starting out with the figure

For my 20% project, I think I'm going to focus more on the style of fashion sketches, and if I have time, I'll begin to develop my own style.  But before I can begin drawing clothes or hairstyles, I'll have to know how to draw the body first.

For a more realistic style of art, I've been reading through a book I have called The Figure: A Classic Approach to Drawing and Construction by Walt Reed, which gives lots of tips and shows many different poses and aspects of the many varieties of the human shape.  After looking through this book and trying a few of the strategies, I decided that high-fashion sketching was a) more fun, b) more style-oriented, and c) more down the alley that I want to go in the future.

I have some experience in fashion sketching from last year's Commercial Arts I class, but I needed a refresher, so I searched for some tutorials on how to sketch the body and its proportions that are practically unattainable in real life but are the standard for stylistic fashion sketches.  I found a few sites, but this website seemed to be the most helpful.  

To familiarize myself with the basic shape and proportions of this body style, I just drew the same thing over and over, becoming more individual and less dependent on the tutorial each time.  Here are some of my experiments:

For my next post, hopefully I'll have something a little more interesting to share than a tall, skinny outline.