Artists throughout history have drawn the human body to express ideas about beauty, potential and also about human experience.

Drawing the human body presents a challenge: although we all share the same underlying structure in terms of bones and muscles, every single body is unique. And that, in a nutshell, is why lifedrawing can be so compelling. The human body is universal—it’s “where we live” and comes within everyone’s knowledge and realm of experience—and yet despite that sense of being universal and common to everyone, there is the fact that the figure portrayed is an individual, and unique.