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Anatomy Spot

two figures, one flaw — spot it

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a standing figure is 7.5 heads tall · shoulders ≈ 2 heads wide · navel at 3 · hips at 3.75 (halfway) · knees at 5.5 · soles at 7.5 · elbows at the waist, wrists at the crotch line

Checking a figure against the canon

Two mannequins stand side by side, both built on the 7.5-head canon and both holding the same pose. On one of them a single part — head, shoulders, torso, upper arm, forearm or leg — has been scaled wrong. You tap the figure you think is off, then tap the part. A round runs five items and the error shrinks as it goes, from ±30% down through ±25% to ±20%. Item one always uses one of the four big central parts, so the opener is legible across the sheet rather than the 0.95-head forearm, whose ±30% is the finest call the drill contains.

Nothing is drawn here. The skill on offer is the proof-reading pass: finding the part of a finished figure that does not belong with the rest. The method the drill insists on is measurement rather than impression: the head-height ruler stays on screen throughout and the landmarks are printed under the picture — navel at 3 heads, elbows at the waist, wrists at the crotch line. Both mannequins share one pose, so the only thing separating them is the proportion in question.

Where the 100 points sit

Naming the flawed figure is worth 35. The other 65 depends on where the second tap lands: full marks on the flawed part's capsule plus a tap allowance eased for the device you point with, fading to zero 1.2 head-units away. Locating carries the weight: with two figures the first tap is near a coin flip. A wrong first pick does not end the item: the drill says “not that one”, the other figure drops to 10, and the locating half still pays in full. The round score is the mean of the five items, and after each one the true canon is ghosted over the drawing with a head-unit ruler, so a wrong answer shows you where the error actually was. Nothing here is judged by a model: the drill chose which part to mis-scale, so it knew the answer before you tapped, and the rest is the distance from your tap to that part.

More observation drills: Gesture Capture · Contour Memory · Proportion Eye · the whole catalogue