Our drawing teacher is a Brit who emphasizes getting correct proportions on your paper using a ruler and L-bars. It has been very helpful to my drawing from life. Using the L-bars as a window helps me ignore the subject as a figure, and think of it more as shapes and shadows in space. In class, I mark my paper into halves or thirds along both axises, and use these rough blocks to transfer what I see to paper. I usually start from the bottom left, then switch to the extreme right or top of the figure before I get too caught up in details. This forces me to keep the proportions throughout the figure right, because if I screw up in one area, the pencil in the other areas won't look right at all.
For the skeleton, I first roughed in the general position of the limbs, then went back over it more carefully. Often, I had the angles correct, but the length and shape wrong. I also often had to go back and make the bones blockier at the tops and curvier along the shafts. Sometimes I had a hard time making sense of what I was seeing, like with the rib cage and the bones of the feet and hands. I did those last, and would have filled them in better if I had more time. I spent about two hours just working on the legs.
This one was improved drastically by shading, despite my preference for line. I had a very hard time figuring how to handle my glasses. Not in the drawing...on my face. I pulled the mirror up real close and took them off for half the drawing, then finished the contour lines and shading with them back on.
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