time limit. Most days, the life drawing session is a series of short poses as follows: three 1 minute poses, two 2 minute poses, one 5 minute pose.

hashtags: #figuary # #figuary22 #FigureDrawingMonth

Important links:

Lovelifedrawing.com/figuary – (run by Kenzo, Mayko) – is a website dedicated to drawing, provides a series of tutorials and live sessions to help you improve your technical skills

Love Life Drawing YT – a YouTube channel run by Kenzo and Mayko

Croquis Cafe – The Croquis Cafe is a figure drawing class recorded in real-time, featuring models in artistic poses.

Here’s a video from Love Life Drawing, introducing the Figuary Art Challenge:

*Additional info:

Sandra Williams is an artist who participated in past Figuary Challenges. She wrote a great post explaining what Figuary is and provided many pieces of information how what the figure drawing exercises look like: Taking part in Figuary 2020

As a participant, Sandra provides excellent insights and tells about struggles she encountered during the challenge. I recommend everyone who wants to join Figuary to read her blog post.

Figuary Past “Prompt lists”

If you are interested in seeing what the Figuary challenge in past years looked like, please visit lovelifedrawing.com/figuary2020/. Kenzo and Mayko gathered in one place all video tutorials they created for Figuary2020.

Or you can visit their Youtube channel and watch the playlist of Figuary videos:

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the video resources provided by Croquis Cafe. However, you can see some of the models’ photos in video tutorials provided by Kenzo (Love Life Drawing).

Figuary Artworks

There are many amazing sketches created during Figuary challenge. Below you can find a few of them – created in different time limits. Some poses have a very small time limit, the shortest is 15 seconds. The drawings presented below took 1 minute or more.
Please don’t feel discouraged if you will struggle or won’t feel satisfied with your sketches; it’s an integral part of learning 🙂