Try lounging on a couch with a mirror facing you from the foot end, then draw your body as you see it in the mirror. Your feet will be huge in comparison with the rest of your body.

Foreshortening refers to the distortion that happens when we draw the human figure in space. The artist must be able to recognize and replicate the distortion that exists in a pose for it to look convincing and in perspective.

Can you find any images where the artist has used foreshortening to emphasise a pose or create a particular dynamic within the composition? Look for examples, both historical and contemporary and make comments in your learning log.

Foreshortening drawing practice

I couldn’t find a mirror that would fit, nor did I feel too enthusiastic about drawing my own body so, instead I set out to practice using pictures from lines of action, which just so happened to have a foreshortening challenge in May. I set myself a 5 x 10′ session.

It was not easy to do in 10 minutes but I didn’t want to overwork it either. I was trying to pay attention to the negative space to help me gauge the length of the limbs. Doing this without scaffold such as a grid really exerts your sight!

Artists using foreshortening

Unsurprisingly perhaps, Jenny Saville’s self-portrait Propped (1992) comes to mind when thinking about foreshortening studies of the female body.

Through a quick search, however, I found out this had been taught for a long time. An article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica mentioned:

Insofar as foreshortening is basically concerned with the persuasive projection of a form in an illusionistic way, it is a type of perspective, but the term foreshortening is almost invariably used in relation to a single object, or part of an object, rather than to a scene or group of objects. – Naomi Blumberg.

The correct depiction in perspective of a single figure or object or part thereof in relation to its distance from the eye of the viewer. Foreshortening has been discussed in treatises and taught in art schools since the Renaissance. – Michael Clarke

More contemporary examples include Lucian Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995), Philip Pearlstein’s Two Models in a Window with Cast Iron Toys (1987), and Cecily Brown’s Performance (1999).

I wondered if foreshortening was most often used with depicting the human body and found an example of a foreshortened dinner table in Gustave Caillebotte’s Le Déjeuner (1876), which uses foreshortening to provides a first person’s point of view.

And finally, I also discovered that there is also a Gen Z social media trend called a “.05 selfie” which purposelo I guess foreshortening is very much a modern way of seeing.

References

Clarke, M. (2010). foreshortening. In The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms. : Oxford University Press. Retrieved 25 May. 2026, from https://www-oxfordreference-com.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/view/10.1093/acref/9780199569922.001.0001/acref-9780199569922-e-742.

Britannica Editors (2022, March 28). foreshortening. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/art/foreshortening