The point of this exercise is to get students to see the masses in the human body and experience a variety of ways to model the figure.
It is important for us to understand that there is more than one way to indicate mass and anatomy, and that we will probably always use a couple different techniques in a drawing. It is also important that we understand these are conventions, and at a certain point, every artist stops straining the eyes looking for structure and resorts to personal conventions to give life to a drawing.
I usually have a number of references from drawing books to illustrate how to model a figure out of cubes, cylinders, ovoids, flat planes, contours, and continuous line. Here are a number of drawings that illustrate the techniques. We usually work from a life drawing model, but the students can work from photos and can even trace these methods over the photos. For some of these methods, it is appropriate to add shading.
